Women's Hiking Group April 27 & 29

The group will meet Tuesday (4/27) and Thursday (4/29) and hike at Weir Farm. Meeting place: Ancona's parking lot at 9:25 am.

Women's Hiking Group April 13 & 15

The Women's Hiking Group will meet this week Tues (4/13) and Thurs (4/15) at 9:30 am and hike Pine Mountain. Parking is at the end of Pine Mountain Rd in Ridgefield.

The Discovery Center's 13th Annual Lego Contest

Congratulations to all of our Lego Contest winners! What a great day we had yesterday at the Rec Center with local Legomaniacs for our 13th Annual Lego Contest! See our photo gallery.

Special thanks to our sponsors and donors: Union Savings Bank, Ridgefield Park & Rec, Mister Mikey, Genoa Pizza & Deli, Steve's Bagels, Dunkin Donuts and Stop & Shop. Also thank you to the contestants and more than 40 volunteers who helped make the Lego Contest possible!

Congratulations to our winners:

PreK/K: Jackary Muldoon, Finn Atkins, Evan Collins

1st Grade: Jack Beeby, Kyra Davis, Jake Schneider

2nd Grade: Jake Dale with Lego Idol, Matthew Lefebvre, Tim Vanni

3rd Grade: Dane Phippen, Omkar Ratnaparkhi, Jake & Ben Cohen

4th Grade: Jason Bangeser & Joshua Gardos, Justin & David Mitchell, Alden Burns

5th Grade: Nile Korobkov, Conor & Brendan Munnelly, John & Killian Buczek

6th Grade & Up: Patrick Gibson, Will Santella

Family: The Mills Family, The Nears, Kendra & Allyson Dotson (The Wondertwins)

People's Choice Award: Jack Halsey

Art Explorers

Our Art Explorers celebrated the March birthday of Vincent van Gogh and created their own artwork last week. To see our budding artists at work please view the photo gallery.

Women's Hiking Group April 6 & 8

The Women's Hiking group will meet this week Tues (4/6) and Thurs (4/8) at 9:30 am and hike Tarrywile Park in Danbury.
Directions: Take Route 7 North, take exit for Danbury Airport. At light at end of ramp, turn right onto Wooster Heights. Go 8/10ths mile and turn right onto Southern Blvd. Go 6/10ths mile and Southern Blvd. will make a sharp right turn. The Park & Mansion entrance is 100 yards beyond this turn on the right.

UPDATE: Women's Hiking Group March 30 & April 1

No hike today (3/30) due to rain. The group will met Thursday, 4/1 at Aldrich Park in Ridgefield at 9:30 am. Directions: Take Farmingville Rd to New Rd. Parking area and park entrance is on New Rd.

Frog-sicles?

The sounds of spring are reverberating throughout the woodlands. For the past week or so, spring peeper calls have intensified. But in some areas, interspersed in the peeper chorus is a series of short raspy quacks. This is the unique call of the wood frog. Wearing a mask and slightly bigger than the spring peeper, this little creature is so incredibly adapted that it can live above the Arctic Circle. Wood frogs inhabit the woodlands eating a wide variety of insects and other small invertebrates. In the late fall, it crawls beneath the forest floor's leaf litter and goes into a hibernation-like state. Over wintering on dry land and above the frost line would kill most cold-blooded vertebrates. But the wood frog is unique in that it can survive being frozen solid - a frog-sicle! In the very early springtime, it emerges from hibernation and immediately gets to the business of breeding. These otherwise solitary animals congregate in the large woodland puddles created by snow melt and spring rains called vernal pools. There they mate and lay their eggs in large blobs usually attached to some form of vegetation. The eggs become coated in symbiotic algae that helps give oxygen to the developing embryo. This makes them easily mistaken for clumps of algae. Depending on the temperature of the water, the egg to tadpole to frog metamorphosis could take from 50 - 120 days. This fast development is necessary as most vernal pools dry up before summer. If you would like to learn how this frog survives freezing see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fjr3A_kfspM or type "freezing frog" into You Tube's search.