Late last fall, the Mashpee Middle-High School Environmental Club and science teacher Shona Vitelli’s Advanced Placement Environmental Science class worked with the Living Lab Wetland Project to design and build a vernal pond.
On this late March day, students crunched over the last patch of snow to see the pond for the first time. As they approached the pool they also discovered ... mud.
"So be careful as you get close," Vetelli warned her students in their bright white sneakers.
Vitelli says it’s all part of the experience.
"We didn’t realize that the mud was so soft around the edge, so we got a few muddy feet," she said. "But I feel like that’s kind of the point of getting us outside."
Sullied sneakers aside, she’s looking at the big picture.
"I’m trying to create the next generation of stewards – the next generation of kids who care about nature," she said. "And the only way to do that, in my eyes, is to get them out here and get them personal experiences so they can connect. And sometimes that means you get a little muddy and you get some dirt underneath your nails."
Mud wasn’t the first pond encounter for all the students. Junior Owen Ziehl was one of the first to arrive, as the advancing class spooked a pair of mallards.
"As I walked in in here, I saw two ducks, which I thought was really interesting, personally," he said. "Because it wasn’t quite what I expected yet. At first I had assumed smaller things, more like mayflies and mosquitoes, first. But seeing ducks arrive before them, is a lot [more] interesting to me."
Owen is correct in that flying insects are typically the first critters to take up residence in a new wetland, along with other invertebrates like fairy shrimp and copepods.
Juniors Abby Glen and Dahlia Locke are hoping to attract some bigger pond dwellers, but they’ll likely take a little longer to arrive.
"I hope there’ll be a lot of animals here," Abby said. "I’m not seeing anything right now."
Dahlia added, "There’s going to be a bunch of frogs and salamanders."
Both girls are part of their school's Environmental Club. And they're making plans to put up bird houses to attract bluebirds to the new pond.
Junior Logan Puma says, now that the vernal pond is filled with rain and snowmelt, the critters should arrive soon.
"These habitat, they provide species with a lot of vital grounds," he said. "So it basically promotes biodiversity. There’s tons of species that can thrive here, where they might not be able to in other environments. They provide breeding grounds for amphibians, like the salamanders, just all tons of different species here."
Or, as conservationist Ian Ives put it, "It's truly a 'build it and they will come'."
Ives works with Wetland Restoration and Training to build Living Lab projects like this one on school campuses around Cape Cod. They use an excavator to clear the spot and dig the pool. Students help to install and bury a wetland liner that will retain water throughout the spring and summer. To date, Wetland Restoration and Training has constructed nine wetlands on eight school campuses.
"When we build wetlands at schools," Ives said, "we're offering a unique, convenient laboratory for study. And that's what's so appealing to the teachers. They understand the ecological value, but what they really are benefiting from is the opportunity to bring students out conveniently on their campus, safely, under control, inexpensively to explore."
At the same time, Ives said, they’re reintroducing vital habitat to the Cape.
"Between, say, the late-1700s and the mid-1980s, Massachusetts lost about 28 to 30% of its wetlands," said Ives. "So there's a need just to help to reestablish this isolated wetland habitat for the rare species that rely upon them."
Since this vernal pond was constructed, Cape Cod endured a cold and snowy winter. Junior Colin Burdge says that helped to naturalize the pond site.
"Coming back out here, it’s amazing how much different it looks from when we built it," he said. "Because there’s all the sticks, there’s all the brush. And especially with the blizzard – all the winds – it helped just like knock down a bunch of branches and stuff, and make it seem a lot more natural, compared to the big, like, muddy pit that we originally had when we first built it."
His classmate Liam Assad says that’s important for some of the animals that will make themselves at home here.
"There’s a bunch of different species that kind of like to be almost on some sort of log or tree, but also have easily accessible water nearby," he explained. "So by putting branches and trees either on top of or near the vernal pool, that allows for species to kind of fluctuate between those two different environments."
As various species take up residence in the pond, Junior Martin L’Heureux hopes students and other Mashpee residents will also take advantage of this slice of nature just steps away from the school parking lot.
"I hope they can have benches and stuff like that, and make this somewhere that people can come, even during the summer, you know, when school is out," he said. "Like, a calm environment that people can hang out in."
Teacher Shona Vitelli would like that too, and she says science classes will be taking advantage of the new school pond for years to come.
