Kristen presents to Master Gardeners of Sarasota County!

Today I had the pleasure of presenting our stream classification study to a wonderful group of people – the Master Gardeners of Sarasota County, Florida. It turns out there are Master Gardeners all throughout Florida. The program is run through the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS). Its mission is to train a core of volunteers to assist the county extension agent in delivering information to residents on how to design, plant, and care for their plants and landscapes in a Florida-Friendly way. Please visit their website to find out more about this AWESOME program:
http://gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu/mastergardener/about/index.shtml

I’m hoping I was able to inspire some Master Gardeners to get outdoors and enjoy our state’s amazing resources. Maybe they’ll even become Chicks with Ticks (since many of them were women)! The Gardeners definitely inspired me to turn my black thumb green, and even gave me a couple free plant clippings (I’ll let you know how that goes). Thank you so much to Bob at Sarasota County’s IFAS extension office for inviting our team to speak. Always a pleasure talking about what we do and love because…
“In the end we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.” – Baba Dioum

Waterling

Tumbling, truckling, the tickling stream passed clear over my wriggling toes.

Cold it was. And hard were the stones under my bones.

Waterling

Dappled shafts of sneaky sunlight snuck through the laughing leaves.

There I lay

Just born

Listening

Naked

Alone and wanting for nothing.

Breathing spray and smiling.

A wild thing.

The waterling.

Vampires Commeth..

With Halloween coming, the Chicks thought it would be interesting to begin dispelling myths about some of the spookier nighttime creatures. We will begin with bats. Vampire bats do not suck blood. Rather, they lick the blood of cows an other small mammals. Vampire bats are actually very small and are no threat to us!

So, here goes. No more fearing them in the dark. They do not get tangled in your hair and will not suck the lifeblood out of you….here are some truths about

 

BATS

• A single bat can snap up over 600 mosquitoes in one hour, as well as other little pests!
• Bats are shy, gentle, and intelligent. They are among the slowest reproducing animals on earth.
• Most bat species have only one live young per year. A mother bat nurses her baby from a pair of pectoral breasts.
• The average life-span of a bat is 25 to 40 years.

• Bat populations in rapid decline, and White Nose Syndrome is threatening them even further. Half the bats in the US are listed as rare, threatened or endangered.

• While both bats and mice are mammals, bats are not rodents and are more closely related to primates and people.

• Bats live a very long time.  Most bats live between 10 and 20 years.  Some bats typically live to 30 years old.  The oldest known bat was recently recaptured in Europe at 41 years old.

• Very few bats contract rabies.  Over the last 50 years, less than 40 people have gotten rabies from a wild bat.  Scientific studies have shown that less than 1% of wild bats test positive for rabies.

http://batconservation.org/drupal/bat-myths Check out the Organization for Bat Conservation!

Go Anywhere!

As adventurous gals, we like to go to new and exciting places. Sometimes, it’s a lake right behind the office, and others, it’s a remote stream after a miles long hike. What we really like to do is encourage others to take time to go outdoors and see something or experience something that gives you that sense of adventure.

Sometimes, it’s just a walk in a local preserve or park. Some of us are trapped in a concrete jungle and a plastic cube and that’s about as adventurous as it gets. Others of us will take it to the limits and climb rocky peaks or dive the deepest rifts. The important thing is, get out there and see what we see.

The wild isn’t all filled with danger and mystery. There’s a beauty in nature that we can’t fake, print, pixellate or 3-D. The only way to know what tar flower smells like when it’s sticky and blooming is to see it and smell it in the air.

So, as Spring is springing – let’s remember to get out the and GO ANYWHERE!

Then, tell us about your adventures…the good, the bad, and the ugly!

Co-Creator Jacqueline Levine expressing her excitement as Chicks go live

Remember how we said bird cams were cool?

Well, they just got even cooler! We tracked down this live feed of a nesting bald eagle pair whose little chicks recently hatched! Yesterday I spied the mommy feeding the chicks turtle! Yes, turtle! Today they are eating fish and some kind of rodent. YUMMY. You can check these magnificent birds out here: http://www.alcoa.com/locations/usa_davenport/en/info_page/eaglecam.asp

So we previously blogged about how to tell the difference between a bald eagle and an osprey. Today we’d like to share the great success story of the American Bald Eagle.. Not too long ago, this species was listed as Endangered. Its population was threatened by habitat loss, DDT (an insecticide used back in the day that caused eggshells to be really thin and crack before chicks were hatched), and hunting. To protect the symbol of our country, the government banned DDT, prohibited the hunting of eagles, and protected their nests. These protections resulted in an amazing recovery, with populations high enough to take the bald eagle off the endangered species list. Yay!

Image from Alcoa eagle cam of mommy and daddy feeding a chick!

 

Osprey update: still no chicks, but you can check in on them here: http://ospreynest.info/ospreycam.php 

Lesson 20: Curing Spring Fever

Taunting us from outside our window...

Jacque and I were moping around the office the other day, wondering why we were more unmotivated than usual. And then it hit us: we had spring fever, a BAD case of it. Not only had we been stuck working on projects that required us to be in the office rather than in the beloved field, but we had also just pushed our clocks forward giving us an extra hour of daylight. Yet here we were, trapped in the artificial light of the office. So we decided to do something about it. We vowed that the next day we would spend our lunch hour (also known as “Lunchingtons”) actually going OUTSIDE.

Murky waters

What a novel idea. Our office does, afterall, sit right on the shore of Lake Bently, a little lake that we had completely taken for granted as it stared at us through our office windows for YEARS now.  While its water is more green than blue and its shoreline is highly developed with storm water drains jutting out every few hundred feet (it has a high LDI for any limnology nerds out there), it is home to birds, gators, fish, and even otters! So why not call it our home as well, at least for an hour?

Happy Jacque!

The excitement of our looming adventure got us through the morning grind, and at noon on the dot we grabbed our lunch (that Jacque had deliciously prepared) and our craigslist-purchased kayaks and off we slid into the murky waters. Within moments we were in another world. Just yards away stood our office building, staring back at us with its mirrored windows, hiding the sterile lights and jealous faces of our co-workers (actually, they probably just thought we were crazy). We paddled happily towards wood ducks and pelicans and ibises and limpkins and cormorants and ospreys and turtles and cypress trees and butterflies. We soaked up the sun and felt the breeze on our faces.

We returned to our offices 59 minutes later, refreshed and more than a little stinky. But we didn’t care. We had cured spring fever, at least for an hour. Do you have any tricks for curing spring fever? CWT would love to hear about it!

Bird cams can be cool!

(Image from http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/?page_id=843)

Today I discovered the coolest web cam ever (at least to a CWT) – a live feed of a nesting osprey pair! An osprey is an impressive bird of prey that hunts for fish, thus earning itself the nickname of “fish hawk.” Ospreys can often be seen in Florida (and around the world) soaring through the sky clutching fish in their talons or perching atop manmade structures.

You MUST check out Dunedin, Florida’s awesome Osprey Cam: http://ospreynest.info/ospreycam.php where you can watch live footage of an osprey pair tending to their nest. Right now they are sitting on three eggs, which they will incubate for just over a month. Once the eggs hatch, the chicks will spend nine to ten weeks in the nest before they fledge (aka fly off on their own). This osprey pair laid their first egg in mid February, which means we are just a couple of weeks away from babies! CWT will be keeping an eye out, and will of course let you know when they arrive.

(Image from http://www.nj.gov/dep/fgw/ensp/raptor_info.htm)

Just a little more about ospreys because untrained eyes often confuse them with bald eagles. The biggest difference between them is size. Ospreys are much smaller, especially their tiny bird heads! Their coloration also differs, but this difference is more subtle since both species are brown and white — ospreys have completely white necks and bellies and sport a distinctive dark eye mask, while bald eagles do not have white necks or bellies and their head is completely white. Bald eagles also have bright yellow bills and feet, while ospreys have a dark beak and white feet.

Have you ever seen an osprey? Or a bald eagle? Or now realize what you thought you saw was something totally different?!

Chapter 18 – What We Do (Hydro-Bio Fluvial Geomorphology)

We study them to make sure they behave!

When you’ve been doing this as long as we have the way we have, you sort of forget that you are actually practicing science/art! In the beginning, we worked hard to read until our eyes bled. We wanted to know what other scientists had found that worked. We wanted to absorb the data, feel the methods, develop hypothesis…then, we went out on our own and began to attempt to regurgitate it all out into the world.

It was amazing what we found that didn’t work. It sounded so sure on paper. It was cool what did work – some of it just intuition. I think we mostly have more water and mud in our veins than blood and now we think and breathe streams. We can walk up, smell the mud, catch some bugs, have Josh look at the fish, and know which ones need us the most.

Sometimes we go through a lot!

Most people have no idea what we do. What we do is, in Jacque talk, very simple. We study streams. We see what’s wrong and we prescribe a sort of medicine for them so that they function better and make the world a better place. I like to tell people that, not so many years ago, it was normal for some company to have a guy drive a backhoe in a wiggly line and then let the water meander. That was stream restoration in the past.

We found all those wiggly ditches. Companies spend millions of dollars fixing them now because they don’t work right. That’s what we do – fix wiggly ditches and make them act like proper streams (or as near as we can) and we don’t build streams with backhoes much anymore. We like to do things a little differently.

So, here’s my attempt to explain some of the ways we do things.

We start by studying real pristine streams of all kinds. We study them to death. We live them, breathe them, smell them, taste them and generally go to sleep with them until we are them! We take what we learn and literally build streams that will look just like them. We fix sick streams to act more like the proper ones.

Things that should be there.

Don’t beat me up all you nay sayers….we don’t put back microbes and every grain of frigging soil….this is reality! We aren’t god…

We put things in the streams that should be there so the living things can be there too. We help simulate many years of flow that would have carved a new stream. We try to mimic as much of what nature gives to make a new stream! We can’t do it all, but every day we try to give more and more.

We watch the baby streams and the streams we’ve fixed. We make sure that they are behaving and not acting up. We fix them more if need be. We count things like bugs and plants and trees. We take out nasty things that could ruin the place. We love them, nurture them, care for them, are proud of them, and hope that one day – you will too.

That’s what we do. And it’s really cool – and we love it!

Lesson 18: By Popular Demand – LEECHES Ewwww!

Just when you think you have everything under control, something goes terribly awry! At least it seems that way when you have the kind of field day we had day before yesterday. We were set to perform three macroinvertebrate samplings in an unknown small system and it sounded like the perfect day for us bug nerds! NOT!!!

It looks like a nice place. I won’t go into the details about what the little stream looks like for fear of breaching the wonderful relationship we have with our client….suffice it to say that…it isn’t pristine. We discussed ahead of time the fact that we would probably find icky bugs too….it is in a transitional state of development. Our job is to come in, evaluate in great detail the state of the system, make recommendations, oversee enhancement, monitor recovery, and later – enjoy that fact that we helped make it better.

We don’t expect drinkable water, park-like conditions, or fluffy conditions. We expect a certain amount of ickiness! We began our collection. Once I began fishing around,WITH MY BARE HANDS. So, without further adieu….

This Photo is for Shock Value Only

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU SEE LEECHES

1. Make squealy noises – doesn’t affect the leeches behavior but it certainly gets out some of the squigglies!
2. Perform a mental check on tucked in-ness…did you tuck in pant legs, shirt, etc…?
3. Revisit why you do this for a living.
4. Pretend that you will know when a leech latches onto you  and starts sucking your blood (which will not happen – they first spit out an anesthesia so you will not know until TOO LATE)
5. Pretend that it won’t happen to you….ha ha ha ha ha….ha ha ha
6. Immediately think of all the horror movies you have seen about leeches!
7. Notice how small and hard to see they really are! Have you just never noticed them before?
8. Make squealy noises again – hey man – they are creepy.
9. Remember that you wore short socks and short boots…..ha ha ha – you should have seen the look on Jessica’s face!!! PRICELESS
10. Make sure you do a thorough leech check….those suckers (ha ha) can be so small!
    

    Lurking Leeches

Finally, remember to check twice,  also, check this out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leech for really gross and entertaining information about leeches. Like – they have two suckers, some won’t feed on blood, if taken off incorrectly, they can vomit their grossness into your bloodstream…and more fun facts!

In the beginning, there was John…..(and he wanted to play God).

In the beginning, there was John…..(and he wanted to play God)..

 

Here’s one of the first and best! Enjoy!