Hi everybody!

This is the class 5/4D at Father Scollen reporting in.  Our trap is up and running as planned and we wanted to share our experiences so far.

Last week, before we set up the trap, everyone in our class wrote down five insects that they thought we might catch in our trap.  Mr. Drew (our teacher) made a Wordle out of it.  The larger words are words that came up the most in our estimates.  You can check out the wordle, as it is attached to this post!

On Monday, the students here in our district unfortunately had the day off, as it was a professional development day for teachers.  Because of this, our students didn’t get to see Mr. Drew fumble with all the poles and stakes while erecting our Malaise trap.  It was a two person job for us, as our grade 3 teacher assisted him (and probably did all the work).

On Tuesday, may of us noticed the trap was set up as we were walking to school.  The trap is located near the corner of the school and is visible from the sidewalk many of us take when we are walking to school.  It reminded a lot of us of a camping tent.  We had an awesome field trip that day in which we got to go to a real life wetland located right here in Calgary.  As a result of the field trip though, we didn’t really have the opportunity to go out and look at the trap closely during class hours.  Many of us did check it out for a closer look after school though.

Today (Wednesday) we finally were able to go out as a class to examine the trap, see how it works, as well as witness how many bugs we’ve captured in our bottle so far.  We were all pleased to see that there is already quite a few creepy crawlies in our collection bottle.  We estimated that there may be around 50-100 in there, but it is very difficult to tell.

We will be sure to check out the trap tomorrow around the same time to see how many more specimens have been caught and we’ll be sure to keep you updated.

Father Scollen 5/4D Over and Out!