CPF grantee Pine Valley Elementary School’s Frog Watch USA group was featured in AZA.org.
Excerpt from article: It was a balmy evening in March when roughly 75 people—most of them third, fourth and fifth-grade students—gathered at the parking lot of a city park in Wilmington, N.C. The group’s energy was electric as the sun went down; students gave each other high-fives and giggled while parents walked behind, all headed to a shelter near a wetland.
Under the shelter stood Kelly K. Crowley, a third-grade teacher at Wilmington’s Pine Valley Elementary School, and Andy Gould, outreach coordinator with the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher. Upon seeing the pair, the group got quiet, sat in a circle and listened for further instructions. Then, the time came for complete silence. The goal of the evening was to listen for the croaking of frogs and toads as part of FrogWatch USA™, a long-running Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) citizen science program for the public collection of data for scientific purposes.
“My biggest fear was that they wouldn’t be able to stay quiet,” said Gould. “If anyone made a sound we would’ve had to start the five minutes of observation all over again.”
Miraculously, no one made a peep.
Read the full article here.