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From the Volunteer Coordinator
For the time of COVID, when it was difficult for me to gather with volunteers, much of my time was devoted to helping the Yard by Yard Community Resiliency Project get started. Blue Thumb is one of several important sponsors of Yard by Yard. The project is spreading bit by bit over Oklahoma, and is currently in some cities within these counties:
If you have questions about whether or not you are in a Yard by Yard area, email me please.
What is the value of being a part of Yard by Yard? Yard by Yard recognizes “nature friendly” yards and one of the benefits is the gift of a bright “Yard by Yard” sign. This sign recognizes your good work, but more importantly, it gets the attention of passersby who can be encouraged to reconsider how they treat their own lawns, and changes that they might want to make.
If you love your local stream, participation in Yard by Yard is another way for you to take action. Check out the Facebook page.
Blue Thumb Training Coming Up!
There are two Blue Thumb training sessions coming up – Oklahoma City (June 11 and 12) and Tulsa (September 10 and 11). Already trained and active volunteers sometimes choose to attend Blue Thumb training a second time. Why would anyone want to do this? Well….
- You can receive the awesome Project WET 2.0 guide – those who have trained before 2016 did not get the Project WET guide, even though Project WET activities were included in the training.
- You can get a refresher on chemical monitoring. You can use the Blue Thumb videos anytime you need an update, but sometimes in-person has some advantages.
- You can see what is new in some of the presentations and activities. Blue Thumb provides surveys to those who attend training, and we take the comments seriously. The provided information is used to make changes, and you might find the trainings offered now to be upgraded from the training you received. Hopefully you feel that the training you received was very good or excellent.
- You can encourage a friend to attend and come along with them to make it a fun get-together!
You can spend time with the Blue Thumb staff and the new volunteers coming aboard. Also, you can choose to attend day one or day two – you do not have to do both. If you want to attend a training coming up, go to our Blue Thumb website and get in touch with the Blue Thumb staff member for your area about attending for a discounted price.
Cheryl Cheadle
Volunteer Coordinator
To our Monthly Monitors:
Howdy Howdy from your QA Officer,
Here fishy fishy. Yes, it is that time of year for fish collecting to start. We will be in the Ecoregions of Arkansas Valley and Ozark Highlands this summer (far eastern Oklahoma). Here is a list of general locations of creeks that we will be in.
- Poteau
- Leflore County
- Frazier Creek (June 17)
- Fourche Maline Creek
- Antlers
- Delaware County
- Beaty Creek (June 29-30)
- Brush Creek (June 29-30)
- Adair County
- Cherokee County
- Spring Creek: Evan’s
- Spring Creek: Three Spring Farm
- Spring Creek: Rocky Ford
- Baron Fork
I have a few scheduled so far. The rest will be scheduled at some point. If you’d like to take part in a fish collection please contact me and I’ll give you the specifics for that day/site.
In general, this is how our fish collections go:
- Meet on site around 8:30 AM and perform a bug collection and onsite QA.
- Assess the physical habitat for 400 meters (~1/4 mile) either upstream direction or downstream; this takes about 2 hours.
- Quick break at the vehicles for snack/lunch/water.
- Then go out and seine for fish to collect within that entire 400 meters; this takes anywhere from 2-5 hours.
These are long hard days of work but we educate about physical habitat of a creek, creek bugs and fish while doing it. Each creek site is a new adventure, we never know what we will find. We are going to be in some very pretty areas and there are tons of fish species where we are going. So if you’d like to tag along and help/learn, give me a whistle and I’ll keep you involved in the specifics for the date/location you sign up for.
Kim Shaw
Blue Thumb QA Officer
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 Make the world a better place!
Would you like to serve on the Friends of Blue Thumb Board?
Friends of Blue Thumb has eight people serving on the board of directors, and we need nine to have a full complement. Please think about joining us. Contact Dennis Wilson, chairman of the FBT board, to learn more.
 
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 Blue Thumb Volunteer Trainings
OKC:
June 11 (Stream Ecology Education)
June 12 (Stream Monitoring)*
Sign up here!
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  A Bit About Earthworms…
When Blue Thumb and the awesome OCC Soil Health Team work together to educate citizens about protecting our earth, an important tool we turn to is the simple shovel. In a prairie area or even a well-managed agricultural field or grazing land, a hearty shovelful of soil will produce a number of creatures visible to the naked eye, and millions of single-cell organisms we do not see.
Oklahoma is fortunate to have native earthworms, which tend to be small. We are also home to several varieties of introduced earthworms – often these are the big, wiggly kind we often equate with rich healthy soil.
These big reddish fellows do help the soil – their castings enrich the earth, their burrows allow for moisture to infiltrate, and their movement through the soil creates greater aeration of the uppermost soil layers. Yet these large earthworms are fairly recent to the ecology scene in North America.
Scientists who study such explain that glaciation from the Pleistocene era wiped out most of North America’s earthworms, and that means that many of today’s earthworms are recent arrivals – they came over from Europe in plants brought to this country, but primarily in “ballast.” Ships coming to North America for the purpose of taking items back to Europe would often use soil as ballast – a weight in the ship’s hull to make sailing the high seas safer and more efficient. That soil would be dumped once the ship docked.
Oklahoma, less impacted by glaciation than our northern states and Canada, has both the introduced earthworms and the native earthworms. Studies on forests in the north of our country are finding that introduced earthworms are having negative impacts on ecosystems. Oklahoma State University has students and faculty that are actively conducting research on the impact of introduced earthworms on Oklahoma ecosystems. So if you purchase worms when you go fishing, dispose of leftover worms properly – don’t release big worms creek-side, because chances are the worms you purchased are actually squirmers from Europe. Learn more here.
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- Recently, the Great Barrier Reef had another massive bleach. This is devastating news, especially since the planet has lost half of its coral reefs since 1950. This article doesn't talk about the most recent bleaching event, but it's interesting nonetheless.
- Have an Insta? Well, you could discover a new species of snake! Check out this article to see just how this very thing happened!
- 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! by Elizabeth Kolber
 Book Recommendations AND Reviews!
Lots of Blue Thumb volunteers AND staff members had great suggestions for books. Here are some good reads for you, some with comments, some simply the recommendation. Since obviously a good number of people like making book recommendations let’s do this again! Send CHERYL your ideas for good books, especially those with an environmental theme, and we will get them in the July “FROM THE WATER”S EDGE.”
- Becky Zawalski - “Once There Were Wolves” by Charlotte McConaghy.
- It’s a murder mystery about a wolf biologist introducing wolves into the Scottish Highlands. I typically don’t like murder mysteries, but this was fun, because it actually talks about the environmental changes that wolves lend to the land. The author has also written another, similar book called “Migrations”, which is on my bookshelf and I plan to read it soon.
- Becky again - Another book recommendation is “Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens.
- It’s another murder mystery about a young girl who has little to no education, who lives in very rural North Carolina in 1969 who creates a name for herself by identifying all the birds, bugs, and critters in the area. It wasn’t my favorite, mostly because I figured out “the big twist” fairly early on in the story, but it’s critically acclaimed and is being made into a movie this year. The science is strong with it, even though the main genre is murder mystery.
- Beth Walker (Tulsa County) - “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization” by David R Montgomery
- Tanya Chapman-Williamson (Pontotoc County) - “A Sand County Almanac” Aldo Leopold
- (Note from CHERYL) Tanya did not provide additional information, but I can say that every professional wildlife biologist sometime or other as a student or within their career, will read this book. Of particular interest to me was seeing a man move from thinking wolves should be exterminated to realizing that the ecosystems are incomplete without all of the important players.
- Karen Pope (Tulsa County) - “Sparrow Envy” by J. Drew Lanham (subtitled- Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts.
- This is poetry. His other book “The Home Place” is more memoir and I recommend it too. An excerpt from Field Mark 73: How to Just Be "Not being out: not wandering somewhere wild - seems sinful. There’s something wonderful I’m not witnessing . ..A new sun warms in brilliant hues.The same tiring orb sinks into the abysmal blue.When that coming and going cycles absent my firsthand witness, I’m squandering time." These words stay with me and inspire/goad me to get out - to witness firsthand.
- Rebecca Bond - The Music of Bees by Eileen Garvin:
- This is a wonderful novel about Alice Holtzman, a 40-something widow and hobby beekeeper in Hood River, Oregon. In a series of serendipitous events, Alice meets Jake, a recently disabled teenager who is grappling with the prospect of life in a wheelchair and Harry, a young man with a good heart but poor luck and decision-making skills. Together, the three become friends and work to transition Alices’ bee yard from a side hobby to a real source of income for Alice. The county in which Alice lives is full of orchards. Enter a pesticide company with a profoundly poor track record that threatens Alice’s bees, as well as the watershed of the Hood River. The novel contains many beautiful gems about beekeeping and wonderfully developed characters. I recommend this book for anyone who is coming to terms with a life experience that has left them profoundly disappointed, as well as anyone interested in bees.
- Rebecca - Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
- This novel is packed with fascinating information about monarch butterflies and potential impacts of climate change on the species. In the book, a fictious event occurs in which a significant portion of the population overwinters in Appalachia instead of flying south to Michoacan. At first, the community perceives the arrival of the monarchs as a miracle and a blessing, but over the course of the novel, they come to realize they are witnessing the unravelling of an ecosystem and the likely extinction of a species. The book grapples with questions of faith, science, uncertainty in a changing world, and maintaining hope in the face of disaster.
- The main character, Dellarobia, is the first person to encounter the butterflies. The encounter changes her marriage, her interactions with her children, and her hopes and aspirations for herself. The reader of the audiobook is excellent. Reading Flight Behavior made me want to check out other books by the author.
- Rebecca - The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World by Patrik Svensson:
- I checked out this audiobook from Pioneer Library Systems and listened to it on my phone. The Swedish author narrates the audiobook and I was instantly hooked. The book explores the natural history of the eel (what is known by scientists, anyway, which is less than you would think) interwoven with the story of Svensson’s relationship with his father. Many of Svensson’s formative experiences with his dad occurred while fishing for eels. Interesting facts to whet your appetite:
- Eels go through four metamorphoses from embryo to adult.
- Sigmund Freud studied eels as a young man. He wasn’t all that good at it.
- All European and American eels attempt to make their way to the Sargasso Sea as they approach sexual maturity, presumably to spawn, though no one has witnessed the act.
- An eel lived at the Halsinborgs Museum in Sweden for 85 years; the eel was presumed to be about three years old when she was caught. (Another eel is reported to have reached the age of 155 in a Swedish family’s backyard well, but that claim is viewed with some skepticism.)
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