Pipestone National Monument Week 4

This week, I picked up an extra shift and have therefore stayed in Pipestone over my weekend. This is actually a good thing, since I will use my one day off to explore Blue Mounds State Park (before it gets too hot out) and to work on the park's float for the Pipestone Water Tower Festival. Last Monday, while I was on my weekend, no one volunteered at the staff meeting to help build a float for the parade. Upon my return on Wednesday, I learned that there was a parade we had to build a float for, that I was now part of the project, and that I was also in charge of it! The theme of the festival is "Fairy Tales and Nursery Rhymes," which I had to combine with themes of NPS values and to somehow trumpet the fact that I'll be driving an all-electric truck through the parade. No easy task. We settled on a design I had made, which I will be building with a little help. I think I've solved all of the engineering problems while working on a shoestring budget of $0.

In the park this week, the snapping turtles have been laying eggs. Why they choose sites right next to the path is not clear, but it might be because the dirt is a little softer there. However, it puts their clutches in danger of being stepped upon, so the resource management team has been trying to build chicken wire and rebar around the nests to protect them.

Snapping turtle. Aggressive!

Wild four o' clock

Gooseberry

As for last week's post, I have some corrections. The purple and white flower was actually a crown vetch, a non-native plant that I had labeled as a wild pea (it is still a pea, but it is more specifically a crown vetch). The plant the bee was feeding on was an indigo bush, not a lead plant, though they look similar but are different sizes. The flower I wasn't sure about was a nightshade, whose berries are poisonous, and whose identity was pointed out to me by my mother and grandmother via phone calls a minute apart.