How the Cayuga Lake Watershed Affects my
Life
Emmett Neno, Groton, NY Grade 7, Home-schooled
How does the Cayuga Lake Watershed affect my life? Well, it does
in a lot of ways. We do lots of things each season that have to
do with the Cayuga Lake Watershed, and no matter what season, we
have lots of fun. In the spring, we catch crayfish, minnows, and
dragonfly larvae in our creek. Sometimes we study them for school,
while other times we catch them just for fun. What is really neat
is when you catch huge crayfish, but even then, as soon as you put
them back in the water, they can still hide remarkably fast. Also,
in the spring we try to find frog's eggs or tadpoles and try to
raise them. (This year we found them very early, yet,while normal
tad pole's heads are the size of a pin head, these have heads that
are half an inch wide!) Another thing that is nice in the spring
is to hear our creek rushing at night. Sometimes we can even hear
it with our windows closed.
In the summer, we like to go down to Cayuga Lake. There, it feels
good to swim during the hot weather, although the water sometimes
is very cold. Usually, once you get in it isn't that bad. The second
thing that we do down at the lake is when we get too cold to swim
we dig up clay. Part of the fun of doing that is finding the clay
pits. Once we do that, we swim underwater and grab huge fistfuls
of it. We then take it home and occasionly make statues out of it.
Other times we just throw the clay back into the water. The third
thing that we like to do down at the lake is fishing. We usually
go fishing down at Salmon Creek,which is a short ways away from
Myers Park. There there are many salmon, but we haven't caught very
many there. But no matter where we fish at the lake it is still
lots of fun. The best tasting fish that I have ever had is Perch
and Rockbass. We have a great recipe for them. Even if you don't
catch a fish, it is still fun just to be outside. We also like to
sort of raft at Salmon Creek. What we do is we take tubes and ride
the current. In some places the current looks so strong it almost
looks like small rapids. The tube will fly up and down, up and down.
You always end up soaked. Oncewe did it without the tubes and just
floated by ourselves, and that time our clothes were sopping. Yet
another thing that is nice is because of the streams and creeks
near us, we hear the peepers (baby frogs) a lot,and we also see
a lot of deer. Once, we even saw a muskrat!
During the winter we enjoy iceskating on our creek. We will sometimes
even have snowball fights while we are skating.
Because of the Cayuga Lake Watershed we can do these things and
many more. This is how the Cayuga Lake Watershed affects my life.
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