Field Trips are for Adults too

I’ve always liked field trips, ever since grade school. As an adult, I’ve looked for ways to continue learning outside of the class room and have my own field trip adventures.

My training for stream monitoring for the Watershed Education Network, (WEN) was such as adventure. I joined 20 or so other volunteers at Greenough Park on Rattlesnake Creek recently to learn the stations that are presented as part of WEN’s field trips. There are 3 parts, Biological, Chemical and Physical.

My favorite part of the whole activity, was the waders. I so rarely get to wear them and I dig any kind of special gear for a project, gloves, hard hats or waders. I put them on immediately after being given them and was reluctant to take them off. I was wearing them way before we went into the water.

The waders were needed in the biological station where we took nets and stood in the middle of the stream to kick up bugs. You do this by doing what amounts to “the twist.” You make sure to twist really deep into the river bed, stirring up lots of dirt and bugs that then flow downstream into you net that you have dug into the dirt down stream from you. You then take this net back to the table where you have buckets of stream water ready and you rinse out all the detritus from the bottom of the net. After all of this debris has settled, you take a plastic spoon and search for bugs. We found caddis flies, mayflies, and stoneflies. The purpose of this activity is to catch the bugs in order to count them, thus determining how healthy the river is. We put them into easily countable trays (individual section of ice cube trays) and then record them on the data sheet. The more variety of species, the healthier the river is. I loved having my nose right up to the bugs, the squirmy, long horse fly larvae and dark, solid bodies of stoneflies.

When we were done wit this station, we moved onto chemistry.

The last station was the physical station. We measured the river’s velocity, by clocking how long it took a tennis ball to travel down a measured section of the river. We also measured how far across the river was and how deep at foot width increments. 

This was a great training and we have a great group of volunteers this year. Look for us, out there on the river.

-Erin Schmiel

Erin Schmiel has been a steller WEN volunteer and has recently become a WEN board member.