Family-Outdoors

It’s  10 o’clock  on a summer night along a gravel road anywhere in Iowa. In the farm pond next to the road a raucous chorus of male frogs are making themselves heard as they vie for mates.  A volunteer stands clipboard in hand, ear cocked, mentally sorting out each of the calling species and the number of individuals using this seemingly ordinary pond.  Skip to a Saturday morning by the river where another volunteer has binoculars trained on the tallest tree in the area.  In this tree is a one ton nest, home to two bald eagles and their young.  Are there two or three young in that nest?  Hard to tell and a follow up visit will be needed; in the meantime, notes are taken and a peaceful hour is spent watching one of the most spectacular birds in North America.  These volunteers collecting data were trained through Iowa Department of Natural Resources’ Volunteer Wildlife Monitoring Program.   “We don’t have enough staff in the D...

When walking around in the woods in the spring or fall, you might come across a wicked big puddle, and if you look closely you’ll see that it is teaming with life! Look for egg masses of frogs (like the ones seen in the photo on the left) and salamanders, tadpoles swimming around or salamander larvae hiding under leaves. If you just bend down and look close, you will be amazed at what you see. Vernal pools are small wetlands that often fill up from rain, snow melt, or high groundwater in the spring or fall, and typically dry up by late summer. It is this seasonal flooding and drying cycle that makes vernal pools different from other wetlands and shapes what kinds of critters use them as habitat. Because vernal pools dry up, they don’t have fish, which are major predators on young frogs and salamanders. Vernal pools provide a safe haven for a diversity of frogs and salamanders, allowing the young to have greater survival than in other habitats like regular ponds. For some frogs...