Island Students Learn About Pond, Marsh, Fen on Wetlands Field Trip
By Leslie Rott

Taking notes and drawing pictures, students relax next to Dwightwood Spring near Arch Rock.

For Mackinac Island Public School students, every day is an adventure, especially when students have the opportunity to take a field trip around the Island. On Thursday, May 26, they explored wetlands and learned the difference between a pond, a marsh, and fen.

Students in grades kindergarten through seven went on the field trip, with teachers Karen Allen, Liz Burt, Laura Eiseler, and Vicki Urman.

“We live in such a wonderful environment, Ms. Eiseler said, “we might as well teach them to enjoy it.”

For the younger students, said Mrs. Urman, the goal of the trip is exposure to things on the Island that they may not have the opportunity to see themselves. For the older children, the goal is to learn about the environment.

The trip was interactive and at times, it was hard to tell who was having more fun, the students or the teachers. Students took notes and drew pictures at each site, and at every water hole they stopped at, they were reminded they should not drink the water.

The first stop was Grand Hotel’s Jewel Golf Course, across the street from the school. There, they studied Hanks Pond. A pond, Mrs. Burt told the students, is a small lake, and this one is full of frogs. The students, however, were more impressed with Grand Hotel’s fountains.

The next stop was Dwightwood Spring, near Arch Rock.

“When groundwater comes out of the ground, it is a spring,” Mrs. Burt told students. The spring is named in memory of Dwight Wood, who lived on East Bluff.

Stop three was an exciting challenge. Students were shown a wetland and had to use their knowledge to figure out what type of wetland it was. It was a marsh.

The fourth wetland was Lone Lake, which, according to Mrs. Burt, is actually a calcareous fen, a variety of marsh. In the case of Lone Lake, students learned that it is fed by groundwater and has a lot of calcium in it and that many of the animals that live in a calcareous fen are endangered.

Students were also able to see tamarack trees, a conifer that turns yellow and loses its needles in the fall and grows new ones in the spring. Buds are visible now, and the new needles will soon grow.

The final stop on the trip was to Croghan Water, which is a marsh.

Marshes, said Mrs. Burt, can be freshwater or saltwater or both, and Croghan Water is a freshwater, seasonal marsh that is wet for only part of the year. A marsh does not have trees, she told the students, but a swamp does.

During their trip, students saw baby ducklings and a snake, but a spring rain shower sent them back to school quickly.