(light music) - Hello there and welcome to Shaver's Creek.

I'm Alexa, and I'm so glad that you're joining us on our adventure today.

We have habitats to explore, logs to roll, rocks to turn over and animals to meet.

So let's get started.

(twangy guitar music) Here we are at our frog pond.

What do you notice around it?

We can notice with our eyes and our ears, even our hands or our noses.

I notice a lot of green, a little bit of purple.

I notice rocks and some trunks of trees.

Oh, and I just heard a dragon fly pass by.

What else do you think might live here?

This is a really excellent habitat for frogs and salamanders, which are also called amphibians.

Amphibian means double life because they start their life in the water and then move onto the land.

The pond is really important for amphibians because they lay their eggs in water, and then those eggs hatch into tadpoles.

Eventually the tadpoles grow legs, and then they can move out onto the land.

Even once they can move around, a lot of amphibians still choose to live around the pond because it has lots of good food like insects and algae, and shelter like the rocks and under the water and plants that you can see.

I wonder if there's a pond near you that you could explore.

Have you ever looked for amphibians in it?

I wonder what you could find.

Let's head inside and meet some of our amphibian animal ambassadors.

(light music) Check out the door to our nature center.

This is an eastern rat snake sculpture, and rat snakes have special scales on their bellies that they can use to climb up vertical surfaces.

Let's head inside.

Hey, Sierra.

- Hey, Alexa.

- I have some friends with me.

Can we get a trail map?

- Yes, of course.

Have fun.

- Thank you.

So, here we are in our Litzinger Herpetarium.

There are tons of fun animal ambassadors for us to meet.

Let's see if we can find Joe to give us a behind the scenes peek.

(light music) (fist knocking) Hey, Joe.

- Hey, Alexa.

- [Alexa] I got some friends here with me today.

Would you be able to show 'em what you're working on?

- Sure, come on in.

So we're doing some target training here with our box turtle, Taco.

And so, what Hunter's gonna do, is he's gonna show this little target to Taco, and it's just a little ball on a stick.

And when he walks over to it, Hunter's gonna pull it out and give him a snack.

So we do training with all of our animals and it's to keep them healthy and happy.

- Let's take a look at our map and figure out where to go next.

The Klingsberg Aviary, that's where our raptor ambassadors live.

Let's head up there.

Here at Shaver's Creek, we have about 14 raptors who are permanent residents of the aviary.

Abby is our aviary program coordinator, and she can tell us more about some of the birds.

- Hi, everyone, I'm Abby.

And right now we have Neo outside with us taking a walk.

So something we like to do on a regular basis with him is bring him outside so he can check out everything around him.

So he's exploring the clovers right now.

I'm giving him a little treats every so often too, to tell him he's doing a really good job.

Here at the aviary, what we like to do is make sure that all of the animals are as enriched as possible.

Sometimes that means taking them outside.

Sometimes that means doing training sessions inside their enclosures.

So, hopefully today you'll get to meet a couple of our other ambassadors to be able to see what their lives are like as well.

(gentle music) - Check out this dead tree.

I wonder why it's still standing here.

What do you notice about it?

I noticed that there are some different colors on it, like a lighter tan and a darker brown.

I also noticed some different textures.

This is kind of spongy, but down here it's a little bit harder.

Did you know that dead trees are actually really good habitat for a lot of different animals?

If we look here, we can see a hole that a pileated woodpecker was working on.

And as it was pecking, it was chipping away some of the bark from the tree as well.

Once this hole gets a little bit bigger, it could also serve as shelter for some other animals like the eastern rat snakes that we saw earlier, or maybe even a flying squirrel.

Do you think that you could find a dead tree near you?

I wonder if you explored it, could you find evidence of some animals?

Or maybe if you watched it long enough, you could even see some animals that are living on it.

Let's keep heading down the trail.

I think I see the lake up ahead.

(gentle music) (geese honking) We've had a busy day so far.

We've met some animals, and we explored some different habitats.

We've seen so many different things, but seeing is just one of our senses.

And when we explore, we can use all five of our senses.

Let's spend a few minutes just listening.

And as we're listening, let's record what we're hearing on a paper.

I like to call this a sound map.

All you need to make a sound map is a piece of paper or a notebook and a pencil.

I'm going to start by drawing an X in the middle of my paper, which will represent myself.

And then as I'm listening, I'll pay close attention to where I'm hearing the sounds around me so that I can map them onto my page.

So if I'm hearing a bird over there, I'll put it on my paper right here.

Let's take a few minutes to just listen and start making our maps.

(Alexa deeply inhales) (birds chirping) (soft music) It's amazing what we can hear if we just take a few minutes to listen.

What did you hear?

Let's take a look at my map and I can show you what I heard.

As I was listening, I heard those geese that were honking over there.

Right now, I hear the sound of people on the other side of the lake.

We're not the only ones out here.

I also heard a dragon fly that was buzzing by me and some bees or another insect over here.

I wonder what you could hear if you found a place to explore.

You can create a sound map anywhere; in your backyard, at a park, in the woods, or even on your playground.

It's amazing what you can hear when you just take a few minutes to listen.

(geese honking) (light music) (gravel crunching) These look like another part of an animal's habitat.

These are boxes that were made by humans, but birds will use them to build their nests and raise their young.

Let's check it out.

What do you see?

I see four baby eastern bluebirds.

Looks like they've just hatched.

They don't have many feathers, but they're probably hungry.

Once they are ready to fly, they'll leave the box and they'll explore a bigger habitat.

Let's leave them be for now.

Welcome to the boardwalk.

This is one of my favorite places to sit and listen to the birds and the frogs, and maybe we'll even see a turtle or a water snake.

This is also a really great place to create a sound map.

I wonder what we'd hear if we just sit and listen.

(birds chirping) Here we are at the creek.

Have you ever been to a creek before?

What did you find there?

Creeks are another really great habitat for animals.

And today, I want to show you one of my favorite and one of the smallest animals that we can find in the creek.

They're called macro invertebrates.

Macro because they're big enough that we can see them with our eyes, and invertebrates because they don't have a backbone.

Macro invertebrates live under rocks on the bottom of the creek, so they're called bottom dwellers.

And when we start to look for them, we step carefully into the stream and we turn over rocks to look very closely for little bits of movement.

If we find something, we'll put it into our collection container, and then we can identify it.

(light music) We found so many different things since we took the time to explore.

I wonder if you could find a stream near you, and if you looked closely enough, I wonder if you could find some macro invertebrates too.

(gentle music) Remember when we were looking at that standing dead tree a little while ago?

Here we have a log that has fallen onto the ground.

I wonder if this is a habitat too.

Let's turn it over and take a look.

Oh, there's a toad.

Looks like he might've been hiding under the log.

Most of the things that live under logs are decomposers.

That means that they help to break down dead things into soil.

They're a super important part of the natural world.

Sometimes we call them nature's recyclers.

A really easy way to remember the main decomposers is FBI, fungus, bacteria, and insects.

Bacteria are one of the decomposers that are too small for us to see with our eyes.

But other ones we can find like the fungus and insects that we saw here.

(light music) We had such a great adventure today.

What was your favorite part?

I loved getting my feet wet in the stream, meeting some animals, finding different habitats, and using all of our senses to observe the natural world.

I hope you find a place to explore outside near you soon.

Maybe we'll even see you here at Shaver's Creek.

Thanks for coming along.

Have a great day.

(light music continues) (dramatic whooshing)