The Naturalist Notebook

As spring has arrived there are lots of exciting reemerging flora and fauna to find including bats! Here at Shaver’s Creek we have 10 bats boxes ranging in various sizes.These bats boxes serve as summer roosting homes for a number of different species of bats including little brown and big brown bats. Shaver’s Creek has…

Greetings all, A very enthusiastic group of 22 birders, representing a range of experiences from middle school novice to bird club regular, came out for the morning walk.  Joshua P. and I split the group and hit the trails around the center.  Highlights included singing ruby-crowned kinglets, blue-headed vireos and a black and white warbler.…

Shaver’s Creek is excited to partner with the Pennsylvania Native Plant Society this year to host their annual Native Plant Celebration & Sale on May 7, from 11 a.m.–5 p.m. This year we will celebrate the interrelationships between native plants and our resident bird species with the combination of the Plant Sale and our 24-hour…

Although Shaver’s Creek has always strived to be on the frontier of environmental sustainability, this past fall we have officially joined Penn State’s Green Team Initiative, headed by the Office of Sustainability.  Green Teams are formed by a group of staff members in any given department on campus who want to help make their organization…

Greetings all, A sunny, cold and rewarding morning to be out and about with 8 other enthusiastic mid-week birders, including 4 of our Penn State students.  We decided to do a mini “field trip” (rather than a bird walk) to Hutchinson Pond and the West Entrance of Stone Valley to take in Puddle Perez, which…

Tomorrow morning is the first Migration Morning Birdwalk of the spring at Shaver’s Creek. Meet in the front yard at the Creek at 7AM. These walks will happen every Wednesday morning from April 6th–May 11th, and are FREE thanks to sponsor Wiscoy for Animals. For more info, visit: http://www.outreach.psu.edu/shaverscreek/index-birdwalks.html Bring your binoculars or borrow some…

At the Maple Harvest Festival this weekend I ate a stack of pancakes (or two), watched my friends tap a maple tree stump, stuck my nose into a bucket of sap, saw seven Horseshoe Cloggers perform to the tune of Taylor Swift, and hiked the Lake Trail in a futile attempt to digest the said…

Hello all Shaver’s Creek friends, THIS weekend is our annual Maple Harvest Festival: Shaver’s Creek has held this annual festival since 1984 to celebrate the first harvest of the new year and help people learn about the maple sugaring process — both in colonial times and the present day. At the festival you can: learn…

Here at Shaver’s Creek the amphibians are out and about! At our Frog Pond in the front yard red-spotted newts, wood frogs and their egg masses are in abundance. Spring is officially upon us and the amphibians have come out from hibernation and are becoming active once again. Red-spotted newts, identified by their brown/yellow skin…

Families attending two recent spring programs at Shaver’s Creek were invited to participate in a new research study on family learning and how they might use science-like, exploration tools during a hike. At each of these programs, families were given the opportunity to fill a small backpack with tools to use on their hike: magnifying…