Wetlands Edge

For two years during middle school, I was involved with a program called Wetlands Edge. After school, I would get on a buss with the other students in the program and ride out to the fringes of Decatur, where there were indeed wetlands. There was a building there, splint in half; on one side, freshwater animals, on the other, salt water.
We started out with an introduction to biodiversity. I learned that Alabama is the most biodiverse state in the nation, and it is in danger of losing many of its precious species. We brushed over the reasons why this was important, but I intuited most of it. It was one of the few classes I was fully and consistently engaged in. We were given waterproof notebooks for our observations, and then they dragged us out into the water.
A quarter mile or so from the main building, there was a pond. I made an art of catching tree frogs in the cattails on one edge of it and the tiny toads that hopped across the trails, and I searched fruitlessly day after day for the muskrat that lived on the far bank. As a group, we trolled the area and swiped around with individual nets, catching dragonfly larvae and sunfish, freshwater turtles, and a fair amount of algae. We also explored the grasses around the pond and tried to make connections between the terrestrial organisms and the aquatic ones that the program was so invested in. The greatest disturbance to the natural environment was the time that I stepped in a hole at the bottom of the pond and sunk into the mud. I got out, but my left shoe didn’t. We spent days digging for it with our nets, but we never fished it up.
This was one of the most valuable classes I have ever taken. I’m not sure if it’s still running or not. No one talks about it, it’s not advertised. When I was involved, I had to explain what I was talking about to almost everyone I told. There are programs with amazing possibilities, but they go largely unnoticed. That’s why when we went off the Wetlands Edge property and explored some of the other watersheds in the area, there was almost nothing to catch. People just don’t know. We’re made of water, but we don’t take enough time to look at it. Wetlands Edge knows how to set this right, but like my shoe, it lies at the bottom of the pond, unfindable and forgotten.