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Hey Volunteers!
For the volunteers living in the OKC metro area and Normanr, you have through August 18 to visit the Norman East Public Library for the Water/Ways exhibit. Blue Thumb is working with the Library and the Oklahoma Humanities Council to offer local information and the opportunity to get involved. Water/Ways inspires discussion about many water issues. The following BT volunteers have helped at events held in coordination with Water/Ways: Karen Chapman; Amanda Nairn, Lisa Knauf Owen, Keith Owen, Jeri Fleming, and Beth Landon. Water/Ways will next be in Ada, beginning on the evening of August 27, at the Ada Public Library. We will keep you posted as the exhibit travels through Oklahoma.
Blue Thumb volunteers who have been around a while have probably heard of the Crow Creek Community. This is a watershed group formed to help Crow Creek in Tulsa County to become a healthier stream.
Crow Creek has been consistently monitored by Blue Thumb volunteers since 1996. Benthic macroinvertebrates and fish collections have painted a picture of a stream in need of help. A series of partners are at work on Crow Creek including City of Tulsa, Metropolitan Environmental trust and the Tulsa County Conservation District to name a few.
The current push in the Crow Creek watershed is to involve the public who live there. Many of the efforts taking place in the Crow Creek Watershed will work in other watersheds to help other streams. Let us know if you have questions.
Cheryl Cheadle
Volunteer Coordinator
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Greetings from Your Director!
We are finally fishing! During the past three weeks I have had the pleasure of meeting a few of our outstanding volunteers during fish collections. I love the feeling of expectation when we pull the seine up to see what’s inside. I look forward to meeting more volunteers and exploring more Blue Thumb creeks during the coming weeks.
During our June and July staff meetings we started planning the Volunteer Appreciation Luncheon that will be held Saturday, December 7th, at the Creek County Fairgrounds. We will have a great speaker, a fun game for biology nerds, and prizes that appeal to outdoorsy, creek-loving types. We enjoy and appreciate our volunteers, and we are looking forward to an opportunity to express our gratitude, celebrate your efforts and just hang out together.
Happy fishing!
Rebecca Bond
Blue Thumb Director
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To our Monthly Monitors:
Howdy Howdy from your Blue Thumb QA Officer Kim Shaw!
It has been a long while since I have written up an informational article about monitoring. With this new monthly eNewsletter, perhaps you’ll hear from me more. I am the person that you submit your data to, that looks over your data, asks you any questions I might have about your data, edits your data, the person to give you suggestions about striving to get good repeatability; perhaps you need new DI water or maybe you should use less creek water sample for your next bacteria screening, etc. We cover a LOT in the 2-day training and not all the information we throw at you can be retained; plus some of you were trained many years ago. All of this and more is why we have mandatory quarterly QA sessions that are mandatory. These quarterly QA sessions make your data more credible to the outside world, keeps you performing the correct procedures, keeps you in stock with reagents/equipment, keeps you up to date with any new procedures and/or announcements. Sometimes we catch bad reagents. It allows you to meet fellow Blue Thumbers. It keeps the program in the good graces with EPA.
I mentioned “good repeatability” is something I look for when I review your datasets. What is that? Answer = Where you get very comparable answers on your two creek tests. This is another part of QA built in to the program and makes your data more credible. You can do a test once, but was that result correct? If you do the test a second time and get a very close result to the first test, than the results are probably correct. That is why you do every test in duplicate for the BT Program. So what is a “comparable” answer? Well, it depends on the test. For oxygen and chloride, your tests should be no more than 2 drops difference. For ammonia both tests should be within 0.1mg/L of each other. For nitrate, within 2ppm (mg/L). For nitrite, within 0.3ppm (mg/L). For pH, within 0.2. For orthophosphate, within 2-3 marks on the wheel.
*Important to know*: if your results are outside of these ranges for good repeatability, then do a third test and take the best two out of three. Please don’t get in to a bad habit of just doing the tests and writing down the results If you think about what you are doing and why, you are likely to catch any QA problems.
Your Blue Thumb staff gets QA tested as well. So even though the standard schooling (K-12, college, etc) has been done, there is still more that can be learned.
Please turn in your data as soon as you can so it doesn’t get lost or forgotten about. I thank each and every one of you who volunteers for the BT Program, we can’t do it without you – you are truly valuable.
Till next time.
Kim Shaw
Blue Thumb QA Officer
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 Make the world a better place!
The 2019 Blue Thumb Festival, hosted by the Friends of Blue Thumb, will be held on Saturday, September 28th from 10:00 am to 4:00m (Indoor and Outdoor Vendors) at the Hilton Garden Inn in Lawton, Oklahoma. All proceeds from the Festival will be donated to the Friends of Blue Thumb which is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.
Indoor vendors will be located in the Bison Room and outdoor vendors will be located in the front parking area, southwest corner. Attendees will experience a unique selection of merchandise, products, and art from several Oklahoma vendors, as well as some out-of-state vendors. Set up will begin at 8:00 am Saturday for both indoor and outdoor vendors. Set-up needs to be completed before 10:00 am.
Interested in being a 2019 vendor? Contact swbluethumb@gmail.com for additional information and vendor application forms. The vendor booth /food truck fee is $40.00. No refunds.
 
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 Education Mini-Workshops
The first Blue Thumb Education Mini-Workshop that you have been hearing about took place in Norman on June 27, 2019. These workshops are designed for current Blue Thumb volunteers. The purpose of the workshops is to prepare volunteers to help Blue Thumb staff with educational events. These are not mandatory, but are fun, enlightening, short, and to the point so that volunteers can gain better footing for striking out to educate the masses about stream protection.
Keep an eye out for future workshops coming to your area, and try to attend if this is something that interests you!
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 Blue Thumb Volunteer Trainings
Tulsa:
August 10 (Stream Ecology Education)
August 11 (Stream Monitoring)*
(This training is completely full)
Alva:
October 5 (Stream Ecology Education)
October 6 (Stream Monitoring)*
Locust Grove:
November 2 (Stream Ecology Education)
November 6 (Stream Monitoring)*
*Stream Ecology Education Training is a prerequisite to take this training*
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 Fish Collections finally began in July, and Blue Thumb staff and several volunteers were able to finish a good portion of sites. These collections will continue for the next couple of months. If you would like to help on a fish collection, please let us know! Fish collections typically take all day, beginning with a stream habitat assessment and ending with seineing 400 meters of stream (roughly a quarter of a mile).
The remaining active sites that need to be fished in the Central Great Plains Ecoregion are:
- Black Bear Creek: Railroad Yard
- Boomer Creek: 3rd Ave
- Boomer Creek: S. Perkins (8/5/2019)
- Cow Creek: Hwy 51 (8/8/2019)
- Duck Creek: Myers Park
- East Cache Creek: Big Green (7/14/2019)
- Each Cache Creek: Rodgers Lane (7/15/2019)
- Feather Creek (8/7/2019)
- Sanborn-Hazen Lake Creek: Strickland Park (8/16/2019)
- Stillwater Creek: Babcock Park
If you decide to accompany us on a fish collection, but do not monitor a stream, please email us to figure out what time you need to be there. You will also need a pair of close-toed shoes that can get wet/muddy, clothes that can get wet and dirty, sunscreen, a hat, plenty of water, and something for lunch. We can provide you with more information when you speak with us.
Dates may be scheduled or cancelled with little notice depending on rain events.
It is the middle of bug collection season! If you are not a stream monitor, but would like to help out with bug collections, we would be happy to have you tag along for any number of collections! Please look at the Blue Thumb Staff Area Map to see whether Kim, Candice, or Becky works in your area before getting into contact with them!
Bug Collections are accompanied by a quarterly Quality Assurance (QA) Session and are largely weather dependent. Dates may be scheduled or cancelled with little notice.
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 A Stream is a Reflection of its Watershed
Our woods, prairies, streets, schoolyards, and farm fields are all a part of the puzzle that creates a watershed. When you lower your sample bottle into your stream, you remove a portion of water that is influenced by all the activities within the watershed. With this thought in mind, Blue Thumb and the Oklahoma Conservation Commission’s Soil Health team are working together to build workshop opportunities that encourage a very ecological approach to understanding how our “places” work.
Many people think of Soil Health as being critical to the agricultural community, and this is true. Healthy soils in cities, neighborhoods, parks, and YOUR YARD contribute to clean streams, rivers, and lakes too. Stay tuned to “From the Water’s Edge,” the Blue Thumb website, and the Blue Thumb Facebook page as we share with you cutting edge information about how you can take your investment in citizenship to a new level as Blue Thumb and Soil Health offer you exciting learning experiences.
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- Many Blue Thumb volunteers monitor within a city or town or provide pollution prevention information to citizens. Have you heard the phrase Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System? This refers to the stormdrains, ditches, and other conveyances that eventually leads to an actual stream, river, pond, or lake. Cities of a certain size are legally required to manage and reduce pollutants in stormwater. This article, written with stormwater managers in mind, is filled with good information for those of us who have a passion for helping streams and rivers.
- Volunteer Citizen Scientists are growing all over the world. All Blue Thumb Monitors use a secchi disk to look at turbidity in their creek, but did you know that that information can be used elseware too? The Secchi Dip-In is working to track changes in water quality all over the world, and you can help! Check out more information here to learn how to get involved.
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