Catching Critters at Gunpowder Creek Park 04/07/12

We wanted to go on another new adventure to a new park in the area again, so we chose a new park by Jason's work in Burlington, KY. Gunpowder Creek Nature preserve is a GREAT little park that's kinda off the beaten path. It is tucked in the back of a subdivision and kind of hard to find if you don't know where you're going since it doesn't have signs to direct you there. But once you're there it's something different from most parks.

At the parking lot there's a big playground that is built a little taller than most for older kids and a nice large covered picnic area.

To get to the woods/creek of the park you take the trail from the parking lot down the hill.... it's nice going down - but when you come up be prepared to take a break or two on the way up! It's quite a hill!

It was just the beginning of spring when we went and all of the snakes had hatched already, so we caught a lot of little garter snakes and water snakes. We also caught a bunch of big ones. Joslyn liked holding the little ones since they don't bite you. Sydella even caught her first snakes all by herself, she's always been more scared of them then Allix and Cecille were at her age.

We caught more than snakes, we caught a bunch of small yellow salamanders and crawdads. Here's Cecille with the King Crawdad of the day. if you look in her other hand she's holding what looks like the nastiest bottled water you've ever seen. But, it's really some litter we had to search for while there... we found a puddle packed with tadpoles along one shoreline. We found a few old bottles washed up in the debris piles and put some water in them and put a bunch of the tadpoles in them to bring home to watch grow up into frogs.

We raised them in a small 10 gallon aquarium with a small filter. We fed them dried bloodworms and really small pellet food. We put a bunch of smaller rocks and fossils from our nature collection in there for them to hide in and under. We got to watch them grow their tiny legs while their tails shrank down. once they turned into frogs we released them in the creek bed  by our house. Some were bullfrogs and some were tree frogs. It was really cool watching them grow! (I thought we had pictures of them growing but I can't find them!)

For more info on the park see the link below:
http://www.boonecountyky.org/parks/ParkInfo/8