The Naturalist Notebook

Come down to the Earth Day festivities at HUB on campus! Shaver’s Creek staff, students and interns are holding a Reduce•Reuse•Recycle RELAY for prizes! Meet our Birds of Prey, and see what Penn State is doing to encourage “A Billion Acts of Green!” We’re here until 2PM. (follow #greenpsu on Twitter) See the full gallery…

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.…

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…

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…

We are all buoyed by the beautiful spring weather here at Shaver’s Creek. The last few days we have been hearing the sweet woodland song of the Brown Creeper, joined around the center by the songs of Chickadees, Titmice, Juncos and our resident Carolina Wrens. Today we were greeted with our First of the Year…