What inspired you to get involved with Blue Thumb?

J: I was coming to the end of my master's program in social work, and I was deeply interested in combining social values and ethics with environmental education and conservation. I took a webinar focusing on Environmental Justice (a key part of our ethics) and the host recommended looking into Blue Thumb. I was already involved with Save Our Streams Tulsa, so it was a natural fit to start monitoring that same creek. I am so glad I did! 

K: I became aware of Blue Thumb in March of 2024 when my friend Jerry invited me to come to his stream to help monitor it. I was in my junior year of undergrad at the University of Tulsa and trying to figure out what I should focus on doing as a career at the time. Going to the creek and learning about water quality monitoring and projects really caught on with me, and I am so glad I went when he invited me.

What do you enjoy most about volunteering with Blue Thumb?

J: I have grown quite fond of our little creek. It's an urban creek so it's not as pretty as some, but I have grown to know and appreciate this small area of water that is a tributary to Mingo Creek and is home to all sorts of bugs, small fish, and one large turtle we have named Yurtle. Ducks and geese regularly use this area as a waypoint too. It's nestled in between a neighborhood and a shopping center with a small park and playground nearby. It experiences a lot of trash being blown in and can also be a source of shelter for those experiencing homelessness. As an urban creek in a low-income area, it holds immense opportunities to build people's relationship and stewardship of water and their natural surroundings. It's very important to me to combine conservation efforts that also meet the needs of those who use the area. One of my driving forces is a quote from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "Fight for the things that you care about. But do it in a way that will lead others to join you." That is what I hope to do here. 

K: I really enjoy the sense of community and purpose I’ve found in water protection in general, which started from my involvement with Blue Thumb. I have really taken off with water conservation topics in my school projects and senior project that I just finished up. It also inspired me to begin working toward a career in water planning, conservation, and stewardship. I am also excited to contribute more to Joanna’s projects she has planned for our creek! We want to foster community involvement in our watershed, especially since East Tulsa neighborhoods are underserved.

How long have you been with the program?

J: I've been monitoring since 2023, starting shortly after completing the training. 

K: I started coming along to monitor monthly in May of 2024 and continued with Jerry and Joanna until Jerry left to go back to graduate school. I became a certified volunteer in October of 2024.

Is there a memorable moment or lesson from your time with Blue Thumb that stands out?

J: I would say this year in general. Hosting successful community cleans, receiving a Friends of Blue Thumb grant (!!), and working more closely with Cheryl and my monitoring partner Kathryn (they are both a wealth of information and I really appreciate their passion). I also really enjoyed the time Kathryn and I had to pile in the back of my truck to monitor because it was a blistery cold morning outside, but we prevailed! We're basically postmen; we monitor rain, sleet, snow or shine!

K: Anytime Cheryl comes to our creek to help with community events or stream cleanups is wonderful. She met with us to plan our activities after the work day, which really meant a lot to me. I also love finding animals in the creek and seeing them flourish!

Joanna Taulman & Kathryn Bartee
Blue Thumb Volunteers

An Innovative Volunteer Project, by Jacob Askey

I grew up in Oklahoma and then went off to university and spent some time working in Texas as a water resources engineer for 3 years. I was back home for several months in-between jobs and looking for ways to get involved with the community. I stumbled upon Blue Thumb and read more about the work they did. Given my background, it seemed like the perfect fit to match my skill set with impact. I reached out to Kim, she gave me a sample data packet for Tenmile Creek, and then I was off on my own trying to come up with a unique way to communicate the data and the importance of stream health to the public.

During my free time, I have been teaching myself the programming language Python and also web development. I knew that I wanted to incorporate these new skills into the project. What initially started out as showing a couple of graphs and a location map for Tenmile Creek on a web page, has now evolved into incorporating the entire history of Blue Thumb data into an interactive dashboard that allows users to learn the context of stream health and explore data trends in their local streams. It has been an incredible learning process and I am thankful to Kim for allowing me the flexibility to explore unique ways to communicate Blue Thumb Data. I am also thankful to all of the current and previous Blue Thumb volunteers that have created such a robust dataset to work with. I consider myself a conservationist, and the work that Blue Thumb does is vital to maintaining the quality of our most natural resource.

I am currently putting the finishing touches on the website and will soon be able to share it with the public. It has been such a pleasure to work with Blue Thumb and I hope that you all get a lot of use out of what I have created!

Jacob Askey
Blue Thumb Volunteer

In July, Jacob will be leaving for the Philippines to do some work for the Peace Corps. The data project Jacob created for Tenmile Creek can be found on our website or by clicking the button below. Go check it out, it is REALLY neat!!!

From the Volunteer Coordinator

Your Stream is Part of a System!

June 21 my monitoring partner, Jeffrey Jenkins, and I completed a small “creek walk” on Coal Creek, north of Glenpool. This is the stream that we monitor. We live in the watershed (although Jeffrey recently moved to OKC), therefore we see this stream often and we have this stream on our minds. Pretty much the whole community of Glenpool is in the Coal Creek watershed.

Our little creek walk garnered a small crowd, and we looked at bugs and fish and everyone there got a turn to pull the seine! When you can actually get people to the stream, they love seeing the fish and the creek bugs!

Not every Blue Thumb monitoring volunteer is interested in doing education activities. But every volunteer cares about the stream they monitor. When a stream becomes a Blue Thumb site, it goes on the Blue Thumb roster of actively monitored streams. So just by saying YES to becoming a monitor, a stream becomes part of the system. A BT staff member might be asked “What streams around here are monitored?” Your stream might be the answer.

When You Pick a Day….

When do you do your stream monitoring? At Blue Thumb training you were encouraged to pick a date and time, such as the last Friday of each month. When you pick your day EARLY in your monitoring endeavor, this will lead to a “randomness” that adds a variety of situations in which you are monitoring. If you are committed to monitoring on the last Friday of the month, you will monitor if it is hot, cold, clear, cloudy, or a light rain is falling. When you do not have a specific date, it might be easy to let conditions bias you.

Of course, you should change the date if conditions are unsafe. You might change the date because something important pops up. If you can know your changes early, you can still employ that randomness by saying “Okay, my team can monitor the third Friday this time, or maybe the day after.” See, randomness intact.

This is also a good time to offer this reminder – a high flow situation can be a good time to monitor. You might not be able to get to the exact place you typically monitor, so you just get as close as you safely can. If you monitor each month at an appointed time, you should get some high flow, low flow, base flow, hot days, cold days, windy days, etc. By “high flow,” we do not mean flooding events. Please do not monitor during flooding events. “High flow” means the water level is above normal, but you can still approach the creek safely. It is important to document your stream in all kinds of conditions, but only if it is safe to do so!

Cheryl Cheadle
Blue Thumb Volunteer Coordinator

Volunteer Article

Last month in this newsletter, I wrote about how Blue Thumbing in two beautiful streams with two long-time BT volunteers lead me to writing about birds and painting them. I published my efforts in “The Cherokee County Bird Book”, which contains illustrations of 70 bird species that can be found in northeastern Oklahoma. For each of the 70 birds there is an illustration on one page and a few paragraphs about that bird on the facing page. Now I am working on a second book that will cover an additional 80 species of birds in Green Country.

Learning about the diet, feeding behavior and migration of the birds I see has made birding a lot more fun. Last May, I saw a Wood Thrush at the Sequoyah Wildlife Refuge, a sighting that would have been of no special interest to me a couple of years ago. I grew up in Michigan, and Wood Thrushes were common there. Now I know that this bird flies over the Gulf of Mexico in a single night from South America to the USA. Furthermore, the number of Wood Thrushes has been cut in half over the last 50 years. The situation is so dire that a group of scientists, called the International Wood Thrush Conservation Alliance, are dedicating their research efforts to finding out why this bird is disappearing.

Bank Swallows, Evening Grosbeaks, Green Herons, and Chimney Swifts are some of other species that were once very common but now are declining rapidly. Not that a bird has to be disappearing to stimulate my admiration.

For example, I have a renewed appreciation for the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker; you know the bird that makes a row of small holes around a tree. This bird is the only migratory woodpecker we have. They winter here but nest in the northern states. They make holes in trees to form feeding stations, drinking the sap that collects there as well as the insects that are attracted to that sap. Other birds make use of these feeding stations as well. What is remarkable is that sapsuckers seem to know something about tree histology. There are two types of tubes just under tree bark: xylem and phloem, xylem conducting sap from the roots to the leaves and phloem from the leaves to the roots. In the spring, sap suckers drill shallower holes to get the sap flowing from the roots to the leaves. Once the leaves are fully developed, they drill deeper holes into the xylem.

Once you delve deeply into a bird’s biology, almost any bird becomes remarkable. I am sure the same can be said for the macroinvertebrates and fish that Blue Thumbers sample. However, information on birds is readily accessible because birding has become a popular hobby, and an app called “EBird” makes it easy to put one’s observation into a big worldwide data base. That data base can be analyzed to reveal all sorts of interesting information. What if all the data collected by stream monitoring over the whole country were put into a big database that was available to everyone? Hmm.

The Wood Thrush is one of several, once common birds, that have lost over half of their numbers in recent years.

The Green Heron, a once common bird now in rapid decline.

The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, a migratory woodpecker that has a remarkable knowledge of tree anatomy.

George Fulk
Blue Thumb Volunteer

From the QA Officer

So, it has been a discouraging summer so far regarding fish collections—a summer unlike any other. Too much rain… ARGH!!! It’s gotta stop sometime—but when?

Normally, we’d have completed several fish and bug collections by now. Currently, we’ve completed one fish collection and zero bug collections/QA’s. Hopefully, by mid-July, we can begin conducting field work—fingers crossed—because through July 7th, they’re calling for a 30–40% chance of rain every day.

Here is the updated fishing schedule. Hopefully, we can stay on track with this schedule!

July 21 – Turkey Ck in Bartlesville

July 22 – Dog Ck in Claremore

July 23 – Cat Ck at the Park in Claremore

July 24 – Crow Ck Zink Park in Tulsa

July 25 – Mingo Ck Hicks Park in Tulsa

July 28 – Mingo Trib in Tulsa

July 29 – Dirty Butter Ck in Tulsa

July 30 - Cat Ck at Christian School in Claremore

July 31 – Coal Ck Morris Park in Tulsa/Jenks

Aug 1 – Mill Ck McClure Park in Tulsa

Aug 6 – Crow Ck Discovery Lab in Tulsa

Aug 7 – Fred Ck in Tulsa

Aug 8 – Twin Hills at Hunter Park in Tulsa

Aug 13 – Owasso Ck in Owasso

Aug 14 – Joe Ck Metro in Tulsa

Aug 15 – Salt Branch in Pryor

Aug 29 – Coal Hwy11 in Tulsa

Still to be scheduled are Crow: Cascia Hall and a replicate.

If you’d like to help at any of the fish collections, please contact me.

Kim Shaw
Blue Thumb QA Officer

FBT is a small nonprofit organization that was formed primarily for the benefit of helping Blue Thumb volunteers effectively monitor and educate the public about protecting streams, rivers, and lakes. FBT does this primarily by providing small grants. If you would like more information, please reach out to Board president, Terrie Becerra.

• Are you curious what the land use or land cover is around your stream and how it has changed over time? Click here to check out the Esri Land Cover Explorer App.
• 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," a project from the Izaak Walton League.

Oklahoma Conservation Commission

Oklahoma Conservation Districts

Project WET

Friends of Blue Thumb

Soil Health Program

Department of Environmental Quality

Macroinvertebrate ID Website