LEWISTON – Kids are like sponges, people say. They just soak up what goes on around them – even when they don’t seem to be listening.

It sure seemed that way Saturday at Thorncrag Bird Sanctuary, during a fall festival run by the Stanton Bird Club.

“Look at this yellow fungus. Cool!” shrieked 5-year-old Alex Roy.

“Isn’t it cool?” replied bird club steward Bonnie Soper, who was running one of Saturday’s three informal nature-learning programs at Thorncrag.

Walking up the sanctuary path 20 minutes before, the group of a dozen or so parents and children stopped first at a small amphitheater, where Ted Elliott of Augusta gave a short lesson on fungi – the edible, the poisonous, the pretty and the downright cool. The adult members of the group asked questions and reminisced about mushroom-hunting days of yore. The kids – ranging in age from 2 to 10 – touched a few mushrooms, gaped a little, and after a few minutes began pulling on their parent’s hands, asking to go on to the next station.

Enough fungi for the day?

Well, not exactly.

Bonnie Soper was operating a winter-shelter building station a few yards down the path. “We’re making a brush pile,” Maddison Roy, 8, explained. “We’re going to help the mouses, the chipmunks and the squirrels.”

But at the brush-pile station and beyond, at the pond, talk of fungus reigned supreme. “Look – jelly fungus,” shouted Sean Monteith, 6.

“Want to go ask the fungus man what that one is?” Stanton Bird Club President Susan Hayward, running the pond studies station, asked Alex Roy when he ran up to her holding a sample she couldn’t name. “Yes,” he said, running off.

Saturday marked the club’s first festival since the construction of a new parking lot, and the second fall celebration in its history. Spring festivals are more about the birds, Soper said. Fungus and pond life are much more visible in the fall.

Bates sophomore Laura Popick and Lewistonites John and Heather Hendron sat on a tarp near the pond, sorting through a soup of pond water and blackish-brown pond goop in several Tupperware containers, recently scooped from the pond by Hayward. John Hendron held up a small soup container. Inside was an animal about an inch long. “She tells us it’s a dragonfly larva,” he said, gesturing to Hayward. “And this is another kind.”

“She told us there are 45 different kinds of dragonflies in Maine,” Heather Hendron said.

Packing up her tarp and containers, Hayward laughed at a group of kids that seemed to be getting covered in mud. “Did you see how good a time they were having?” she asked. “It’s incredible to see the light in their eyes, the discovery of something new … I feel like I’ve planted the seeds of a conservation ethic.” Hayward, who has taught at Thorncrag since 1983, has already seen a generation of kids come through, and knows from experience.

Former student Laura Damon, visiting for the day from Portland, quickly backs her up. “Yes, I have a conservation ethic,” she says.

And as for the current batch of kids? What did they take away from the experience?

Building the shelters, being at the pond, and finding fungus were all fun, Sean Monteith said. But his favorite part? “I liked helping the animals,” he said.