Bonner Scool Stream Monitoring

Spring days are here, most of the cold winter days are behind us. As I watch sun shining on rivers and we hear of snow geese on Freeze Out Lake, WEN’s office is a buzz with new energy. Even a spring break week meant class presentations and fieldtrips for WEN’s team.

Last week as Sean Kiffe’s Bonner School students were headed to Turah Fishing Access to collect School Stream Monitoring data for their sixth year, WEN’s 2010 spring volunteers were staged to meet them. Launching WEN’s spring river field activities with a whopping 34 fieldtrips scheduled from Feb. through June, some wonder how does WEN do all of this. It starts with Josh Gubits and the winter water monitoring trainings. Then, Alain Strehlow recruiting the new volunteers and regular volunteers for the fieldtrips the teachers schedule for their students. New volunteers, Kristen Kober, Gareth Griffes, Sheri Whittlake, high school student Conner Weston, regular volunteers Al Pak and Travis Ross from Missoula Water Quality District joined the fieldtrip staff. The weather was fine for a fieldtrip, cool but with sun shots enough to keep everyone motivated. New volunteers learned from the experienced crew how to best engage the seventh grade students in learning new concepts of their river.

Eager students broke into their groups of physical, chemical, and biological groups. Travis Ross brought an electronic multi-meter probe to compare pH, conductivity and temperature to WEN’s field equipment measurements.

The aquatic insect station always keeps the students interested. The favorite discoveries were large salmon flies, net spinning caddis with green bellies, and red mayfly nymphs Josh identified as Flathead mayflies. Students were also enthusiastic about measuring velocity by throwing sticks in the river and timing them as they floated downstream. Animated yells to the students operating the stopwatches could be heard of ‘start!’ at one end and ‘stop!’ as the sticks crossed the downstream steaks.

It is a great way to learn and a good thing to have students out for an afternoon at Clark Fork River. Even a chilly day at the river is better than the classroom for seeing, feeling, knowing a river. These are the students who have grown up watching the changes to the Clark Fork River in their backyards. Only a few years ago, they drove or walked by a reservoir of water at the confluence of the Blackfoot and Clark Fork Rivers.

"Science is awesome. They should do it all over the world!". ~Thomas, 7th grade Bonner Student