It Takes a Village

I love how my villages overlap. I exist in the village of Blue Thumb staff members and Blue Thumb volunteers. I am in the village of the greater Oklahoma Conservation Commission. I am in the village of family and friends. Nature is my village as I study fish, watch birds, and occasionally catch a glimpse of a coyote, opossum, or skunk. There are no hard lines that exist between my villages, and perhaps your villages are like this as well. 

A fellow village resident from the Information Technology piece of the Oklahoma Conservation Commission, Shellie Willoughby, created this map of Blue Thumb sites.  Blue Thumb Quality Assurance Officer, Kim Shaw, provided the information needed for both the currently active sites and the once monitored sites. I hope that you will spend a little time looking over where volunteers are currently at work, and where they have worked in the past.

It can be a short trip from a historic site to becoming active again. We like to assign new volunteers to streams that already have some data. As volunteers’ lives become too busy or for some other reason they cease to turn in data, an active site can rather quietly slip over to the inactive column. We are always thankful to have at least a little data, and just as important, we are thankful to former monitoring volunteers for giving their time to help their local stream.

Each stream on this map can render some type of story…the speedy coyote on Cache Creek…the students who cut the thumbs from their gloves on Haikey Creek so that they could wear them and have “blue thumbs”…the wee little green heron who truly followed us up the stream and back during a fish collection on Lost Creek…the haunted doll head found in Elm Creek…the soft-shelled turtle that was the size of a turkey platter in Bishop Creek…the little boy who went seining with his mom’s cell phone in his pocket in Nickel Creek…the autumn leaves dancing from the tree branches and into the water on Spring Creek on a special October day…and many, many more stories that YOU can add to the mix!

When  you look at the dots and the triangles on this map, keep in mind that every stream has a story, every stream has many stories. Are you there to witness them? Collect these stories as you do your monitoring duties for Blue Thumb. Build your library of tales and then share, and even invite others to join you at the stream. 

When you are reading this, we will be starting the celebration of 30 years of Blue Thumb monitoring! Thank you for being a citizen scientist, and telling the stories of your creek adventures. Keep up the good work!

Cheryl Cheadle
Volunteer Coordinator

Environmental Expo

This is the second call for volunteers who want to attend the Environmental Education Expo at the Oklahoma City Zoo on Friday, February 3. If you are willing to staff the Blue Thumb exhibit during breaks, Blue Thumb is paying the way for several volunteers to attend. The 2023 theme for the Expo is “The Sustaining Power of Nature.” Please contact Cheryl by Friday, January 6, if you wish to attend and have Blue Thumb pay your way. 

To our Monthly Monitors:

Creek monitoring volunteers, thank you for participating in the Summer 2022 QA sessions where we asked you the following two questions and chatted with you about your responses. As promised, I’ve summarized your answers below for each question so you can see what staff will be working on.

1. What do you want to get out of your participation with BT?

• Concerned of activity in watershed, want to know how creek is doing, if 303d listed – why and how to delist it
• Create a nature preserve
• Keeping active in WQ activities, volunteer work, 4H, local
• Tribal/City/school
• Is a great excuse to get out, go to the creek
• Doing real science/in depth data, use this with students
• Contributes to something bigger
• Upstream/downstream differences compared to their site
• Advocate message

• Bring in ecotourism groups
• BT presence/monitoring helps keep people out
• LOVE the biological results
• Choctaw Tribe wants similar OCC rotating basin plan
• Find data audience, target projects/reports to them (new employee)
• Continue to offer education supplements/opportunities/advanced training classes – specially to understand the data, bug/fish/invasive species/soil
• More structured channels for advocacy
• More outreach in rural areas
• Annual meeting for volunteers – local experiences
• High tech meters for data comparison
• Access to statewide data

This gave us some great insight from your point of view to help us adjust, improve, etc the Blue Thumb program. Thank you. After reading through the notes above, if anyone, creek monitor or not, has anything to add, please feel free to contact me or any Blue Thumb staff member.

We Blue Thumb staff had a day-long meeting December 5^th to address what you all had to say. We have, and will continue to, come up with ideas to address a lot of your points of view. I will expand on that in a future e-news article, perhaps for February’s edition.  We will hand this out/discuss at your Spring 2023 QA as well, along with our (Blue Thumb staff) action items. Thank you for helping to make the program better.

Kim Shaw
Blue Thumb QA Officer

Make the world a better place!

Start off your year with a gift to Friends of Blue Thumb! With no paid staff, the small nonprofit is able to target great education projects for funding, projects that help citizens understand that they live in a watershed. As citizens within their watershed, they play an important role in stream and river protection. 

Do you like the idea of giving to a good cause? Consider Friends of Blue Thumb.  Please send a check to:

FBT
P.O. Box 58103
Oklahoma City OK 73112

We are a small nonprofit and are committed to helping YOU do good work to protect our streams and rivers!

Winter, Wildflowers, and Winged Friends

As you read this, winter has just recently begun. I look outdoors at my front yard, and there are two primary areas of dead stems and seed heads standing where previously there were wildflowers blooming. I am allowing these areas to stand because I am a fan of birds, and I have observed birds landing in these areas and eating seeds that were not harvested by me or that naturally ended up falling on the ground. This is the natural place birds will seek food. I fill feeders, and I know the birds need this extra help. I do love seeing the birds perched on stems of my dry, brown wildflowers. 

I have read the reports from the Audubon Society and the World Wildlife Fund and I believe them – there are up to 70% fewer birds now than were here in 1970. I had a cardinal in my back yard last week, the first cardinal that has been in my yard (that I witnessed) since April. Previously it seemed like cardinals were seeking me out. I have blue jays and starlings, and the other day I had some robins in the yard, they too are more scarce than before.

There is a new water feature in my yard that I know will be helpful to birds, and it joins two smaller water features that are not clearly obvious to the naked eye, rather tucked back in my flowers. I will continue to feed the birds. I will maintain my lawn with no poisons and I will nurture my prairie for another year, starting with mowing it in very early March. I will mow and will then remove the mowed stalks in my effort to mimic the grazing of buffalo. This is the way of this continent. Fire or large grazing animals would leave places where new growth could thrive with the previous year’s crop going up in smoke or filling the tummies of herbivores. 

As December is ending, I am considering my hopes for my yard, my community, my state, and my world. I will work to have a “giving” yard rather than a “taking” yard. I will be asking many people with whom I come into contact to do the same. I will work locally, very locally if you consider my one little yard, because not trying is giving up.  If you have some philosophical moments as you greet the new year, consider how you might change your yard management to benefit small wildlife like birds, butterflies, and bees. Consider who of your friends and family might like to hear about why you are a Blue Thumb volunteer and what this means to you.

Cheryl Cheadle
Blue Thumb Volunteer Coordinator

• Did you know that a massive freshwater river is flowing under Antarctica’s ice? Check out this article that describes how the river was detected and what scientists think it means.
• A recent study has found that one-third of iconic world heritage glaciers will melt by 2050.
• 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!

Oklahoma Conservation Commission

Oklahoma Conservation Districts

Project WET

Friends of Blue Thumb

Soil Health Program

Department of Environmental Quality

EnvironMentor

Macroinvertebrate ID Website