the Way of the Turtle

Morning Cleanup at Buckingham Pond
Thursday, April 21, 2016

My advising group (minus 4 kids who didn't come to school today) and I spent the morning at Buckingham Pond as part of the school's spring community service day. Last Sunday the Conservancy had their public spring cleanup, and from what I saw on Tuesday they got an incredible amount of work done. But there's always more to do... in our case, it was three hours of raking and bagging leaves and then hauling the bags to the parking lot for eventual pickup by the DGS Composting Unit. And in my case, lots of walking back and forth in between bouts of raking and bagging to see how my two groups of students were doing.

All in all it was a productive morning - we filled between 30 and 40 bags with leaves from the areas near the playground & maintenance shed and then the small grove of trees and lawn near the southern side of the pond inlet.

The goose came ashore a to graze a few times while we were there - his mate is still sitting on her nest across the pond, I'm guessing another two weeks to go for her. An even more welcome sight was a number of turtles crawling up onto logs to sun themselves... I don't see them often there, so it's always a pleasant surprise when they put in an appearance.

One thing this morning solidified - there's no way I'm doing the paddle tri out in Rochester Saturday morning. Raking and hauling wore me out big time - I just haven't recovered enough yet to handle that tough bike course after a 5k run and then go on to paddle three miles, half of that against the river's current. It's a shame - I've done every year since they first established the race back in 2010 - but it is what it is.

JMH