Reptiles at Risk

The Grand River, Part 2

Posted by Jeff Hathaway on January 30, 2008 at 4:16 PM

Steve here again...

Tuesday had Robin and I in Cambridge, right near the Grand River- home of several species at risk reptiles. We arrived at the school at about 8:30 and by the end of the day had interacted with 252 kids from grades 4-8! WOW! What a day!! We had an amazing time, as the school was filled with really enthusiastic and well behaved kids, and an awesome organized faculty! All of our pre-presentation surveys were completed and waiting for us as we arrived. The whole day was absolutely positive! Hopefully the rest of our week here will be as awesome!

Steve and Robin along the Grand River...

Posted by Jeff Hathaway on January 30, 2008 at 4:14 PM

Steve here! Quite the contrast from last week! Instead of being on the Canadian Shield with Crystal, this week, I'm in the Carolinian Zone with Robin. No snow storms and no broken down vehicles! We're staying at Robin's boyfriend Andrew's house for the week, so we're based in Waterloo, deep in the city nestled between Quizno's and one of the fanciest looking LCBO's I've ever seen! From here we'll radiate out all week to smaller towns in the area. Here at the house
there are 9 people living all tucked away in individual apartments. Most of them are engineering students at Waterloo University. They were really receptive, and quite thrilled to get their own private snake show!!

Our first school was in Fergus, and was mostly younger kids, grades 3-6. It was really FUN! The kids were great, and we got lots of stories of rattlesnakes at Killbear Provincial Park, and at the cottage!

Crystal and Steve, on the road in eastern Ontario...

Posted by Jeff Hathaway on January 26, 2008 at 8:06 PM

This week, with two crews going in different directions, it just figured that as Crystal and I set out for eastern Ontario we should run into a little car trouble! We were somewhat slowed by inclement weather already, but Crystal’s example of quality German engineering (her words) actually died! At least we were fueling up in Peterborough and not on a country road in a snow squall when the car stopped running. A quick tow, a short wait at Canadian Tire, a new distributor cap, and we were back on the road about three hours later. Unfortunately, we were not able to get to our scheduled school that day.

Our school programs went exceptionally well on Wednesday and Thursday, though… we talked to over 360 kids in four schools during these two days. It sure is interesting to talk to kids that actually know what black rat snakes and five lined skinks are and have seen them in the wild!! Most of the kids knew of the rat snake’s plight and knew some of the cool nearby spots to see them. However we did have to listen to some stories of 5 and 6 metre long rat snakes (the record size is ~2.5 m)! We surprisingly still had a few kids that were really uncomfortable around snakes though, but the most nervous girl ended up volunteering to help us with the younger children for the rest of our time there!!

As I write this, we are in Kingston, awaiting a morning drive to Sharbot Lake for two schools up there. My GPS says it is a one hour drive, so we’ll be up early! Wish us luck with the weather!