Brightly Colored Turtles

About two weeks ago, Jonah and I went to the water pond to look around for tadpoles and minnows. Jonah was raking and raked out a baby red eared pond slider. He did not want it, so he gave it to me. I made a home for it. It loved its new dwelling, but seemed a little lonely, so I went up to the pond and caught two more brightly colored turtles.

Samuel said that he didn't want his turtles anymore, so I took them. He had two snapping turtles and four red eared pond sliders. Now I have seven baby pond sliders. I was excited to have a lot of turtles!

The turtles are very good swimmers. Most of them spend their time on the bank. When I walk around the pond, they slide into the water. It is fun watching them slide into the water. The turtles can't hear very well but have very good vision. They can also feel the vibration in water, and if something touches the water they will go under. 

The red eared pond slider usually eats very small fish, plants, and other things that grow or live in the water. I usually feed mine tadpoles, frogs, worms, and minnows.

I am glad that I got my colorful turtles. It has been fun and exciting to watch them eat what I feed them, and to watch them swim around in the tank. Although I do have to clean it twice a week, I am planning on keeping the red eared pond sliders maybe for the rest of this summer. When it is time, I will let them go back into the water pond where I found them.

~Isaac

All That Glitters Isn’t Gold

When I was walking down the driveway on a nice and warm afternoon, I spotted a shining piece of crystal. I picked it up and examined the rock. It was gold! I stuck it in my pocket.

Later on, when we went inside, I showed everyone the gold. I was excited. I was pretty sure it was fool’s gold, but it was so thrilling, because who knows? It could be real. Fool’s gold is also called pyrite.

Gold is a metal that is very rare. A shiny mineral that looks like gold is pyrite. It looks like gold but it’s not. Gold has no smell, which pyrite does have. Pyrite smells like rotten eggs. Pyrite is a lot harder and more fragile than gold. If you use a hammer on gold, it will become flat but will not break. Pyrite will make a sharp spark when you hit it with a hammer.

Then I had the idea of making a museum. I wanted to find more gold. So, I went to the driveway again. Everyone wanted to find the kind of rock I did. So, with me, came Moriah and Galilee. We searched a lot and we found some more. We had a lot of fun looking for them. The gold we found was so amazing and I put it in the museum we made. We have also been looking alongside the road and have found some.

Finding the gold made me so excited that I have looked every day. The pieces I have found the most are surrounded with crystal. Others have tar on them. In my collection I have seventeen pieces of gold. The shininess of the golden rock is so great to have in your hands. We tested one of the rocks by using a hammer to break it open and ours broke, but it did not make a spark. This told us that our piece was not gold. We looked at the pyrite under the microscope. It was cool.

I discovered that all that glitters isn’t gold. I like to pretend that it is real gold. It is amazing what can turn up on your driveway. I think so, don’t you? 

~Unique

GUPPIES GALORE

Not too long ago, we decided to convert our goldfish tank into a guppy tank! We did not know that this was the beginning of our guppies galore. We went to the pet store and purchased three guppies. One was a boy and two were girls. The male guppies have a bigger tails and are much more fancy. When we returned home, we put the three guppies into the fish tank and watched them happily swim around in their new home.

Guppies are very pretty fish. They also are one of the few fish that give live birth. For weeks we enjoyed watching the pretty fish swim around. A few days later, we noticed that the girl guppies’ bellies were bigger than when we first got them! We all came to the conclusion that the guppies were full of babies!

We continued watching the fish for a few more days. One morning, I stopped to look at the guppies before going outside and I saw three tiny babies swimming around! I excitedly told everyone, and they quickly came to look. In a short time the fish tank had quite a few baby guppies swimming around in it.

We were excited, but also worried for the baby guppies, for the other fish were hungry, swimming around waiting for the little fish to leave the safety of the water plants. When one did, the older fish quickly swallowed it whole! When we saw that even the momma guppy was feasting on her own babies, we quickly got a jar and filled it with water and placed the fry into it. A few days later, after the baby guppies had grown a little, we put them back into the big fish tank and watched to see if the full-grown guppies ate them. To our relief, the bigger fish did not eat the smaller ones.

Not a week later, the other guppy had her babies! We repeated the same thing, and soon released the babies back with the other ones. We did not realize how many guppies we had, until one evening when we fed them, and guppies just kept coming! We have more guppies than I can count right now, and we don’t know what to do with them! If all the girls have babies, then we would soon have millions of guppies! Guppies galore!

~Samuel

The Mouse Dog

There is such a diversity of life at Wichita Mountains wildlife refuge. From large animals like the American Bison, to tiny prairie dogs, many various species make this small corner of the world their residence. Cynomys Ludovicianus, the black-tailed prairie dog, calls the refuge home. He is one of five different species that live in North America, and the most common prairie dog in the United States.

The Greek word Cynomys means “mouse dog,” which is a very accurate description of the prairie dog. With a body length of fourteen to seventeen inches, small rounded ears, and short legs, this little rodent is very akin to its mouse relative. Its bark gives it the name dog.

Recently at Wichita, I had the privilege to observe a prairie dog town or coterie. These little varmints’ burrowings are essential to the prairie’s ecosystem. Like giant earthworms, they aerate the soil and churn it, bringing necessary nutrients to the surface. Their chirpings added pleasant notes to the somewhat quiet scene. Besides adding sound to the grasslands, prairie dog calls contain specific information as to what kind of predator is approaching, and how fast they are doing it. Some say they even have a distinct call for a human with a gun! I wonder how they were describing the scene of twelve people excitedly gazing at them?! 

Black tailed prairie dogs are diurnal, as they are mostly active at dawn and dusk. The rest of the time is spent in their burrows, taking care of the young, or out in the swards, feeding on the vitamin rich grasses. In winter the prairie dog will leave the burrow to forage, but enters a state of torpor at night. Torpor is similar to hibernation but is involuntary and shorter in duration.

At the Wichita’s, we got a view of a black-tailed prairie dog settlement that was about a half-acre large. Other colonies are much bigger. In Texas, a coterie was reported to cover twenty-five thousand square miles and hold four-hundred thousand occupants! That’s a lot of land and prairie dogs! 

There is so much to discover in God’s world! The black-tailed prairie dog is just one of the millions of fascinating creatures that roam this earth! From the largest to the smallest, animals are only a part of our Creator’s handiwork. It was a pleasure to see prairie dogs at the refuge, and then also learn a bit more about this interesting species!

~Halayah

Lizards High and Low

Every year when it starts getting warm and throughout the summer, I walk down the driveway to catch the Eastern Fence lizards.

A couple of days ago, I caught four eastern fence lizards about three inches long. They were sitting on our split rail fence! I took them up to the house and put them in one of our aquariums on Critter Corner, to keep them for a while. Samuel caught five big lizards; they were about six inches long!

Eastern fence lizards are grey with a little bit of brown on them. They can grow up to be almost a foot long! They are amazingly fast and hard to catch. They live in open Woodland, brush, prairies, sand dunes, open rocky hillsides, farmlands, and abandoned buildings. They even live in old dead trees. Males have blush patches on each side of their belly and two widely separated blue patches on the throat. The males are the prettiest.

Eastern fence lizards are one of my favorite kind of lizards to keep on Critter Corner. They are easy to tame, and it is fun to watch them eat. We feed them little grasshoppers and mealworms. To water them we sprinkle a little water on the rocks and sticks in their cage.
We have an enjoyable time keeping eastern fence lizards on Critter Corner. I enjoy feeding them, looking at them, and holding them. I even enjoy letting them go after we all are done with them, because I know that the next time I am walking down the driveway, I might see the lizards again.

~Jonah

My Very Own Net

A couple days ago I was looking through the American Boys Handy Book, and I saw how to make a net. So, I decided to try to make it. I got string and a Y shaped stick that I could bend into a circle. Then I got started.

First you trim off all other branches to leave only the Y. Bend the two branches until the ends overlap each other. Now you have a circle. Tie them together securely. Now you can start stringing the strings.

You make a slipknot around the branch circle, leaving the two sides of the string to hang down. Continue this the whole way around the circle. The next step is to tie the knots, to form the net. The weaving is kind of hard but in a couple of hours it looked good.

I noticed that the net was not going to be the net that I thought it was. I was planning to catch minnows with it, but instead it could only hold big fish.

With the knowledge I know that I have now, I can make a net with smaller holes to catch minnows in it. I am glad that I looked through the American Boys Handy Book. I enjoyed the challenge that I had making my very own net.

~Isaac

Like Trying to Find a Needle in a Haystack!

The phrase “like trying to find a needle in a haystack” has its origin well over 400 years ago. The first time a saying similar to this is recorded, was in 1532 when Thomas More used it in reference to finding a particular phrase in writings, saying: “To seek out one line in his books would be to go look (for) a needle in a meadow.”

The saying certainly stuck, and has been used throughout history as an idiom meaning something extremely difficult or nearly impossible to find. If you have lost something, it may not really be in a haystack, but finding it may seem just as difficult. At times however, if you do happen to have a haystack around, like we do on our farm, it may be just the place that a lost item needs to be found.

A few years ago, while taking a night hike with the family, we found ourselves reclining on a group of large round bales of hay in our upper field. While lying there, we marveled at the beautiful night sky filled with stars before continuing around a trail and on to our cabin. Just before arriving, Rhonda anxiously exclaimed that her wedding and engagement rings were missing! She knew they were there before the hike, but were now gone.

Knowing that we had spent most of our time on the haystacks, I went with flashlight in hand on a search. To my amazement, there, nestled down a few inches in the hay were the tiny shiny objects! While rings in a haystack may not be as difficult as a needle, we were overjoyed at the discovery.

A few years later, a less expensive object was lost in the round hay bales near our barns. Several of our children and grandchildren had been leaping and jumping on the bales and a John Deere cowboy boot had disappeared. When evening arrived, a search ensued. The bales were dug through and scoured with no luck. Finally, after hours of searching, buried beneath a pile that was set to feed the cows, I found the unlucky, but unscathed boot. Gideon, the one boot grandson, now had the boot twin and could rest for the night.

A few day ago, the third hay stack find was discovered. Upon baling hay last year, our friend Chris had placed his open pocket knife on his baler while fixing a string. Forgetting about the knife, he continued to bale and much to his dismay, the knife was gone. After a long search in the field, he decided that maybe it had gotten baled into one of the square bales. We had loaded seventy-five bales on our wagon and so the possibility of finding it was about the same as “finding a needle in a haystack.”

The hay was fed to various animals throughout the winter, and even though a reward was offered to anyone who found the heirloom gem, it was not discovered. At last, while working with the cows a few days ago, there laying half buried in the muddy hoof trounced hay, I found the shiny, still opened heirloom treasure that was lost last year. Sending a picture to Chris, he was excited to be reunited with his pocket Buck knife.

While the items I have found in haystacks, so to speak, have been exciting finds and at times valuable, they in no way compare to the parable of the lost sheep in Luke 15:4, where the shepherd left the ninety-nine sheep to find the one that was lost, or Luke 15:8 where the woman sought diligently for one lost coin. In those parables, the lost items are referring to man's soul and the kingdom of heaven. When those are found, it is far more than a little excitement from a ring, boot or knife recovery. It is eternal, and a time for great rejoicing, for that which was lost has now been found!

~Mark

The American Bison

In the southwest corner of Oklahoma, we saw the beautiful landscape of the Wichita mountain range, as well as the animals that dwell therein. Prairie dogs, Rocky Mountain elk, Texas longhorn cattle, scissor-tail fly catchers, Eastern Collared lizards, and bison are some of the indigenous animals that can be spotted throughout this beautiful wildlife refuge and game preserve. There is so much you can learn about bison!

The Indians of the Plains such as the Blackfoot, Sioux and the Nez Perce, saw the bison as a walking storehouse. They relied on the bison for their very survival. They found a use for nearly every part of the animal! The bones, beard, brain, bladders, blood, buckskin, chips, fat, gall, hair, hind leg skin, hooves, feet, dewclaws, horns, liver, meat, muscles, paunch liner, rawhide, skull, stomach contents, stomach liner, tail, teeth, tendons, and tongue, all had a part to play in the Native American’s lives.  It was not only a food source, but their tools and utensils, homes and decorations, clothes and many other items necessary to their livelihood.

In 1901, President William McKinley set aside 60,000 acres of the red Oklahoma land for a wildlife refuge and game preserve. With mixed grass prairie, ancient granite mountains, and freshwater lakes and streams, the land was, and continues to be well suited for the animal and plant life found there.  

Theodore Roosevelt and Charles Hornaday helped to re-establish the bison herds that were hunted down to extinction. Some say that the mass destruction of this animal was prompted by those wanting to exterminate the Native Americans, as they relied on it for survival.  Re-locating bison from New York by train, Oklahoma began what is now one of the best-preserved bloodlines of bison in the United States.

Buffalo and bison are often mixed up, and the names are thought to be interchangeable, but they are not. How do you tell the difference between the two? Bison have large humps at their shoulders and bigger heads than buffalo. They also have beards and thick coats which they shed in the spring and early summer. Another easy way to tell a buffalo from a bison is to look at its horns. The horns of a bison seem to come straight out of the head, whereas the horns of a buffalo have a helmet like shield across their head and then curve up. Buffalo live in south Asia and in Africa, whereas Bison are found in North America and parts of Europe.

Every year, the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge does a round-up of the bison. It took me by surprise to find that they now use trucks to do the work! In times past, of course, they used horses. In the past they have even utilized helicopters! These roundups are held to maintain a healthy and genetically diverse herd.

While perusing the grounds of the Wichita mountains, we spotted a little bison calf.  At first, we wondered if it was a rock.  It was as red as the  granite boulders in the area!  Now that I have seen one, it comes as no surprise that bison calves are called “red dogs.” They blend in very well with the red Oklahoma landscape.

The bison is an incredible creature that God made on day six of creation. I am always excited to learn more about God’s amazing creation. I am thankful for the first-hand opportunity we had in the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge to acquire a greater understanding of the majestic American Bison.

~Jayla