Point Whitehorn Wetlands Tour

What a fantastic day. There were 450 visitors to the Point Whitehorn park and Beach Watchers were busy talking to people the whole time. Visitors were interested and engaged in what we wanted to share. Hats off to Sue Brown, Wendy Harris, and Dawn LaTurco for pulling this off! Special thanks to Heather Mackay for pulling great activities and ideas together and providing such incredible information to our team.

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Beach Watcher Teams are Pulling Together

Our Beach Monitoring team is off and running. This group has great support this year and I’m very pleased! They have already monitored the site on Point Roberts and have the whole summer planned out. If you would like to get involved, however, it’s never too late. Just let me know and I’ll put you in touch with the group.

Other project teams are coming together now a well after a brief pause. We are simultaneously working on some internal assessments at WSU Extension and that had me sidetracked for a bit. So my apologies go to our new Beach Watchers.

The Youth Education Team, Chuckanut Bay Education, and Rain Gardens Teams will be coming together very soon. I expect we’ll pull our Festivals and Events team and our Continuing Education Teams together just a little later in the summer.

If you would like to know more about the projects these teams are working on and/or get involved in the planning stages just let me know and I’ll get you plugged in.

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Stormwater Bar

Thank you Dennis Jones for bringing this gem to our attention!

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Watershed-Friendly Gardening Video

The City's BTV channel (cable channel 10) will be airing the watershed-friendly gardening video again through June 15. Here is the schedule:

Fri at 8 a.m.
Wed and Thu at 11 a.m.
Sun at noon
Sat at 2 p.m.
Mon and Sat at 11 p.m.

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Garden-to-Garden

Speaking of gardening, have you ever wondered how “greener” gardening pencils out compared to traditional landscaping? Below is a link to a neat project in Santa Monica California that set out to measure the installation costs, and ongoing maintenance of a native garden compared to a traditional garden. The installation cost for the native garden was higher but the garden used only 1/5 the water, generated only 1/3 the green waste, and required just 1/4 of the labor of the traditional garden. Neat!

http://www.sustainablesites.org/cases/show.php?id=1

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Another small step towards sustainability – reusable snack bags

Thanks Jennifer, for sending this link to me.
http://snacktaxi.com/

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What do You Get When You Save Water? Energy!

“Beginning in the early 1990s, the Santa Clara Valley Water District got serious about water conservation. . . .The results have been impressive: a savings of 370,000 acre-feet of water in 13 years. (A typical household uses one acre-foot of water per year).

But perhaps even more significant have been the energy savings and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions: 1.42 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and 335 million kg of carbon dioxide, which is equal to taking 72,000 cars off the road for a year.”
Read more about it here:

http://climateprogress.org/2009/04/04/saving-energy-water-santa-clara/

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And What Could we Get if we Saved Enough Energy? A Healthy Ocean Ecosystem.

Here’s a nice simple explanations of ocean acidification:
http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/video/flash/acidification-1.html

And Here’s More on our Impacts on the Ocean

“Climate change, fishing and commercial shipping top the list of threats to the ocean off the West Coast of the United States.”
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=114704&org=OLPA&from=news

I was thinking that a display showing how sea shells dissolve in an acidic environment would be powerful. Would anyone be interested in pulling that together?

Spring Whirlwind

Wow! It’s been an amazing couple of months. We’ve got a great new class ready to lend a hand in Whatcom County and we’ve had terrific team work from experienced Beach Watchers.

Low Tide Walks and Beach Clean-Ups

Thanks to Lisa Balton, Steve Bailey and Bob Ryerson for helping the Gooseberry Point neighborhood association with their Earth Day celebration and beach clean-up. This great team shared information about what lives on their beach and juiced up the neighbors to enhance their stewardship for the beach.

And thanks to Lisa Balton again, Margo and John Ferdon and Jennifer May for lending a hand with the Northwest Indian Colleges Service Learning beach appreciation and clean-up day on the Lummi Reservation. I'm so glad we had a chance to work with our tribal neighbors through the Northwest Indian College!! Hurray!

If anyone has pictures of either of these events I would really love to have them.

Rain Gardens

We did a lot of Rain Garden Promotion this spring

Great Big Thank Yous go to

Beach Watchers Bob Ryerson and Sue Brown, who were joined by Master Gardeners Katharine Harrison and Dac Jamison and Master Composter/Recycler Kay McMurran who did a super job at the Conservation District’s Annual Native Plant Sale in March.

Bob Hendricks, Rose Lavoie, Jeanne Bogert, and Bob Ryerson at the Master Gardener Plant Sale in May.



And Jean Waight, our Beach Watchers intern Sarah Burnett, Crystal Wojcik, and you guessed it, BOB RYERSON, at the Backyard Habitat Fair.



Jean Waight has a lovely blog called Green Tea and Sympathy with a humorous take on "Going Green." Check it out! http://greenteasympathy.blogspot.com/

And Bob Ryerson has been very active in the Marine Mammal Stranding Network and has in fact become their volunteer coordinator. Way to go Bob!

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Forest Conservation Tour

We also had a fantastic team teaching students about the healthy forest, healthy stream, healthy fish connection at this year’s Forest Conservation Tour. Big Thank Yous go to Shelley Halle, Jennifer May, Jim Krieji, Steve Bailey, and Rose Lavoie.



And finally a round of applause goes to Jane Lewinski for entering all of the Beach Monitoring Data from 2008 into the online database!! Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Training 09 Slideshow photos by Margo Ferdon

A creative approach to plastic awareness from San Francisco

March & April 2009 - The Training Issue

The class of 2009 is in training and we’re having a great time. This year’s class consists of 13 fantastic students. We have enjoyed a few new activities and field trips this year.

Highlights for me included touring Bellingham Cold Storage, learning about effective educational techniques from our 4-H Educator, Michael Wallace, and doing a beach seine at the Post Point Lagoon with Glen Alexander from the Padilla Bay Estuary Research Reserve – we found fish, a nudibranch, and numerous other neat creatures in the net!

Once again, I've been a bit overwhelmed by training preparations and have neglected the newsletter. But the world has not slowed down one bit and I suspect you haven't either! There's a ton of things I have to share with you as well as upcoming events and opportunities on the events page.

Enjoy!

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Marine Invasive Species Monitoring (MISM)

On Monday April 13 from 6 to 9 pm, at 322 N. Commercial Street on the second floor we’ll have Ann Eissenger wildlife biologist with Nahkeeta Northwest explain marine invasive species and train us in what to look for and introduce the MISM program.

“The Puget Sound Marine Invasive Species Volunteer Monitoring Program (MISM) is a new citizen-science shoreline monitoring effort – targeting 32 non-native marine and estuarine organisms. The purpose of the program is to identify the distribution of selected non-native species and provide early detection for high-risk invaders.”

You are all welcome to join us for this Beach Watchers training session or any others you wish to brush up on. I sent out a course agenda earlier this month to everyone. Please just let me know when you would like to come.

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Ferry Landing Fish and Wildlife Habitat Enhancement Project

This project to restore and enhance marine habitats, reduce water pollution and secure eroding shoreline bank, spearheaded by Watershed Master / Beach Watcher Wanda Cucinotta on Lummi Island is ready to roll!

Want to help do some fun work and protect our marine waters and public tidelands? Come join our Saturday morning volunteer work parties this spring.

Volunteer crews will:
• Remove noxious weeds, install approx. 2,000 native plants along the bluff areas around the ferry terminal and shoreline to the north.
• Install 1 mutt mitt station with signage at a location approved by Whatcom County.
• Remove rough creosote logs from the northern shoreline.
• Install pretreatment bays and an oil/grease separator to the rain gardens in the new ferry terminal parking lot.
• Install bioinfiltration measures along the wetland path north of the new parking lot.
• Install and maintain a Bioclean catch basin insert in the catch basin immediately north of the southern entrance to the new ferry terminal parking lot.

Call Wanda at 220-3077 if you would like to volunteer, or have any questions and/or concerns. Check out their Blog: http://liwec.wordpress.com.

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When 1+1 = 100

Garden-variety pesticides add up to more than the sum of their parts when it comes to attacking the nervous systems of salmon, a newly published study finds.

http://www.wsutoday.wsu.edu/Pages/Publications.asp?Action=Detail&PublicationID=13986&PageID=

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Cutting water use Could be Best Way to Save Electricity

Policies that lead to reduced water consumption could help to address climate change, writes Ben Block, a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/13/network-water-efficiency-climate-change

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Check out The Jellyfish

Inventor Chad Maglaque doesn’t just want to bring change to the world of renewable energy -- he wants to mass produce it. The Seattleite has recently invented an affordable, accessible version of the micro-wind turbine, which he calls the Jellyfish

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009415.html

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Global Warming Groove

This is serious fun!

http://www.climatecrisisjam.org/

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Ecosystem Services

Around the world and in our backyard people are talking about ecosystem services – a way to recognize, value, and protect the ecosystems that provided life-support services to humanity. This issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences delves into ecosystems services and challenges to implementation.

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/28.toc#content-block

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An Ocean Fairy Tale

A beautiful story with a powerful message - a different way to educate!

http://chge.med.harvard.edu/programs/healthyoceans/once_upon_a_tide/home.html

Wetlands Video

This is a great, short video from the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. Enjoy!

The Seri & the Sea