Endless Guilt Available

Our dog was the first to find this little guy out on the bricks in our greenhouse. We've never seen a salamander like this around here, so we were surprised to find him at all ...

... but we were REALLY surprised to find him out in January! Guess he was a little confused!

Wish I could say that we sheltered him for a while, then set him back out when it got a little warmer. That was the plan.

We, My Youngest and I, put him in a container where he quickly buried himself in mud. A few days later, I put his container outside to acclimate to the slightly warmer air intending to go out and find a nice place where he might dig in and spend the rest of the winter.

Yes, he's still out there in the container! Probably dead. If I was a real homeschool mom, I would've led my son on an in-depth study of the 5,093 types of salamanders, researched its preferred habitat and replicated it, and of course, made charts of its behavioral patterns. And we might've found out that it lives mostly very north of us (brainstorm reasons for finding it in our area), that we should've made sure to wash our hands after handling it due to its toxic excretions (collect and test excretions - resource help from the local university), and we might have tried harder to help it live if we had known that it's endangered in Iowa (map Iowa and plan a family trip there).

Endless guilt available to all homeschool mothers and would-be rescuers of confused salamanders!