From the Director

This is a season of change for Blue Thumb. Briant Nguyen, our Field Education Coordinator, has moved on to other opportunities. For the past year, Briant has worked with volunteers in the western half of the state. We will miss Briant's infectious enthusiasm for all things fish, and we wish Briant the very best in his future endeavors.

In the very near future, Blue Thumb will be advertising to fill two positions: the Field Educator Position (formerly Briant's role) and a new Education Coordinator position. The Education Coordinator will oversee Project WET and Project WILD, coordinate with partners on education events and provide professional development opportunities for K-12 teachers, among other duties. The job announcements will be posted on our website and Facebook page and in Workday.

For decades, Blue Thumb has been the sponsoring organization for Project WET in Oklahoma. We have recently become the sponsoring organization for Project WILD. We are excited to offer new educational opportunities that focus on the importance of wildlife and the interconnections between healthy waterbodies and healthy communities of insects, amphibians, reptiles, fish, birds and mammals. 

Have you visited the Blue Thumb website lately? The website is a great place to go for upcoming trainings and past issues of From the Water’s Edge and Blue Thumb in Pictures. There are several resources for monitoring volunteers, including SOPs, educational videos and links to data forms and the mobile Data Entry App. We recently added pages to showcase data projects. Check it out!

Rebecca Bond
Blue Thumb Director

Blue Thumb for Life

We often get asked about how many active sites and volunteers Blue Thumb has. There is no easy answer for this as the numbers are always changing for many different reasons. People come and go, just as creek sites do. When people stop monitoring or never monitored but have been through a full Blue Thumb training, we still consider them all volunteers. Some come back to being active with either creek monitoring or educational days or both.

Within the past couple months, we’ve had a handful of people coming back to be an active part of the Blue Thumb program. One or two did some Blue Thumbing in high school or college and are now in a professional career and want to pick back up with creek monitoring. Another person was a high school teacher, moved on to 4-H, and asked Blue Thumb for a creek experience with 9 of their 4-H kids. We LOVE to have this happen and to hear about it! Just because you don’t have time to give Blue Thumb right now doesn’t mean you are out of the program; once you train, you are Blue Thumb for life, and we will welcome you back at any time.

We have had people in the past like this come back to monitoring over the years, it is just that several people coming back within a short time that makes this ‘newsworthy’ for me. We hope this continues as well. Blue Thumb's ‘active sites’ list and number of volunteers are numbers always in fluctuation, just like the flow of a creek is. So please don’t have any guilt or bad feelings if you must step away and turn in your test kit. Life happens, we certainly understand.

When and if you find time later, please contact one of us and we can help you get started again. You can attend a training for free or just parts of a training. Or one of us can come out and help you with your first-time monitoring or parts of it. Plus, we have the monitoring videos and all the test instructions written out. So, we have several different ways to help you get started again.

You can always help Blue Thumb with education whether you have been trained or not, whether you have monitored a creek or not, whether you are an ‘active’ volunteer with us or not. Please talk to your family, friends, neighbors, strangers, etc. about water quality, water conservation topics. We all use water thus we all need to contribute to water conservation. Education is a never-ending task that we can all help with.

Kim Shaw
Quality Assurance Officer

During our full staff meeting on May 29, the Blue Thumb team introduced agency staff to two fun Project WILD activities. One of the activities, Riparian Retreat, allows participants to explore a riparian area through guided imagery. After imagining the sights, sounds and smells of a riparian area, participants create an art project to share what they experienced. One of our favorite art projects was a limerick about the humble mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis):

The fish that was swimming was not the best,

his coloration was not fuchsia.

He lives in a pool because he likes to rest,

his name was Mosquitofish or Gambusia.

He is the darter of the west.

- Jason Ramming

From the Volunteer Coordinator

The Sounds at My Site 

My May monitoring of Coal Creek in south Tulsa County took place on May 25.  Since my monitoring partner Jeffrey is working for the US Forest Service in the NW this summer, I am currently a solo monitor. 

Coal Creek in Morris Park (Glenpool) has a reasonably good riparian area on the west, and at least a narrow strip of vegetation on the east.  I was not in a hurry, and it was a nice day, so I chose to count the sounds around me.  Highway 75 is just west of the park, so the thrum of automobiles was consistently present.  Then there were a few airplanes and one really loud helicopter.  It was the birds who were the stars of the morning!

I have never considered myself much of a birder, but I really enjoy birds. I tend to be around people who have a crackerjack ability to identify birds.  I decided to keep track of the birds I heard, and the list is impressive.  I heard but did NOT see:  cardinal; robin; house wren; yellow-billed cuckoo; red-tailed hawk; Carolina chickadee; and blue jay.  I saw some mallards and a flicker.  I saw and heard crows and a barred owl, and this deserves more description.  Across the stream I heard a soft whirring sound and I thought “owl.”  Almost immediately after this I heard and saw crows on a mission as they together flew into one area of a tree.  Following this, a large barred owl hooted some rather angry notes and flew into another tree closer to me.  I was surprised that the crows did not follow. 

So nearly a dozen birds were known to me on this day and this has been uplifting.  So many species of animals are on the decline, and for the last two years it has seemed to me that I have had fewer birds and fewer bird species visit my yard.  This year I am seeing more birds, both in my yard and in other places.  Why?  Am I paying more attention?  Is this a better year for birds?  I don’t know.  I had gotten lax and my birdfeeder was empty.  Now it is filled again.   Adult birds will eat the seed, and this will give them more energy for seeking insects for their little ones.  Considering my monitoring results, Coal Creek tests were all within a reasonable range and the stream was beautiful.

Cheryl Cheadle
Volunteer Coordinator

Spring Weather Can Be Dicey and Icy

Hail is solid precipitation that forms when raindrops are carried upward by thunderstorm updrafts.  When these drops move into extremely cold areas of the upper atmosphere, the water freezes.  As these pellets move around they collide with liquid water drops that coat the pellets and freeze, and this can continue to happen until the weight of the pellet becomes too great to be supported by the thunderstorm’s updraft.  Many coats of frozen layers can exist on one pellet, and of course the more layers, the larger the hailstone. 

Wind-driven hail can be especially damaging – instead of falling straight down, it can pound the sides of buildings and break windows.  Cars frequently are on the losing end of the battle with hail.  Crops (and basically all plants) are susceptible to hail damage.  In July of 2023, hundreds of birds were killed and/or injured in Oklahoma City by hail.

Oklahoma tends to get more hail than most states.  Peak hail season is mid-April through mid-May, and hail has made the news this year in many locations and during many storms.  In recent history, hail has not taken many lives, although a large enough hailstone bonking a person right on the noggin can do the trick.   While not common, cattle and chickens can be killed by hail.  The pellets are damaging, and the noise and confusion caused by severe storms can increase animal stress levels.  

Thunderstorms can happen without hail, but hail happens with thunderstorms.  To be safe, be weather aware.  By cell phone, computer, radio, or television, keep tabs on the weather.  Try NOT to be out and about in severe weather, and if you are, go to a place where you can take cover.  Go to a saferoom, storm shelter, or most interior room of a dwelling.  Do not be tempted to run out into a hail storm to pick up especially large or interesting hailstones.  Snag these after the storm has passed.  They will keep a long time in the freezer. 

The largest hailstone on record is about the size of a bowling ball.  Typically hail is no larger than a golf ball, which can still bruise flesh or slice the thin skin of a scalp. 

Cheryl Cheadle
Volunteer Coordinator

Friends of Blue Thumb – The Friends of Blue Thumb (FBT) Board has room for three new members. If you have been through Blue Thumb training for new volunteers, please consider serving on the Board.  When this nonprofit organization formed circa 2010, the goal was to protect wadeable streams by supporting the Blue Thumb volunteers who were stream monitors. 

It isn’t easy for a state program supported by federal dollars to readily provide money for the volunteers. That gap left a place for FBT.  Some of the ways volunteers have benefitted include:

• Purchases of waders and winter gloves
• Funds to help volunteers attend conferences and training sessions
• Exhibits to get information out to the public
• Help to cover education signage

When FBT first became an organization, Oklahoma’s conservation districts joined at a special rate of $75, when the lifetime membership fee was (and still is) $150.  Many districts joined in the early days, with more coming aboard over the years.  These conservation districts have turned to FBT for funds to help with local tours, natural resource days for children, educational tools, and more.

Since 2020, the birth year of the Yard by Yard Community Resiliency Project, FBT has been a big player in this project’s support by providing funds for signage and seed.  Yard by Yard continues to grow throughout Oklahoma.

Friends of Blue Thumb has maintained an active Board since the beginning and has many new members. There is room for three additional Board members.  We meet primarily by ZOOM every other month but will meet in person in OKC on July 16 at our summer retreat.  If you want to learn more about what it means to be a member of the FBT board, contact the chairwoman Terrie Becerra.

Friends of Blue Thumb is accepting mini-grant proposals from active Blue Thumb volunteers and member conservation districts throughout June. You may complete the short application here. Please contact Cheryl if you have questions about mini-grants.

Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_paddlefish

This Fish is a Survivor!

The North American Paddlefish is an aquatic 'living fossil' that has been around since the age of dinosaurs. This is a cartilaginous fish with a unique paddle-like snout, or rostrum, covered with electroreceptors that allow for adult paddlefish to detect and filter feed on zooplankton floating in the water column. In Oklahoma, paddlefish exist in various parts of the Arkansas and Red river basins, and successful conservation efforts have secured self-sustaining populations in many parts of their range.

This fish is considered a living fossil because fossil records of paddlefish date back to ~300 million years ago, meaning this fish’s ancestors survived the Great Dying which was the most severe extinction event in Earth’s history! The American paddlefish is the sole survivor of this group; its only other modern cousin, the Chinese Paddlefish, was declared extinct in 2020.

Oklahoma Conservation Commission

Oklahoma Conservation Districts

Project WET

Friends of Blue Thumb

Soil Health Program

Department of Environmental Quality

Macroinvertebrate ID Website