AUBURN — Water boatmen, water skimmers, water scorpions, crayfish and fairy shrimp — Milne Pond at New Hampshire Audubon Massabesic Center was teeming with macroinvertebrates, the small, spineless creatures that people can see with their eyes.
On Saturday, 25 children perched at the water’s edge, swishing the water, dredging the mud and scooping up critters with hand-held nets.
“I got something! I got some slugs,” chirped a girl in popsicle-print leggings.
“We’re always looking for ways to get out and explore nature,” said Amanda Harding of Hooksett, whose children Bodhi, 7, and Evelyn, 10, were ‘dip netting’ the pond for things that wiggle and dart. A tray on land held a bounty of tiny water-dwellers, including a sprinkling of tadpole eggs.
It was a tour of New Hampshire’s nearby, abundant wildlife — especially things that fly, slither, jump or swim. Each year NH Audubon celebrates Earth Day with a festival of the state’s wild animals on the smaller side, many of which are found in backyards, vernal pools and neighborhood ponds.
‘Ponding’ means collecting as many creatures as you can then returning them to the water, unharmed and unhandled, so the animals survive.
“We’re observing with our eyes, not our hands,” said Slater Roosa, an Audubon educator.
“I just come here to watch birds,” said Jasper Doherty, a 10-year-old from Plaistow. “It’s amazing, especially the woodpecker. How it can find insects inside trees — I don’t know how they do it, but it’s amazing.”
“My favorite bird is probably owls,” said a 7-year-old girl from New Boston. “They can turn their head backwards.”
On Saturday, New Hampshire Audubon President Doug Bechtel led a birdwatching tour. Spring is boom time in the natural world, he said, because nature is coming alive again.
That includes birds and the insects they eat.
After winter, birds need food — lots of it. The choice item on the menu is bugs.
“They’re skinny and have to fatten up. They’re also feeding baby birds,” Bechtel said.
He shepherded parents and children to a ‘bee hotel’ made by Eagle Scouts out of perforated logs and pine cones — in front of an old barn that hosts one of the largest bat colonies in the state.
The group trekked along a path lined with numbered bird boxes, some side by side, roughly 10 feet apart, which host bluebirds and tree swallows.
“Tree swallows are more aggressive than bluebirds,” said Bechtel, a biologist who studied forestry and ornithology in graduate school. “You see a lot of swallows and bluebirds fighting for the same box. By pairing your bird boxes, you can have both.”
Songbirds flying and perched in trees gave a near-constant symphony. A red-shouldered hawk soared overhead, one in a nesting pair that has lived here for years. Parents and children listened to the trilling of swallows and the clear whistle of cardinals.
“You can actually see it! A yellow goldfinch,” a mother told her daughter, pointing high in a tree.
A sugar maple out in the open in an expansive field provides a rest stop for birds in flight — and also an ideal fast food restaurant. Bugs flock to the tree’s budding flowers, Bechtel said. A flicker, a type of woodpecker that behaves like a robin, dined on bugs on the ground.
Across the field, a lone surviving elm tree from the last century is a favorite spot for Baltimore orioles, which will arrive soon.
Bechtel paused to hear a white-throated sparrow — a birdsong he’s learned to recognize.
“You either hear, ‘O Canada, O Canada, O Canada,’ or ‘Oh, Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody,” he said.
For new and aspiring birders, he said the best tool is a birdsong app called Merlin, from Cornell University’s Ornithology Lab, which identifies birds that are singing nearby without anyone having to see them.
“If there aren’t enough bugs to feed the birds, there will be fewer birds,” Bechtel said. One of the best ways to encourage birds is to encourage plenty of the bugs by not mowing your lawn until May.
“You can encounter wildlife the minute you walk out your door,” he said. “It’s birds. They’re wild animals. It’s a great part of living in New Hampshire.”
Inside the center, Sarah Burrell from The Caterpillar Lab in Marlborough held a live cecropia moth, with large wings that resemble Victorian-era wallpaper. The beautiful moth lives a week to 10 days, she said.
Ash Draper of Chester and her 4-month-old daughter, Tillia, were transfixed by live-action footage of a leaf mining caterpillar wriggling on a leaf in a nearby dish, while its image was magnified on a screen.
Roughly 3,000 varieties of caterpillars can be found in New Hampshire, Burrell said.
For more information on wildlife programs and guided bird walks, go to nhaudubon.org. The site contains a new guide to birds in New Hampshire, including whether they are currently abundant or threatened.
