Noah and I always have a busy time outside in the summer. In fact, we seldom come in the house before dark (notwithstanding the occasional shoulder surgery). Katie is big enough now that she is starting to tag along on our adventures more frequently. About a month ago we decided to go scope out the wildlife population living in the creek.
Every summer when it starts to get dry of course the creek dwindles down to barely a trickle. Fortunately, there is a small leak in the pond dam and it keeps water in the creek for much of the summer until it gets REALLY dry. Unfortunately, there is a small leak in the pond dam and it drains the water a little more quickly than I'd like.
Noah is quite fearless when it comes to trudging through a mossy creek in search of creepy crawly treasures like tadpoles, crawdads, leeches, frogs, fish of all kinds, and the occasional snake.
We found a ton of tadpoles, some of which had just started to sprout tiny little legs under their long tail. I had never actually seen this myself and I think my fascination with seeing the tadpole-to-frog transformation up close caused Noah to be fascinated as well. It might sound a little crazy but it's sort of a elementary school science lab in 'real life'.
.JPG)
Every summer when it starts to get dry of course the creek dwindles down to barely a trickle. Fortunately, there is a small leak in the pond dam and it keeps water in the creek for much of the summer until it gets REALLY dry. Unfortunately, there is a small leak in the pond dam and it drains the water a little more quickly than I'd like.
Noah is quite fearless when it comes to trudging through a mossy creek in search of creepy crawly treasures like tadpoles, crawdads, leeches, frogs, fish of all kinds, and the occasional snake.
We found a ton of tadpoles, some of which had just started to sprout tiny little legs under their long tail. I had never actually seen this myself and I think my fascination with seeing the tadpole-to-frog transformation up close caused Noah to be fascinated as well. It might sound a little crazy but it's sort of a elementary school science lab in 'real life'.
.JPG)
Here is Noah showing off a little tadpole.
.JPG)
We also found a bunch of baby mudcat hiding in some moss. I suppose there were well over 60 little fish schooling up in this one tiny hole but we could only manage to catch about 25 of them. They are fast little boogers!
.JPG)
Here is a close-up of one:
Mudcat are really not good for a pond. They are considered a 'trash fish' of sorts and increase the turbidity (cloudiness) in small bodies of water. BUT, the bass love to eat 'em and we like to help our bass grow big and strong. We took these from the creek and put them in our pond initially because we made a mistake and thought they were channel cat. Paul Mauck (Kyle's dad) identified them properly from a picture I emailed him. He said the bass should pretty well keep the mudcat in control. Right now we keep every single mudcat we catch even though they seldom grow over 2 pounds. MommaBoz WILL NOT eat them but Noah and I have and they taste fine as long as you fry them up in small chunks. Otherwise, they get a little gamey. :-) We had hoped to use the tiny mudcat as bait to see what we could catch but we didn't get around to it before it got brutal hot outside.
Most of all, we just have an incredible time hanging out together and exploring our backyard zoo. By next summer, Katie is probably going to be the champion naturalist in the family. You can see even from a year ago she has a special knack for the wild.
Golly, I sure love my baby girl.
.JPG)
We also found a bunch of baby mudcat hiding in some moss. I suppose there were well over 60 little fish schooling up in this one tiny hole but we could only manage to catch about 25 of them. They are fast little boogers!
.JPG)
Here is a close-up of one:
Mudcat are really not good for a pond. They are considered a 'trash fish' of sorts and increase the turbidity (cloudiness) in small bodies of water. BUT, the bass love to eat 'em and we like to help our bass grow big and strong. We took these from the creek and put them in our pond initially because we made a mistake and thought they were channel cat. Paul Mauck (Kyle's dad) identified them properly from a picture I emailed him. He said the bass should pretty well keep the mudcat in control. Right now we keep every single mudcat we catch even though they seldom grow over 2 pounds. MommaBoz WILL NOT eat them but Noah and I have and they taste fine as long as you fry them up in small chunks. Otherwise, they get a little gamey. :-) We had hoped to use the tiny mudcat as bait to see what we could catch but we didn't get around to it before it got brutal hot outside.
Most of all, we just have an incredible time hanging out together and exploring our backyard zoo. By next summer, Katie is probably going to be the champion naturalist in the family. You can see even from a year ago she has a special knack for the wild.
Golly, I sure love my baby girl.
No comments:
Post a Comment