Plants, Streams, and Fishy Fun

 

Sometimes it takes a little team-work to pull that
stuborn piece of garbage from the stream bank.



What a great weekend for volunteering!

We had a few exciting events going on last weekend. A volunteer river clean-up in Peshastin, plant bundling for our annual native plant sale, and even an environmental education “Shrub Steppe Day” put on by Wenatchee Outdoors at the Wenatchee Valley Museum.

On Saturday, I was excited to get our bundling event underway. We’d received our order of native trees and shrubs and they were ready to be sorted through, bundled, and grouped into appropriate orders. Luckily for me, Val and Jeff, a couple of plant bundling pros, came out to help and showed off their expertise. Thanks to their, and a few other volunteers’, help we were able to go through the whole order faster than expected. One of my favorite parts of the event was the opportunity to learn something new that presented itself during bundling. Our motley volunteer crew’s knowledge of native plants and bare root plant care varied so there were plenty of opportunities to learn and teach others. 

 

Volunteers found lots of old trash in a variety of shapes and sizes.



On Sunday, Cascadia worked with the Leavenworth Community Fellowship Church in Peshastin to cleanup a section of the Peshastin Creek.  About 20 members of the community church came out to get involved with the cleanup and it couldn’t have gone better. At first glance, the clean-up site contained a few piles of debris that would need to be cleaned up but other than that there didn’t seem to be a whole to do. However, after we all got started cleaning up on the stream bank, we found that there was quite a bit more debris than originally thought.  Ranging from old tires, bottles, pipes, fences, chains, and general garbage, the piles of trash collected from the creek grew… and grew… and grew! By the end of the day we had managed to clean up 570 feet of stream bank and collect 2,120 lbs. of trash and scrap metal. We even saw a mink playing in the water just across the creek. It was gratifying to see wildlife in the exact area we were cleaning up the stream and knowing that they and everyone one else downstream from them would benefit from our work.

 

The whole Leavenworth Community Fellowship Church
stream clean-up crew!



Although I wasn’t able to attend “Shrub Steppe Day”, I was able to talk with Sean from Cascade Columbia Fisheries Enhancement Group who was there doing a demonstration dissection of a trout. Cascadia had set up a fish anatomy puzzle right next to Sean’s dissection station so I was interested to find out what kids had learned about fish anatomy. “A lot of kids were going from the fish dissection straight to the fish puzzle. They learned a lot and had never seen the insides of fish” Sean said. “Kids loved learning about how similar fish anatomy is to that of our own, but they found that the coolest part of fish anatomy is the swim bladder (the balloon like organ that can inflate and deflate to change the fish’s buoyancy in the water).”