Amphibians and Reptile

First, "Days With Tadpoles" by Rebecca:

Yesterday Marianna and my mom were taking a walk with Dusty, and they came to a place where a big tire had made a puddle.

 They saw a bunch of tadpoles, which are baby frogs or toads.

So they came back and told me about it.  Then I woke up Joe and he wasn’t very excited, but we got on our bikes and went to the place where they were. 

 We brought a bag and a cup.  Then we got some tadpoles in the cup and poured them into the bag.

Then we went home.  We poured them into a habitat in my kitchen area.  We put pebbles in it and creek water. 

First they all started down at the pebbles, but after a while they came up and were all swimming around.  My mom bought fish food, but they didn’t eat it until this morning.  It’s Marianna’s job to feed them breakfast and my job to feed them dinner.  They ate a lot of algae from the water. 

We’ve only had them for a day; they’re really cute and tiny.  Lucca watched them for a minute or two, but she wasn’t very interested.  The tadpoles have a tail and it’s kind of see-through. 

They swim around all day.  They still hang out at the pebbles, and a few were hanging on a stick and being very still.

"Tadpoles," by Marianna:

Yesterday morning, while I was on the walk with my mom and Dusty and Mrs. Laing, we found in a giant tire rut hundreds of tadpoles.  When we got home, we told Becca, who got very excited.  Then we woke up Joe, who was not very excited about it at all. 

We got out the tadpole habitat and dumped a bunch of creek water into it.  We also put in a bunch of pebbles at the bottom.  Then we rode on bikes and put a bunch of tadpoles and some rainwater in a quart size zipper bag.  When we got home, we dumped them into the habitat. 

When we first put them in, they just went down to the bottom and wiggled in between the pebbles.  They didn’t move for a while, and I thought they were dead.  Then they touched each other and started swimming around.  They still spend time in between the pebbles.

Right now they are very tiny.  They are black with a little tail.  They are swimming around a lot, all over the place.  They’ve been eating the algae in the water and ignoring the fish food we gave them (until this morning).  We saw some hanging from a tiny stick that was floating in the water.  They looked funny. 

 And David's northern ring neck snake (or so I've been told), named Linnaeus (after the father of taxonomy):

Supposedly it eats worms.  There was one in the dirt David put into the aquarium, but we can't tell whether or not it's been consumed.   David is also trying scrambled egg, cooked chicken, and live tadpole (in the water dish).  Hopefully time will tell.