Invasive Blitz

Today a friend and I went to a class called "Invasive Blitz" at the Carlos Avery Natural Wildlife Area.  We learned about invasive plants and insects.  And it wasn't boring at all.  Our class was inside all morning but we were given small clickers.  When a question was posed on the power point slide we would answer with our clickers pointed at the computer.  The computer added up our answers and gave the results in a graph.  In this way, if you were the only person to get an answer wrong in the class you would know it but no one else would - not that it ever happened to me (truth - 3 times).  I loved my clicker and had fun adding my votes to the total. I wish we had things like this when I was in school.

They fed us a ton of great food and I ate too much.  After lunch we went outside for an hour to walk around and look for invasive species. We found buckthorn and honeysuckle.  I got distracted by animal tracks.  Some little mammal was here hopping and dragging it's little tail.  I even found the hole where it came out and the hole where it went back in.

The weather was cold but there was no wind and the sun felt warm so it wasn't too bad out there.  The snow on the trail gave my feet good traction.

Another small mammal made the track on the left while a tunneling animal made the track on the right.

The landscape is pretty out here but frankly I'd prefer July.

or August.  I learned a lot today, met some new people with similar interests and even got a gold pin that I will put in a drawer with all my other nature pins.