martinzoo

This year we’ve had a bumper crop of ticks. And GB is a tick magnet!

Between the two of us, we’ve had 65 ticks. I know this because HE is keeping count. It’s a good thing he’s not grossed out by this…….like his mom. He just gets annoyed by the time it takes to get them out.

It’s those itty, bitty ones that are so ridiculously hard to get to.

I even broke down and had my husband sprinkle the yard with that insect dust. I held out for a long time because I was worried about the effect it would have on our nice backyard habitat. But I can’t handle the thought of all these #@*! r ticks! I got some organic bug spray to spray on GB before I know he’s going out…………… But I don’t always know when he’s decided to run out and putter around the yard.

Anyway, we’ve gotten a system for getting these guys out of the body. And we cheer embarrassingly when we get the whole thing out intact.

First, you must have an excellent pair of tweezers. My fingernails used to be good enough, but I no longer trust them. Once you’ve torn a tick to bits and some of it is still left in you, that ends the use of fingernails.

Next you must inspect the area and clean it up really well.

GB thinks this part is funny. Back at tick number five or six, I started laying a cotton ball drenched in alcohol on top of the tick, and GB said I was getting them drunk. So now we say we are getting them drunk. It’s a good way to make sure the area is clean, too. I also clean my tweezers with it.

Then you take the tweezers as close to the skin as possible and pull with a firm, steady pressure, until it comes out.

The two we retrieved today came out intact, even though they were the teeny, weeny kind. I guess we’re getting good.

I don’t like that!

Remember these little guys?

Here, you can see one of the caterpillars in it’s classic “J” formation. They form the chrysalis just a few hours later.

And 10 to 14 days later they emerge as butterflies.

This was just minutes after emerging from it’s chrysalis. And the following video is taken just moments after the butterfly broke through his chrysalis. We were totally bummed that we missed the actually busting through. We tried to catch the others, but you know how life goes, as soon as your back turns, something cool happens.

I have no idea what the dramatic music goes with; something that GB was watching, I’m sure.

Time to let them be free…….!

One last caress…….

I love this look of awe!

The butterfly’s first pit stop.

Bye bye butterfly!

Our challenge today was to mark off one small (12″) square and really study the life that went on in that tiny, little square.

These bluish, whitish flowers are called bluets or quaker ladies. I like the name quaker ladies, because I think it’s cute.

We saw this fern-like plant, but haven’t identified it yet.

Our notebook kept having little visitors. I’m not sure what this tiny guy was. He was actually moving pretty fast. I’d say he was about a 1/3 of an inch long. And he sort of had a centipede-like look to his body. But it was hard to tell in the 10-15 seconds that he spent on the page.

I couldn’t tell if this was a spider or an ant. So I blew the pic up a bit.

And I still can’t tell. It looks like a spider to me. But GB and I have checked Google, and Google images and can’t seem to find one that looks quite like it. Poor GB, I’m not a good bug researcher.

I DO know what this sucker is. And he, along with 11 of his little friends prompted a tiny argument between GB and I. This is the second time in less than a week that GB and I have had altercations with ticks. I took 12 off of GB yesterday, thankfully none had penetrated the skin. But the one that I took off earlier in the week was in a very delicate place. No need to elaborate. So I was annoyed by the little varmints. And I may have made a not-so-nice comment directed at God, that went kind of like this:

Me ~ “I don’t see any dadgum reason why God would have created these foul little critters!”

GB ~ “Are you saying that God made a mistake? Because I don’t think He would like that. I’m sure there must be a reason for ticks to live. Like, maybe they are food for some other animal.”

So, I was properly chastised. We came inside, looked ticks up on the internet, and found out that there are three basic groupings of ticks.

The American Dog tick

The Deer tick

And the Lone Star tick (we see plenty of these)

We also found out that ticks are arachnids, cousins of spiders.

AND we found out that some birds, including robins (that’s poetry, I tell you!), eat ticks. And fire ants eat ticks too. In fact, in some locations fire ants have decimated the tick population. Hmmmm…….. which would I rather have? I’ve never actually had an interaction with a fire ant, so I guess I can’t say.

We had a blast in our nature class today. We spent almost no time at all in the classroom. We only touched on the fact that you can learn about how healthy a pond or lake is by seeing which critters are living in it. Miss Christen was hoping we would find some mayfly larvae or some gilled snails that are completely pollution intolerant, because that would mean that we have a very healthy, clean pond.

We used the same nets that we used last week but we scooped the contents into these buckets. After letting them settle for a bit, we would search for life. Then, using the spoons, we would capture the creatures and put them into the ice cube trays for further inspection.

It’s way more fun to work with a friend.

Here is a photo of some of our earlier finds: two tadpoles, mayfly larvae, damselfly larvae, and we also caught a minnow which we let go. We also found a cricket frog, a water scorpion, a gilled snail (yeah!), and a crawdad!

One of the most interesting things we learned was that crawdads are so tough that they used to use them in medieval times to create a shield of armor for men who couldn’t afford a traditional one. They were known as “Douvner Doublets.”

This is the water scorpion that we found. They are one of the pond’s predators. They look a lot like a praying mantis in the water. But these little guys will actually eat the tadpoles that we found.

And this is a picture of a gilled snail. Because of the presence of this guy and the mayfly larvae, we were able to determine that our pond is pollution-free.

GB and I enjoyed this class so much that we are going to try to make our own net and go pond dipping in our own neighborhood to test the water quality.