Right now, as the sun sets on Saturday, Sophie is rooting grasses for a bed to sleep under the stars. In a week’s time, she seems to have developed a penchant for the outside rather than her nest inside her outbuilding. Her stint as visiting ambassador at Sauder Village, for porcine everywhere, and here on The Quarry Farm for two days of welcoming two schools from two counties, must have made this so.

As for me, my voice is gone, but the temporary loss is well spent on two full days of spring fields trips with over 170 people painting lasting leaf t-shirts, getting up close and personal with macroinvertebrates as water quality indicators, and meeting a six-spotted tiger beetle, pot-bellies, turkeys and Sophie herself.

Thursday morning, preschoolers and parents from the Pandora area hiked around the Red Fox gardens to select interesting leaves. With a little help from the adults, the children arranged dandelion, violet and burdock on their white shirts and spritzed paint around the greens. Several malfunctioning spray bottles later, there were some very colorful shirts, not a single one exactly like the one next to it.

Third graders from Chamberlin Hill Intermediate School in Findlay arrived on Friday in two shifts. The first 70-some got off the bus around 10 a.m., made their shirts (using all new spray bottles) and hung their finished wearable art in the bushes and trees before hiking down the hill, along Cranberry Run and splitting into two groups at the north gate. Half went through the gate to meet the farm animals, the other to see dragonflies, damselflies, crayfish and the amazing boneless swimming acrobatics of fish leeches.

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Thanks to Zoe for showing everyone that fish leeches won’t suck human blood, even after 10 whole minutes.

With a lot of paint left in the bottles after the second bus drove away south on 7L, we tackled the north picnic table with splashes of red, purple, green, and blue. The other table remains for another visit and another day.