Karen Shragg is the director of Richfield's Wood Lake Nature Center and a local expert on coyotes in populous areas. On Thursday, February 12, Karen will tell the story of how man, pets and coyotes co-exist--or don't--in our soutwest suburbs including Eden Prairie. She will discuss the pros and cons of managing the coyote population as well as tools that naturalists use to study and understand the challenges of managing predatory animals in a suburban setting.
Join us for this very engaging discussion on this very interesting topic.
Field trips--I love field trips. It reminds me of my school days; get out of school, take a trip, see something very cool and hang with my friends.
Last Thursday, club member Todd Bollig took us on one of the coolest field trips I've been on in a long time. We visited Redeye, a division of Stratasys, right here is Eden Prairie. They are in the business of additive manufacturing, or 3D printing as some of us used to call it. We learned about FDM (Fusion Deposition Modeling) which is the process that extrudes small beads of thermoplastic material to form layers as the material hardens immediately after extrusion from the nozzle. We also learned a lot of other big words and TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms), most of which none of us understood. But it sure sounded cool.
We saw big machines that create big parts and small machines that make small parts. We saw simple parts and very complex parts. We saw parts that were parts of other parts including the very machines that were making the parts. The great engineers and sales people at Redeye made sure that we got to see a lot of very cool stuff on our 45-minute tour.
Thanks so much to the team at Redeye for the great field trip. And a special thanks to Todd for setting it all up. I want more field trips, now. ;-)
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