Welcome to Winter in Minnesota

This winter has gotten the better of me, I have to admit, but Pete and Finn have been out and about sledding, building snowmen and snow forts, talking walks, and generally enjoying the days when it was not too cold to be outside.

Our Minnesota State Parks still have events happening, and I may have to kick myself out of the winter doldrums and make something happen. They also have a nice calendar including events three months out, if you can imagine that one day, it will be May, and you can go on a bird walk or take pictures outside without your camera battery freezing.

Afton State Park: Bee Program & Beach

Afton State Park, a set on Flickr.

Come for the bee program, stay for the long walk!

Afton State Park: Covered in BEES

Finn and I went over to Afton State Park, another metro-adjacent Minnesota gem. They were having bee activities, where you could learn all about bees and make a bee craft. Pipe cleaners and tissue paper to the rescue! As bees, and other pollinators, have been the talk of the environmental world lately due to their apparent decline and phenomena such as colony collapse, I thought this would be a good learning experience for both of us. We have many pollinators in our garden, including honey bees, but our butterfly population was almost nonexistent this summer.

As with much of the non-human natural world, it's easy to put our own cultural biases and observations on top of them, so it won't surprise you to know that I did some mumbling when she said that the Worker bees, who are all girls, do all the work, and can sting. Yeah, it's no wonder they sting, slaving away while the drones, well... The Queen lays all the eggs, and the Drones, who are male, are sex slaves. No stinger. Which is helpful in a sex slave. In the fall, Workers block the Drones from the hive, and they die. (Insert snarky comment here.)

It won't surprise anyone to know that if flowers don't have bees and other pollinators, they don't grow. Other pollinators are wasps, hornets, hummingbirds, and butterflies. Wasps differ from bees in that they don't have hairs, their wings are longer, and their bodies are longer. Also, honey bees can only sting once and then they die; wasps can sting many more times, as we learned to our misfortune one summer and fall when they were nesting under our siding and repeatedly getting into the house.

Currently, honey bees are under threat from colony collapse, mites, fungus, pesticides, and the vast swaths of agricultural monocultures like corn and soybeans that blanket miles and miles of the heartland of the United States.

This was set up at the upper picnic area, and you could come at any time during the designated time frame to learn and make your crafts. Near the parking lot and the picnic area is a nice meadow, and we walked through it looking for butterflies and other insects. We did see a few monarchs and numerous dragon flies. At the beach, we saw common blue butterflies, which over-populated my youth to the point that they became mundane, but now, I rarely see them, so this was a treat.


What you should know: There are pit toilets at the upper picnic area, where this event was staged. They are a few yards down the trail. In them, you can see numerous spider and spider-adjacent species.

There are trails and a beach, but the beach is quite a walk if you have a small child who will refuse to walk after a time. Make sure you have a printed map with you because the signs on the trails were rather confusing, and I wound up making a wrong turn that ended with me walking way too far, eventually in the glare of the hot sun, carrying almost forty pounds of whining child on my shoulders.

Fort Snelling State Park: Storytime & Spiders

I have to say that while Finn does not mind having the lady rangers to himself, come on, caregivers! We were the only ones here again.
This event happens every Monday morning, and you should be here. Indoor story time is for winter. This week, we learned about what to do if you should find a baby Great Horned Owl in your backyard. Personally, I found most of this story to be implausible or all-too-convenient (baby owl is found by the children of a wildlife rehabilitator), but we definitely learned from it, and Finn found it interesting.

Later, after we hit the beach and the playground, we attended a spider talk, and there were other people present for this, which was nice. First we had a presentation from Ranger Amie inside the visitor center, and we found out:

-Birds eat spiders
-A black widow bite will make you sore all over, but you won't die.
-Mites will attach themselves to spiders and feed on them.
-Spiders eat spiders.
-Wasps eat spiders and will lay their eggs in them.


-Spiders eat mosquitoes, which makes them heroes and heroines.
-All spiders have fangs, 2 body parts, eight legs, eight or six eyes, and an innate ability to terrify the majority of humans.
-All spiders have venom and are poisonous, but it's mostly only poisonous to bugs.
-Male spiders have pedipalps, which are a combination of mating organ and arms, and they use them to do stuff, which is truly multi-tasking. And truly gross if you extend that concept to humans.
-Spiders' legs are attached to the head.
-Spiders are arachnids, and so are scorpions, mites, and daddy long legs (shiver)*. Daddy long legs have a single body part and don't produce silk.

Other interesting facts include that in the US, spiders are lone wolves and live by themselves because (see above) spiders will eat other spiders. Tarantulas are not true spiders because their fangs come down, not from the side. You might get bit by a tarantula, but you won't get hurt. Minnesota's poisonous spiders are the Northern Black Widow and the Brown Recluse. (Which didn't live here before, but thank you, climate change!) The Brown Recluse is gray or brown, has no markings on body, but a marking on the head that looks like a violin (or a fiddle, if the spider has attitude). If you are bitten by a brown recluse, the wound will take at least three months to heal. Put an ice pack on it to keep the venom from spreading, and go to the hospital.

At this point in the talk, I realized that I was spending too much time trying to figure out what kind of spider Shelob is. She makes silk and seems to make sheet webs (flat, convex or concave, only edges are sticky) or irregular cobwebs (no pattern, not sticky, spider sits in the middle), but her silk is definitely sticky, and not all of the 7 types of silk are. (There are four kinds of webs. Funnel webs are like a sheet web but with a hole in the middle, and orb webs are the classic spider webs, the webs that make all other spiders jealous. They have vertical spokes, which are not sticky, and spirals, which are. It takes a spider about 20 minutes to make one, and they rebuild them every day or so.) But spiders that live on webs are almost blind, and Shelob certainly can see. And talk.

I would not be at all surprised if she eats her silk and reuses it, as spiders do. She's an active hunter and jumping spider, but those species do not build webs, only the occasional trip wire to warn them when prey is near. They see well and do a mating dance, which I really can't see Shelob enjoying. For web-building spiders, the male plucks the lady spider's web so she will know he's not food. Active hunters have different silk glands, and they make cottony little, white swabs for their babies.

Speaking of babies, they can't stay in the nest long after they are hatched because their siblings will eat them, so they practice "ballooning," casting one line of silk to get themselves to safety. You've walked through them on your travels in the woods.

Non-mythical spiders live 2-3 years and can have three thousand spiderlings, 2-3 hundred in a single egg sac. Which is something to think about just before you fall asleep.

After the presentation, we went outside to find spiders around and on the visitor center. No Shelob, but as I think she's tarantula-adjacent, she's not a "true spider" anyway.

Don't tell her I said that.

*I have loathed daddy long legs since I was a small child. They used to march through our house at one point every year, and I remember not wanting to walk down the hall to my room because one was hanging out on the wall, in my way.

Fort Snelling State Park: The Beach

We are going to chew the nougaty center out of this urban gem this week; yesterday we dipped our toe into the visitor center and Pike Island. Today, the beach. So far he's mostly playing with his new water pump shooter, which works. He's having fun.

People from states with oceans or even giant freshwater lakes will of course scoff at the following assertion, but they can suck it: this beach rocks. It's wide, sandy, and conveniently located near an international airport. I smell LAYOVER!

No one is going to be surfing on Snelling Lake, but you might be nibbled by fish. Nibbled on, not eaten by, which is something to tell the teenaged girls who were purposefully freaking themselves out with the GIANT FISH in the deeper part of the swimming area. "EEK! A six-inch perch swam by my leg!" Granted, if a 26-inch carp did that, I might EEK as well. And then I would move to the shallow area and let the sunfish stare at my ankles.

It was a transparently gorgeous day with no ulterior motives. We stopped at the Dollar Store on our way there to see about a new beach shovel. Finn has 27 of these, but I could find none this morning. These will last a day or two, but I tell myself the joy they will buy will be worth the dollars. (Parents lie to themselves all the time.) I also bought him a balloon, but that took a trip when I opened his door to fasten his seat belt. I got a face full of shiny, yellow smiley face and off it went, smiling and sailing over the roof of an unfortunate strip mall.

The water is warm and relatively shallow. Finn is 3'6" tall, and he would have to walk out pretty far to get himself into trouble. Still, there are no lifeguards here, so people should be vigilant lest their small child in a colorful innertube scares away all the geese or your 5-year-old buries his new yellow beach strainer in the sand and can't find it (I have no idea who that last example is).

There are two depth levels: sunfish and carp. They are separated by little floaties and the shrieks of adolescence.

Surrounding the beach is a large picnic area with many tables and grills. Trees dot the mown lawn providing some shade most everywhere, ensuring that fistfights don't break out over the prime spot to leave your trash behind when you go home.

There are changing rooms and bathrooms as well as a playground adjacent to the beach.

You can rent a canoe, and there is also a fishing pier, where they do regular "learn how to fish" events.

We went to the beach twice in one day and slipped a doctor's appointment complete with blood test (different blog) in between visits. Finn really enjoyed the sand and shallow, warm water, and the weather was perfection (low 70's, breeze, sunny blue sky). Due, I think, to the breeze, the mosquitoes were not noticeable, but there were some lovely biting flies, so I again recommend bug spray.


More pictures here.

William O'Brien State Park, Minnesota

If you draw a circle around the Twin Cities in a 60 mile radius, you will capture at least nine Minnesota State Parks. And once you have captured them, what are you going to do with them? We decided to hit William O'Brien State Park for an evening program and short explore.

This is one of numerous state parks and recreation areas along the St. Croix River, north and east of the Twin Cities. South of the more well-known Interstate State Park, you can get to William O'Brien in around an hour if you are not trying to fight rush hour traffic north on 35E, which we were. Though I think this particular slow-down was not due as much to rush hour as it was to human error: people slowing down unnecessarily to ogle a truck by the side of the road that seemed to have lost an entire wheel and part of its axle. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

We still made it in time for the intended event, even including a pizza stop in Scandia to stave off the hangries*. What, you ask, is the event? A beaver talk! (Let's keep it clean, people. This is a family show.) We gathered at the visitor center with Ranger Emily and a few other campers for a short amble out to an active beaver lodge in the park. Before we even hit the trail, though, Emily showed us her snakes! She has a fox snake and a hog-nosed snake (both native to Minnesota) that she keeps in terrariums in her office and also uses for educational programs. She told the kids a little bit about these snakes (named Karl and Walter) and also showed us her painted turtle, Charles (also native). She rescued him from a prairie where he was not supposed to be. Oh! And she also let the kids hold a tarantula exoskeleton (not native). Cool beans.

Have I mentioned that there are programs like this happening all over your Minnesota State Parks, and they are included in your day or annual pass? No foolin'.

A brief bio on our friend, the beaver: they are North America's largest rodents, weighing from 50 to 60 pounds, and they can live up to 25 years. After being driven extinct in Europe by fashion because people are idiots, trappers started to deplete the North American population of these yellow-toothed marsh creators. This particular lodge has been active for 20 years, with probably a single set of parents and their successive litters of kits, who move on after two years with their parents. The beaver is the only species outside of humans to specifically manipulate their environment to suit their needs, and they do it much more sustainably, creating wetlands that filter our water supply and host numerous other species.

This event was well worth the trip. Ranger Emily was an engaged and knowledgeable guide who enjoyed sharing and teaching and interacted well with both grown-ups and kids.

After the talk, we explored the park a bit, checking out the two campgrounds and the four camper cabins, as we plan to return for a weekend this summer and also in the winter. We chose a number of sites we like, and of course they are all taken because you need to book your weekend state park plans well in advance. They do, however, keep a number of sites for first-come, first-serve campers, so Finn and I will try to get a site we want in that manner. It means I have to make phone calls and maneuver a new situation, which I don't care for, not being much of a dare devil (yes, phone calls and new situations are daring for me), but I'll do it.

For the family.

What you should know: Deerflies. They are mostly just annoying, but bug spray might be in order, especially for the kids. Oh, and ticks. Make sure you check yourself and your family thoroughly. Pete once caught Lyme Disease from a deer tick he most likely picked up in St. Croix State Park a few years ago, and it's sincerely not fun.

This park offers biking and hiking trails as well as canoeing and a small swimming beach. There are two campgrounds, and both are really nice, but the River one might be more crowded as it's closer to the action.

*The "hangries" are a pernicious condition that occurs in two members of my family, sometimes on a daily basis, resulting from lack of food. The whining and/or tense anger that manifest are both annoying and preventable, but the original hangry monster has not learned this in his over 40 years.

William O'Brien State Park

William O'Brien State Park, a set on Flickr.

An evening trip from St. Paul to William O'Brien State Park on the St. Croix River to learn about beavers.