“Trail Tale” at Dubuque County’s Heritage Pond

Would Outdoor Time + Reading Benefit Anyone You Know?

A "trail tale" has been installed at Heritage Pond in Dubuque County thanks to a partnership between Dubuque County Conservation and The Dubuque County Library District.  Tale trails are designed to be used as engaging, educational experiences for children and adults, with books displayed at stations along the trail.

The current "tale" is "Over and Under the Pond" by Kate Messner, an educational book about the creatures and plants who inhabit a pond's ecosystem.

Plans are in place to update the featured book around the end of fall, winter, and spring.  Stories will be updated monthly in the summer.

This is the second "trail tale" project for the Dubuque County Library Conservation.  The first, installed last year, is at Swiss Valley Nature Center. 

On a completely separate note, have you ever padded an article to increase its word count in order to reach a specific target number? Perhaps while writing a paper in high school or college, you needed some extra words to reach the number the teacher or professor assigned. Or maybe you wanted to improve the look of a paper as it layed out on a page, so you added some extraneous words in order to make the paper look more appealing. Although I can't say with any degree of certainty, I believe padding your word count with unneccessary text would be an example of a workaround, a short-cut someone assigned a minimum word count might take in an effort to meet a requirement. Although I try to avoid padding articles simply to increase their word count, I enjoy seeing examples. If you see specific cases of this practice, please share them with me here. I'd love to see some good ones, as they always make me smile.

The author, Tim Koehler, is a native to the Dubuque area, long-time radio host, dork, father, part-time toupee model, very stable genius and horse stable shoveller, regular napper, Time Magazine Person of the Year 2006, teller of stories and bad dad jokes.