Adventures in the Wildlife

I learned alot about the valley this month and made a commitment to see more things around town. If you want to know more about my discoveries click here. Today we had our first valley field trip. We went to the Alamosa National Wildlife Refuge if you look around at the site click on refuge kids and then you can click on a list of all the birds in the park. We had a great time. It's not quite the wildflower season yet but we were able to see a lot of really cool things. Click on the highlighted words to see what we saw.To start we took a walking trail along the Rio Grande River. I stepped onto another little path to get a little closer to the river and there were just a bunch of snakes every where, they were just little garter snakes but at one time I was able to see 7 or 8 slither off under the rocks. After our walk we walked out again to see if we would see more and sure enough we did. Dustin thinks that this is their mating season and that's why there were so many.

Walking along our trail we also saw some Mallard Ducks, Canadian Geese, Marsh Wrens, and Killdeer and we were able to hear a Woodpecker in the trees. During our walk periodically we would walk on a little path to the river. David really enjoyed the mud. We stopped and looked at some ants, David tried to pick them up and just wanted to play with them until we made him keep moving.

When we finished the walk along the river we went back to the car and made a stop at the restrooms. David was a little unsure of the latrines at first but they quickly became a game and he kept asking to go back.

David did go the first time, but this a picture of the game part of the latrines, he kept wanting to get back on, he even threw a rock in it

To leave the refuge we took the auto tour out and we were able to see a lot more birds. The birds we saw like non moving water, here's the list: American Coot, Ruddy Duck, and White Faced Ibis. It was really cool to see so many different birds in one place.

Since we were driving through the wetlands area there were Cattails everywhere! David kept calling them flowers so we got out and let him look up close and touch them. We are going to come back the the Cattails are brown. It's like looking at a field of sunflowers except is a marshland of Cattails, I think it will be really cool.

This is David touching the cattails

We will be going on two field trips a month. Tomorrow we go to the Alligator farm (only because it's free tomorrow), so look for more pictures tomorrow or Sunday. Then our next field trip will be to the Native Aquatic Species Farm on May 2nd.