Foxcroft Farm April 11, 2019 Journal

Stream Ecosystem Week 2, Thursday Lab Section

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It was Thursday morning and it is really cold, that’s my first observation of the day. It had been raining for the past two days so the ground is very wet. When we get to the stream, our ecosystem, the heavy rainfall of the past few days was evidenced by the water, which was flowing much quicker than it was last week. It was not going fast, but it was not still. Our biocube is also submerged in a few inches of water. When I felt the water it is much warmer than last week, so if it flooded my boots again at least it wouldn’t be as cold (but I had brought extra socks just in case). Our team gets right to work looking for biodiversity. The first thing we do is look for bugs within the water. We watched the surface for a while, but the most effective way is moving the dirt and then putting in the net. Once we pulled up the net we swung it around to get all the water out and then evaluate what we have. After several tries we had put three bugs in tupperware. The first one was so small we barely see it. It looks like a small shrimp, with small legs and feelers, a light beige color with a vertebrae or something of the nature a reddish orange stripe under its translucent skin. It swims by shuffling its legs and contracting its body and it slowly moves forward. It is no longer than my pinky nail. The next bug we find is a spider. It is about the size of a penny, dark black with thin legs. Its front and back legs are about the same size which is slightly longer than both sets of middle legs. The last bug we find is the most interesting to me. It has a silver hard shell with two red dots on the top. However, we never really see it as every time we flip it over in the water it flips back over and attempts to swim downward but pumping its LONG legs. It is a backswimmer. Though we don’t find any other animal species when I walk through the stream ecosystem I find a small hidden animal burrow by a tree. It is very tucked away and if I hadn’t been looking closer than I would have missed it. The small burrow in on an island the opening is about the size of the length from my wrist to the tip of my middle finger. It is surrounded by sticks and moss. Occasionally I can hear spring peepers chirping in the distance, but I know they are too far away to be in our ecosystem. I mallard flew overhead. You could tell it was a male because of its colored plumage, it was honking over and over again but no honks or calls were returned. Other bird sounds I heard were high pitch, the most commonly occuring was one high pitch trill sometimes followed by two shorter notes. In our ecosystem we saw cottontails in all stages. Some were unbloomed, some were in full bloom with some seeds missing, some were completely bare and some had fallen onto the ground and were decaying. We photographed mosses found in the trees as well as ferns with small dark purple seeds on brown stalks. The ferns were found right near the shore of the stream. The other notable thing our team evaluated was skunk cabbage, which was abundant in the area around our ecosystem. Fun fact, skunk cabbage is called skunk cabbage because when you pull out the leaves it smells like skunk, not because skunks eat it. During our 15 minutes of silent I laid on the bridge because it was in the sun, and it was so warm and beautiful. We were surrounded by small splashes, the sound of wind through trees and plants, the faint sound of peepers, and the occasional bird call. It was a great observation week.

- By Hadley