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April Education Activities
April is here - it seems to me that this is the month when Blue Thumb staff receives the MOST requests to do education events with children. This April is no different. Pay attention to the Blue Thumb Facebook page and you will see some prime examples of our activities with students.
What is your April looking like? Will you go out and complete monthly monitoring? Will you borrow an EnviroScape and do some demonstrations at your nearby park, or even at the end of your driveway? As weekend festivals begin, is there a place for you to offer information about Blue Thumb and stream and river protection?
Think beyond April too. May and June have possibilities as well. Our earth needs our love and care. Many of us are hungry to be among other folks again. Please contemplate how Blue Thumb can equip you to do good education work in your community and watershed.
Read any good books lately?
If you have, then send in a book recommendation for "From the Water's Edge." We are looking for books with some type of environmental theme to recommend to Blue Thumb volunteers. You can even send in a short review. You need to send this information to Cheryl Cheadle by Wednesday, April 20 for printing in the next eNewsletter. I hope to get at least three recommendations to share!
Cheryl Cheadle Volunteer Coordinator
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Happy Spring!
You have recently completed a winter macroinvertebrate collection, and soon your field person will reach out to schedule a time to "pick" your bug sample. What is "bug picking" and why do we do it? Bug picking is the process of preparing a subsample from your collection for the taxonomist to identify.
The first thing you do during a bug picking is wash your sample, removing big pieces of debris as you go. After the sample is washed clean of silt, and large leaves and twigs and pebbles have been removed, your field person will make a visual assessment of the number of macroinvertebrates (excluding black fly larvae). If there are a lot of bugs, your field person will split the sample into two piles in the sieve and ask you to flip a coin. Based on the coin toss, one of the halves will be returned to the sample jar and the other will be spread out and examined again. If there are still a lot of bugs, this process may be repeated a second or even third time. Your field person will record the proportion of the sample that is picked (1/2, 1/4, etc.). When your field person is satisfied with the density of organisms, she will move the remaining portion of the sample to a white tray and add a centimeter or two of water.
You will then carry the tray to the table where you will pick. Your field person will ask you to evenly distribute the bugs and debris, and then will lower a metal grid into the tray, dividing the tray evenly into 28 numbered cells. Unless the whole sample is picked, there must be an average of at least three and no more than 25 animals per square. The goal is 10-20 organisms per cell. When you and your field person have achieved the desired density of bugs, picking begins.
Your field person will give you a random number chart. You will start with the first number of the chart that has not been crossed off by another volunteer. You will remove each organism from the cell labelled with that number from your chart, tallying the number of organisms in that cell as you remove bugs. When you think you have removed all the organisms from the cell, your field person will do a quick Q/A check, and then will begin picking the next cell identified on your random number chart. You will continue picking until you have 100-130 bugs. Once you begin picking a cell, you will remove all of the bugs in that cell. As we pick, we are assembling a completely clean, randomly selected subsample of macroinvertebrates. The sample begins with a quart-sized jar and ends with a tiny vial of bugs preserved in ethanol. We use subsampling to reduce the amount of time it takes for you to pick a sample, and to reduce the cost of having the bugs identified by a taxonomist. We randomize the process so we can make statistical generalizations from the subsample to the original sample.
I wish you many bugs, little algae, high macroinvertebrate diversity, and happy picking.
Rebecca Bond Blue Thumb Director
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Talk Trash with Kim
Howdy Howdy from your QA Officer,
I was going to write about how to properly enter your Orthophosphate results (wheel reading, NOT calculated answer) and Chloride results (number of drops, NOT calculated answer), but we'll cover that at your next QA session with bug picking. Instead, I'm going to get on on my soap box and talk about trash. This past month, the week of March 17th and 20th, I took some walks and was beyond depressed to see SOOO much trash! Are humans just not thinking, or are they doing this deliberately?
On March 17th, I walked a busy road near my house and was collecting aluminum cans to recycle and just could not get over ALL the trash in the roadsides. March 20th, I walked a paved path in Moore and could not get over ALL the trash. It's just heartbreaking.
April is "Earth Day" month; REALLY, everyday is Earth Day. That is why I am bringing this up now. I would like to challenge all you readers, and myself, to pick up at least 5 pieces of trash everyday for at least a month. This should, unfortunately, be an easy task/challenge for you as there is so much trash. Pass this challenge on to your family and friends too, pass it on to strangers as well. Educate everyone that littering is bad and why it is bad. Trash is a pollutant that we can see; just think about all the other pollution that we can't see.
I don't mean to be depressing, just bringing this reality to your view. I would imagine that you readers don't littler, but just because we are not part of the cause doesn't mean we should turn a blind eye to it. Pick up trash on your own, with your family, or organize a trash pick-up day with your local community, etc. There is no immediate fix, this a marathon, not a sprint, but the more people we can educate and have help out with the problem, the better for us all.
Happy Spring and Happy Earth Day Month to you all!
Kim Shaw Blue Thumb QA Officer
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 Make the world a better place!
Many thanks to the Conservation Districts that came aboard the Yard by Yard Community Resiliency Project for 2022! Friends of Blue Thumb is excited to again be a sponsor of Yard by Yard, which is also sponsored by the Oklahoma Association of Conservation Districts and OCC's Soil Health Team and Blue Thumb Program.
New districts include:
- Okfuskee County Conservation District
- Woods County Conservation District
- Marshall County Conservation District
- Mayes County Conservation District
- Ottawa County Conservation District
- Rogers County Conservation District
- LeFlore County Conservation District

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 Blue Thumb Volunteer Trainings
Oklahoma City: June 11 (Stream Ecology Education) June 12 (Stream Monitoring)*
*Stream Ecology Education Training is a prerequisite to take this training*
Sign up here!
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 My name is Cheyanne Olson and I am a student from the Environmental Science Department at Oklahoma State University. I am writing to invite you to participate in my research study identifying participant outcomes for volunteers of Blue Thumb programs. If you decide to participate in this study, you will be asked to complete an individual survey to assess your experience with Blue Thumb. If you agree to the study, you may click this link to the Qualtrics survey to begin. On the survey, if you include your name (which is voluntary), you will be entered in a drawing for random prizes, with more details to follow.
Remember, this is completely voluntary. You can choose to be in the study or not. If you have any questions about the study, please email me.
Cheyanne Olson Instructor of Biology Rogers State University
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Congratulations to the Yard by Yard Community Resiliency Project for being featured in Oklahoma Today magazine! We encourage you to take a look at this great article!
- Want more support for water quality monitoring? You can check out a whole network of USA water quality monitoring programs and resources!
- Did you know that there is a whole association for Citizen Scientists? You can become a member and learn more about it here!
- Don't forget about the "Stream Selfie" project from the Izaak Walton League, the #trashtag movement, and tick testing!
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