Honey Island Swamp

Yesterday we spent the day at Honey Island Swamp. I will go again this afternoon. It was very beautiful there. To get ready we had to put on big rubber boots. These boots were mostly to protect ourselves from snakes. We found ourselves next to a five foot long king snake! We saw other snakes also. There were a lot of snakes. We also saw alligators, turtles, and deer.

Back to our mission, we were there to collect caterpillars. Rebecca Hazen, our scientist, decided on a little plot in the swamp and we went to work. We looked under all the leaves. Then we took a beating sheet and a stick and beat the trees to make caterpillars fall on the white sheet. The picture you see is of Sarah Farnham, a teacher from Maine. Other things also fell on to the sheet, mostly spiders. The orb weaver is not on the sheet. I had someone put the sheet behind it so you could see it. It is on its web. The spider is bigger than the hand of an adult. Oh, we found fifteen caterpillars and that pupa. We labeled them and took them back to the lab.