Second Visit to Foxcroft Farm
Our second visit to Foxcroft Farm was just as fun as the first! It had rained the night before, so there were pools of water across the farm, so much so that one of the teams had to walk in trash bags to reach their ecosystem! While the walk to the stream was not that bad, unfortunately, the stream had overflowed its banks, and we could not reach our BioCube. Instead, we took more pictures and samples of the stream wherever we could reach.
I noticed immediately the sounds of birds filling the air. I could not see the birds or identify them, as they were hidden or too far up in a tree to see, but there was certainly a flock nearby. Perhaps next time, I should record their sounds. We started taking pictures of the plants we could reach. There was a lot of a certain grass looking plant growing in the bank of the water, which I captured a photo of. They were rooted in the water. When I uploaded the image, I found out they were young cattails. I have attached the image I took of the cattails.
We had a small net in our bag, so we used that to skim the top of the stream and small pools of water that had been created by the rain for organisms. We caught a spider, and a fly. We found a few more insects but were unfortunately unable to catch or photograph them.
We continued to explore the stream, but not much had changed since last week, save the stream overflowing, so we could reach even less. During our silence, I heard the birds mentioned previously and the sounds of the stream. I could hear my groupmates moving around the ecosystem, as well. I decided to go as far into the woods next to the stream as I could, to see if I could find something new. I ended up just enjoying how peaceful the scene was instead of finding different organisms, but I just enjoyed taking a minute to be fully immersed in the environment.
One exciting thing that happened was that one of our group members almost fell into the stream! He was reaching over the edge with a net to see what he could catch, and a piece of wood broke off under his feet. Luckily, he was able to catch himself, and we were even able to retrieve the wood that fell. We found that inside, there were many carpenter ants, which were the cause of the wood breaking off. The wood also had some mushrooms on it, which I am not fully convinced on the ID of. Overall, the second week at the farm was a lot of fun, and we were able to find lots of cool organisms!
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