Kicking off Earth day!

Helping my son understand how to love the Earth and take care of it has been fun today!  First we considered how much stuff he had.  He is an acquisitive little guy, so we talked about reusing as a focus because reducing seems really hard for him as far as possessions go.
 Then the real fun began, we collected cans from his grandmother's house and brought them to the scrap yard.  He was most impressed with the crusher, and glad we had parked in the parking lot so that no one accidentally crushed our car :)
Next we went to our adopted ephemeral wetland, picked up trash and cataloged various tadpoles, salamander larvae, and frogs.  Wow there were a lot of scary alien looking bugs too!

First ever visit to an ephemeral wetland

Today we set out to find one of our adopted wetlands.  Let's just say I'm 98% certain but next time I will bring my phone to verify exactly where I am.  First let me say that the wetland is shrinking, and that made for some insane amounts of tadpoles and salamander larvae in small crowded hot pools.  The water bugs were intensely large, and at first it was too distracting to notice the mole salamander larvae.  However after we started looking closer we found 30 large mole salamander larvae, too many to count tadpoles of various frogs: little grass, ornate chorus , and southern cricket.  There were lots of mature gopher frogs and ornate chorus frogs! Wow, it's crazy that just by drying out there are no fish thus no predators and life abounds!