Seymour Simon's Blog, page 18

Something extraordinary happened on the first spring day up in the country (the Hudson Valley in New York State). Not the first day of spring (that’s March 21st) but the first day that feels like spring, which can be any day from early March to mid April. Well, we had a day like that last week and naturally we went looking for early signs of spring like spring peepers. So we were visiting pond after pond but most of them showed no signs of spring. Many of the ponds were still partly frozen and even those that had no ice still showed no signs of frogs, frog eggs, or tadpoles. All that changed when we drove past a small spring pond with the car windows open and heard a deafening chorus of what sounded like a mixture of peepers and birds honking. We immediately stopped the car and got out to look. In addition to the usual high pitched chirping of the tiny spring peepers, the pond was alive with honking sounds and large, thrashing frogs. The sounds were deafening. The water looked alive with frogs leaping and grasping and showing sudden bursts of speed. I had never seen anything like it before. I had binoculars and a camera but the frogs were too far away from where we stood to really identify them. It was only after I got home and did some research that I found out what kind of frogs they were and what was happening. I went to my computer, opened up the Google Search, and typed in "Frogs Quacking like Ducks". Sure enough, the answer popped right up. The frogs were wood frogs, a small (1 to 3 inches long) blacked masked frog that lives in the eastern United States from Georgia all the way up to the Arctic Circle. It is the only frog known to live north of the Arctic Circle. Usually they live in wet grasslands or moist woodlands. But they hibernate during the winter and as soon as they thaw out in spring, they head for temporary ponds formed by spring rains and snow melt. The wood frogs use these ponds to make and lay eggs. The male frogs call to the females with duck-like quacks. The females lay their eggs and the males fertilize them in huge masses that contain 1000-2000 eggs. The females move the floating egg mass into the shallow ends of the pond in a large raft of other egg masses. Then all the frogs leave the pond leaving the eggs to survive on their own. The eggs are even able to withstand freezing weather and ice formations. The eggs hatch in a few weeks as tadpoles and the tadpoles take about six weeks to develop into frogs. Another amazing story of the natural world! I recorded some of the scene using the video setting on my camera. Click play below to hear (you may have to wait up to one minute for the video to load, depending on the speed of your connection. Be patient - it’s worth it!). The wind is blowing, which makes it a little noisy. But, listen past the gusty wind. The first thing you’ll hear are the high-pitched peepers. Listen more closely, and you’ll hear quacking, as if there was a flock of geese flying by. That is the sound of the wood frogs, and it was even louder in person!

For yesterday’sWriting Wednesdaywe asked readers to review a nature poem called "Welcome to the Night," by Joyce Sidman.My favorite line from the poem was: "The night’s a wild, enchanted park." Isn’t that a powerful phrase? It conjures up all sorts of images in my mind!I promised that I would post my own review, so here it is.

Good morning, and welcome to Writing Wednesday. Today we are going to write a review of a wonderful nature poem by Joyce Sidman called Welcome to the Night. It is from her book DARK EMPEROR AND OTHER POEMS OF THE NIGHT (Houghton Mifflin, 2010). First read the poem below. Read it more than once, try some of the most delicious phrases aloud, use your imagination to see, hear and feel the words that call out to your senses. Now that we have read this poem, let’s write a poem review. You can use the form below to get you started. Click here to download your own copy of the form, print it out, and write on it. Tomorrow, I will post my own review of Welcome to the Night. We’d love to read yours, too!

Hooray!SEYMOUR SIMON’S EXTREME OCEANSis being published today by Chronicle Books. In honor of publication day, we decided to choose our "Cool Photo of the Week" from this amazing book. This is a photograph of the biggest fish in the ocean, the whale shark. Do you see, at the top right in the photo, the size of the human snorkeler compared to the whale shark? A whale shark can grow to be 50 feet (15 meters) long and can weigh as much as 80,000 pounds (36,288 kilograms). It has a huge mouth and approximately 3,000 very small teeth. Fortunately, the snorkeler has nothing to fear from this huge fish, which does not have much use for its tiny teeth. The whale shark swims with its mouth wide open to collect seawater, then pushes the water out through its gills and eats the small sea animals that are trapped inside its mouth. Barbara A. Ward, writing in IRA’s Reading Today wrote ofEXTREME OCEANS: "The text and photographs in this engaging nonfiction title are sure to appeal to middle grade readers, especially those attracted to anything extreme, in this case, ocean extremes. The book contains twelve short chapters that explore oceans that are extremely warm and those that are extremely cold as well as the life-threatening enormous waves and tides that sweep in from the ocean’s depths so swiftly. In his usual straightforward style replete with interesting details, this nonfiction maven also covers tsunamis, hurricanes, and sea creatures so incredibly dangerous that no diver wants to encounter them, even briefly. Even those who know plenty about the world’s oceans will still be able to add to that knowledge after reading this photograph-filled book. It has an ocean of interesting facts for readers to share with others."

I love this poem, from an anthology that I published a number of years ago. Actually, this is prose that I adapted from WALDEN, written by the great American author, philosopher and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau. I think these lines scan beautifully as poetry, don’t you?This whole earth which we inhabitis but a point in space.How far apart, think you,dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star,the breadth of whose diskcannot be appreciated by our instruments?Why should I feel lonely?Is not our planet in the Milky Way?

Today we begin our month-long Earth Day 2013 coverage on the Seymour Science blog. This month we are committing to Meatless Mondays (do you know why that helps reduce CO2 emissions? We will write about that next Monday). We will also be measuring our carbon footprints, suggesting fun and valuable projects that you can do to help protect our environment, and simply celebrating the magnificent beauty of our planet home. We look forward to your comments throughout the month of April. Tell us what you are doing to celebrate Earth Day in your home, school or community. We hope that you will make it Earth Day, EVERY day, not just in April, but throughout the year. Photo: "Frog Dancing after Rain" by Shikhei goh

An advertising billboard that produces water? Strange as it sounds, that is exactly what is happening in a dry, desert area just outside Lima, Peru. The Spanish words on this billboard read: "A billboard that produces drinkable water from air. It’s imagination in action." A new engineering college opened there just last year, and they were trying to figure out a way to attract students. When they started thinking about how to grab the attention of future engineers, they decided to put "imagination into action" and show that it is possible to solve people’s everyday problems through engineering and technology. Here’s how it works. This is a very dry, desert area where some people do not have access to clean drinking water, though they are surrounded by salty seawater. The inside of the billboard has machines that extract water from the humidity in the air, store it in tanks, and filter out the salt to make it drinkable. The water then flows down a pipe to a faucet that anyone can use. The blue words on the pole that say "Agua. Aquí" means "Water. Here!"with an arrow pointing down at the faucet. So far, this single billboard is producing about 25 gallons (96 liters) of drinkable water every day. This is just one project, but it shows what we can do by applying our human imagination to figuring out how to use the resources around us to meet everyone’s needs.

All is well at my bird feeder, where we seem to have figured out how to keep the squirrels from lifting the cap and eating the bird seed.One morning this week my wife Liz and I were eating our breakfast and watching all the different kinds of birds at our feeder, which is right outside the kitchen window. We started naming and counting all the different types of birds that we were seeing.Of course, we don’t automatically know the name of every single bird. There were lots of little brown birds with a very distinctive pattern of brown and white stripes on their heads. I was pretty sure it was a sparrow, but didn’t know what kind. So, I did a Google image search, typing in the words: "small brown bird, striped head." Sure enough, up popped a picture of my bird - a white-throated sparrow. Then, just to be sure the image I found was correctly identified, I searched again, this time for "White-Throated Sparrow." That second search took me to legitimate websites like the Cornell Ornithology Lab and eBird.org, where I was assured that my bird was indeed a white-throated sparrow.While I was on eBird.org I decided to file a report on what I was seeing. Do you know this great website? They track bird populations by collecting data from regular people like you and me. It is a very simple form to fill out. Here is what I wrote about what I saw:You can do this, too. They are interested in what you see where you live - in your backyard, in your school garden, in a park or vacant lot in the city. Wherever you are, you can be part of a community of people who are collecting this huge body of data on our everyday birds.If you decide to try it, please write by clicking "comments" at the bottom of this blog post, and tell me what you see!

Can you feel it? Smell it? See it? Spring officially arrives tomorrow, March 21st, at 7:02 a.m. ET. Here’s an excerpt from a book that I wrote about the arrival of spring: Spring in America means heavy rains and late snows. It means birds flying north, trees and grasses pushing out new green leaves, wildflowers bursting into bloom and the sound of spring peepers. Spring is a season of beginnings, a signal of a renewal of life across America. Spring is the season to look for skunk cabbage shoots poking through the snow, to hear the early morning songs of robins and the late afternoon cackle of red-winged blackbirds, to feel the soft catkins of a pussy willow, to taste the first berries that ripen, and to smell the wet earth after a rain. Springtime is the sounds and sights of nature reawakening across America after the white sleep of winter snows. - from SPRING ACROSS AMERICA, Hyperion Books, 1996, by Seymour Simon Today, for Writing Wednesday, we would like you to write about the signs of Spring where you live. Even if there is snow on the ground in New England, hail falling from the skies in the southeast, heavy rains on the west coast, or a frigid wind blowing across the northern plains, you can still find signs of spring when you step outside your door. Take a few minutes and tell us what you see, what you smell, what you hear, what you feel. Use all your senses, and write about how you know that Spring is finally coming to your neighborhood. I am driving up to my lake house on the edge of the Berkshire mountains this afternoon, and I will write and tell you what I find. You can click on the yellow "Comments" link at the bottom of this email to post your writing for your friends and family to read. Happy Spring, everyone!Photo: Liz Nealon

Today’s "Cool Photo of the Week" is high up on my list of the cutest animals ever.And I learned something. Otters sleep holding hands so that they don’t drift away from each other. Makes sense, doesn’t it?