Taking nature into their own hands at Coast Day

Anthony Ukaha was quite surprised when a water quality test he performed came back with positive results.

Philadelphia water is clean, he learned.

"I thought it would be polluted," said Anthony, 11, from West Philadelphia, who joined other ecotourists for yesterday's Southeastern Pennsylvania Coast Day at Penn's Landing.

The event was just one of a number in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware to clean up, learn about, or just appreciate the Delaware River.

About 20 organizations at Penn's Landing offered events all centered on ecological themes.

"Everyone walks away from here learning something they didn't know," said Deanne Ross, a program specialist with the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary. While the programs were geared to kids, she said, parents were just as interested.

Joy Brown, 36, of Germantown, took her four children to Coast Day for "something educational and fun."

Her son Alim Manning, 10, was impressed that soda bottles could be recycled into shoelaces. He plans to be more active now and recycle. The only problem, he said, is that his family's recycling box was stolen.

At the Cradle of Birding Wildlife and Conservation Festival at the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge in Tinicum, exhibits were just as much about armadillos, porcupines and Madagascar hissing cockroaches as birds.

About 1,000 visitors wandered though exhibits about conservation and learned about native and nonnative wildlife and plants.

"Is that a turtle?" asked Richae Williams, 12, from West Philadelphia. Richae had just spotted an African spurred tortoise, the size of a large computer monitor, walking the hallways at the refuge.

The 14-year-old tortoise had arrived with volunteers from Forgotten Friends, a reptile rescue group in Lancaster.

Minutes earlier, at a Drexel University display, Richae had held a much smaller eastern box turtle for the first time.

"It's fun here," said Richae, visiting the Heinz refuge with the Widener University Ecology Academy for Girls.

"We are very much a part of the waterfront," Bill Buchanan of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said about the refuge. He explained that many species found in rivers and oceans started life in tidal marshes. "The refuge is doing what it should do, provide proper habitat."

A rare eastern spiny softshell turtle and coastal leopard frogs have recently been sighted at the refuge, Buchanan said.

At the exhibit of Earth Force, an environmental education group, children made bead bracelets. They had just drawn outlines of their hands and written pledges to be more ecological:

Help keep the streets clean.

Pick up trash.

Recycle.

"We give them a little bead to remember their promise," said Dawn Wales, 32, of Earth Force.