Kenridge Farm, 13 April 2008

It’s a drizzly day at Kenridge Farm. Several families join us on the Stowell Trail to spend a Sunday afternoon together in the woods. We come across aggregations of springtails on the rocks. As Sebastian leans over one group, they leap off the rock, falling like iron filings to a magnet.

Turtle rock is a favorite stopping point on this trail.

boys climb the shell for a better view of their surroundings.

Sebastian calls out with surprise when he brushes up against a chilly green darner dragonfly on a trail marker.

Because of its immobility, everyone is able to get a close look. Did you know that dragonflies, like other insects, have antenna? This is the first time we’ve seen them.

The kids loved walking on the wooden planks set in the mud along the maple sugaring trail. It was a challenging balancing beam act for the smaller ones. The group ended up at a cluster of ponds and observed the wood frog and spotted salamander eggs and watched fifteen red spotted newts moving across the pond bottom. Then we headed past the pussy willows and up the hill to the parking lot, the kids having spent two hours in the company of their parents in a springtime landscape of field, pond and forest where there is so much to see, if you just know how to look.