Hey everyone~! It's Jenn here!

 So today turned out to be not only a very interesting day but an exceptionally fun one too! The day began with a trek out to the Homer Spit, for the annual Shore Bird Festival which Homer prides itself in every year. The concept of the festival, is for bird watchers from all walks of life, to come and view a wide variety of birds that only stop in Homer this time of year to rest and refuel before continuing on to their breeding grounds where ever that may be. However, its not exactly a festival. This may be because today is Thursday, and only the first day, but we will never actually find out because we have so much else planned to do. So we walked the Spit, browsed through the shops, and went to a delicious little cafe for lunch.

After lunch, we met up with our guide at the Beluga Slough trail for the first of several different activities that had been planned for us. Our first activity was a walk through the marsh, to view some of the birds that had migrated. We saw a sand hill crane, and some geese, but for the most part that was it. The ground was wet, or saturated, but it was an experience all its own, and we learned about the different mud consistencies in the estuary.

The next activity we did for the day was determining the pollution level in Beluga lake. The way to do that was to check the amount of bugs we could find around a dock, and the numbers we ended up collecting told our guide a lot about the health of the lake.

The final activity of the day was snow shoeing at the Wynn Nature center on top of the mountain overlooking the city of Homer and the Homer Spit. It was a very unique experience and an excellent way to end the day. Everyone had a wonderful time, despite those, like myself, who took a face plant into the snow when we tripped.

That's it for today!! Thanks for reading!