The Muskrat is a semi aquatic rodent that lives in wetlands! We have some living at Heartland Forest, they can be seen at the fishpond, and can swim underwater for roughly 15 minutes on average!

Heartland Forest has 4 kinds of maple trees: the black maple, the red maple, the sugar maple, and the freeman’s Maple. The maple genus is called Acer! The sugar maple’s binomial name (scientific name) is Acer saccharum!

Frogs, toads, newts, and Salamanders are amphibians, meaning they have an aquatic gill-breathing larval stage, followed by a terrestrial lung-breathing adult stage, but some amphibians stay in an aquatic habitat and keep their gills as an adult such as the Axolotl!

Turtles can be seen sunbathing to regulate their temperature, they are called exotherms or “cold blooded”.