The Birds and The Fish

Time for adventuring this morning!  The boys had their adventure bags, loaded with pencils, notebooks, binoculars, magnifying glasses, and water bottles.  Beanie had her adventure bag ready with her camera, drawing book and colored pencils, story book for the car ride, and stuffed animal because she just has to have one with her at all times.  Its required somewhere in her girl handbook I think.  I had my adventure bag ready with the camera, wipees, mosquito spray, and the birding book.  Daddy's adventure bag is really the baby backpack and consists of the Squeakers...and some water bottles.  We loaded up and headed to Cherokee Marsh, a new destination for this group of wanderers.


We were excited to find prairies and woods, as well as a trail that led to the river.  I love being able to take pictures of the trees and flowers for identifying later, pointing out bugs along the way hoping to find some kind of wonderful new nature discovery to share with the kids.  Usually, Otter is the only one who gets as excited as I am about these things, but I keep trying with them all.  Beans sometimes gets interested and Smoosh is slowly getting attracted to the little things that crawl.  Daddy does a great job of entertaining us all along the way, recreating Dora exploring or some kind of bizarre lost captain of the woods.  The man does an excellent job in the comedy department.  There was a neat observation tower the kids could climb and Beans found a little spot where she could yank out her book and draw a little bit.

The kids actually sat and listened to birds for a few seconds while I grabbed out the bird book with high hopes of sharing my infinite wisdom on identifying birds by their songs and flight patterns with the books illustrations of their feather colors and beak shape.  But, Smoosh and Beanie decided too much sitting and observing was not terribly exciting and ran off in search of more mobile adventures before I could even get the book open.  Otter and I sat, listened, and watched for birds.  Squeakers did her best keeping Daddy on his toes by running after Beans and Smoosh, often tripping and falling on the stones in her way.  We walked further down the path and found a nice little dock where we could sit on the water.  Daddy  was the first to point out some splashes in the water that were definitely from fish.  We all sat to watch.  Then one by one, Beans got up, Smoosh got up, and Squeakers rolled over out of her backpack almost into the water.  Maybe she wanted to taste it?   Time for them to go, and Otter and I to be left alone again to just sit and observe.

There are times where that old part of my life as a scientist gets a little chance to come back up and get a fresh breath of air from all this mommyness, and this was one of those rare moments thanks to those big splashes.  Otter and I started to notice they were all splashing in the same spots, all in the same pattern at the same intervals.  In one great big circle.  Too cool.  They weren't eating, they were, you know, ummm...trying to pass on their genes!  As a person who specialized in developmental biology and probably knows a bit too much about the mating habits of other species, this was a terribly exciting event for me to actually see randomly on a Saturday morning adventure out with my kids!  Unfortunately for me, my excitement for this sort of event is not shared by family members.  My enthusiasm was not matched in the least when I exclaimed "Oh look, all those fish are mating!  They're not eating, guys!!!  They're all mating!!"  Otter was a little bit interested, Daddy feigned a spark of delight at my discovery, and Smoosh proceeded to throw sticks at the big splashes in the water as I was trying to show him the fish.  Bean lifted her head for a moment, then went back to tinkering in the grass.  Did they not realize that in the animal world this only happens once a season?!?!?  How could this not be so incredibly cool to them??!?!  No one else thought that sitting on the dock and watching the fish for another 20 minutes or so would be nothing short of wonderful, not even Otter.  Sigh.  I begrudgingly got up from the dock and joined the rest of them as they decided the water had been entertaining enough for them and they wanted to find more adventures back in the woods.  There it was, my brief 10 minutes of scientist, delicious as it was, now gone and back into mommy-mode. 

We did more discovering out in the green and eventually found our way back to civilization.  As soon as we got home though, I spent a good deal of time looking up carp and pike mating habits trying to determine what fish we had seen out there.  Its good to let the scientist in me indulge in my guilty little pleasures every once in awhile.  And I marked my calendar to make sure we "adventure" out there around this time next year...you know, because it was so nice out and all...