We were pretty excited to sign up for the Mudpuddles to Meteors Nature Exchange. All three kids wanted to participate, so getting everything wrapped and ready to go had to wait until my schooled boy was home to join in. It’s all ready to get into the mail today, the deadline day.
When we signed up, I figured it would be fun to share part of our world. We really love where we live. (Ahem: I could do without winter and snow, but what can you do?) But of course, this project involved much more than just sharing. We spread out all the possibilities for packaging and agreed on at least twelve items to send. Then we needed to write up tags (writing!), which also involved precise identification so we could include the Latin names. We generally know what we’re looking at, but we wanted to be sure we got it right for our Alaskan recipients.
I gathered our relevant field guides, in this case Peterson Field Guides: Atlantic Seashore, Peterson First Guides: Shells, and Save the Bay’s Uncommon Guide to Common Life of Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island Coastal Waters, and we set off identifying. We counted the teeth on the crab shell. We compared the descriptions of blue mussels and ridged mussels, bay scallops and sea scallops. We copied down correct spellings. We wrapped them carefully and taped on the tags:
Very few of our items were small enough to fit into an egg carton, as suggested, so we used a larger box, and later I cushioned everything with newspaper as well. It will soon be off to the post office, and we’ll wait for our package and a chance to learn about the local nature of someplace far away.
What a great idea by Dawn and Annie of Mudpuddles to Meteors–thanks so much for hosting!