It was a good day to be a fisherman, or so Guthrie Gallagher, 2, seemed to think. Cradled in his mother Charlotte's arms, Guthrie was learning the intricacies of casting on a fly fishing pole Saturday afternoon, and he appeared deeply committed to the lesson.

A little further down on the lawn in front of the arena at the Benton County Fairgrounds, Guthrie's older brother Cove, 4, was more interested in getting tangled in the line and occasionally throwing his entire pole toward the target. The lawn doubled as a river, and the trout were actually not fish at all.

"Frisbees!" Cove exclaimed when asked what he was fishing for.

Charlotte Gallagher said this was the second year she's taken her sons to the Kids Day for Conservation, an annual event that brings together more than 30 local and state natural resource organizations and businesses, which all offer kid-oriented activities.

"They really liked it," she said. "They like to make stuff. We made a picture frame, a mason bee house, he chased pigs and played with a snake and crawled in the dirt .. that's all they really need," she said with a laugh, "one big dirt pile."

Just down from the Gallaghers, Charley Renn of Mid-Willamette Fly Fishers was showing 7-year-old Jasmine Thomas how to cast. Soon she was confidently casting the long line almost directly on top of her Frisbee target.

"That was pretty close," Renn, a third-grader from Lebanon, said as the foam-tipped line landed just next to the Frisbee.

Inside the arena, among dozens of other booths, 4-H Wildlife Steward Scott Burress was explaining how different water birds use their bills to catch and eat food. Five-year-old Adrian Santos of Corvallis and 5-year-old Jonathan Knapp of Albany stood over a blue-tinted tank of water, pretending to be birds.

Adrian had a pair of tongs that mimicked the bill of a blue heron as it snapped up fish, while Jonathan's sieve scooped up bits of algae.

"The way ducks eat is by scooping up a mouthful of water," Burress explained. "The water comes out of the bill and what's left in there are little plants and little bugs."

Burress is a wildlife steward with Jefferson Elementary School, and uses a similar project in classrooms to explain how birds eat. He said he'd had a non-stop stream of kids visiting the booth all day.

Organizer Gary Springer of Starker Forests said there were fewer booths this year, but that given their space limitations, it was probably best to keep the numbers of booths to the low 30s. The number of visitors was expected to meet last year's total of 2,000. And he said the booth participants get as much out of it as the kids.

"It's a good place where we can all come together to do something with a common goal."