May 22nd - May 26th
May 23rd,
After having a nice long weekend I am ready to go into another adventure filled week. I never really talked about my commute to work, to be honest it is really not on topic for this blog but hey it is still apart of the experience. 40 minutes.... yup 40 minutes to get from my home to my work. normally it takes 25 minutes but today I decided to take a different route to work (I really didn't mean to take an alternate route). I got back onto the main road that is right before the road my work is located on and I was lucky I took the way I did because I would of been late to work (there was a car accident that was just finishing being cleaned up).
okay I guess I will get back on track... So the first thing we did today was collect some bugs. we had three sites to monitor because the people who would be restoring Avon creek needed the before and after data. we did two before data checks and then we collected some after data (one of the sites were already restored). We found a lot to be honest... found some mayflies larva, a lot of aquatic worms, a baby cray fish ( I now love cray fish...) and some leaches.
above is a photo i took of some of the bugs we collected and placed into a bottle of rubbing alcohol (I think that is what is used) for records.
One neat thing I learned today was how to use a "flow meter" what it is exactly is a meter that is placed in the stream, or river and you can get an accurate reading of how fast the body of water is moving. one of my supervisors said that they would break up the body of water into sections and adding up their numbers to get cubic feet per second for the flow.
above is a photo of the flow meter we used (not my photo just taken off of google images).
After lunch we headed over to a Stream leader site and helped a group of students catch bugs and I.D. them. to be honest it was not a bad day at all. The kids did find a baby cray fish which I think is really adorable... but thats just me.
After Stream leaders one of my supervisors had me and one of my fellow interns work on going through all of the responses they got from the Water Festivals. Nothing too big, just marking down who said what and summarizing their comments made. There is a lot of work still to do, I still need to make a spreadsheet of the data I and my fellow intern collected from the response papers and all of this data still needs to be written up in a nice couple paragraphs to be shown to the committee members.
After having a nice long weekend I am ready to go into another adventure filled week. I never really talked about my commute to work, to be honest it is really not on topic for this blog but hey it is still apart of the experience. 40 minutes.... yup 40 minutes to get from my home to my work. normally it takes 25 minutes but today I decided to take a different route to work (I really didn't mean to take an alternate route). I got back onto the main road that is right before the road my work is located on and I was lucky I took the way I did because I would of been late to work (there was a car accident that was just finishing being cleaned up).
okay I guess I will get back on track... So the first thing we did today was collect some bugs. we had three sites to monitor because the people who would be restoring Avon creek needed the before and after data. we did two before data checks and then we collected some after data (one of the sites were already restored). We found a lot to be honest... found some mayflies larva, a lot of aquatic worms, a baby cray fish ( I now love cray fish...) and some leaches.
One neat thing I learned today was how to use a "flow meter" what it is exactly is a meter that is placed in the stream, or river and you can get an accurate reading of how fast the body of water is moving. one of my supervisors said that they would break up the body of water into sections and adding up their numbers to get cubic feet per second for the flow.
After lunch we headed over to a Stream leader site and helped a group of students catch bugs and I.D. them. to be honest it was not a bad day at all. The kids did find a baby cray fish which I think is really adorable... but thats just me.
 |
| photo taken by me. baby cray fish |
May 24th,
So today started off like any other day at the office, but we did a weekly clean. this time we were in Sterling Heights. I do have to give one piece of advice to anyone about to do a internship where you need to wear waders... Wear waders that are comfortable, I made the mistake and I take 100% fault for it, but I wore the skin tight waders that when they get wet they get heavy to move around in and it hurts to walk a mile in the sun picking up trash and not able to change back into regular shoes. I got back the the parking lot and I laid down and attempted to take off my waders and I needed help getting them off because of how tight they were. Besides all of that we did pretty good. there wasn't much trash on one side, there were a few items that we were un able to get to because how dense the trees were and how steep the banks of the stream were.
After Lunch we went back to the same Stream leaders site (we were helping with the same school today). I would have to say today was a lot easier, I decided to stay more on helping the students I.D. I never saw students this interested in learning than this group of students. They asked me questions about the bugs and they caught on very fast. The kids caught a lot of cray fish, one student caught a hellgrammite.. now because I know there will be a few people wondering what this is I will post a photo... if you come into contact with one of these bad boys dont touch it... they do pack a big bite...
 |
| Hellgrammite |
 |
| Adult Male and female Hellgrammite |
May 25th,
There are four words that would describe today... Cold, Wet, Long, and Amazing. we did a very long session of Stream Leaders. I decided instead of doing the bug I.D. part of the program I would try the physical part. This part of Stream Leaders, I consider a lot more fun then the others. My job was to help my fellow intern answer questions about the data sheets the students had, and to make sure the students stayed safe in the river. Since we gotten all this rain in Oakland County the past couple days the flow of the river was very fast and the level of the river was higher than normal. I almost lost my footing twice today luckily I didn't fall in.
So the physical part of the program involves calculating the flow of the river, if you see any trash, what the weather is like, any direct pollution, if there is any wildlife present, etc. Our last group of students were amazing, the three volunteers that were in the water with me listened to everything I said about saftey in a fast moving river, when I asked them questions they answered them and they knew what I was asking. These kids are the reason why I love helping with the Stream Leaders program.
After Stream Leaders we all went back to the office to warm up and I worked some more on the survey summary from last tuesday and I also helped out with sorting/ taking invatory of the brand new tshirts we got in for our River Day weekend event.
Overal this week: pretty simple and straight forward. I am starting to get a hang of things, I am learning new things, and I am pushing my self outside my comfort zone.
There are four words that would describe today... Cold, Wet, Long, and Amazing. we did a very long session of Stream Leaders. I decided instead of doing the bug I.D. part of the program I would try the physical part. This part of Stream Leaders, I consider a lot more fun then the others. My job was to help my fellow intern answer questions about the data sheets the students had, and to make sure the students stayed safe in the river. Since we gotten all this rain in Oakland County the past couple days the flow of the river was very fast and the level of the river was higher than normal. I almost lost my footing twice today luckily I didn't fall in.
So the physical part of the program involves calculating the flow of the river, if you see any trash, what the weather is like, any direct pollution, if there is any wildlife present, etc. Our last group of students were amazing, the three volunteers that were in the water with me listened to everything I said about saftey in a fast moving river, when I asked them questions they answered them and they knew what I was asking. These kids are the reason why I love helping with the Stream Leaders program.
After Stream Leaders we all went back to the office to warm up and I worked some more on the survey summary from last tuesday and I also helped out with sorting/ taking invatory of the brand new tshirts we got in for our River Day weekend event.
Overal this week: pretty simple and straight forward. I am starting to get a hang of things, I am learning new things, and I am pushing my self outside my comfort zone.
Comments
Post a Comment