When I left off last month, Mike and I had just arrived at Waterloo Creek. The day’s task was to first install a stream gage, to measure the creek’s water level, and then go up the creek a bit, to take flow readings across its width, to determine the amount of …
I’m a city boy, raised in, and former resident of, a once-large city in the US rust belt. What I knew then about water was that if you turned a tap, it came out. Having aged out of the work world, and having arrived here in Fanny Bay, I had enough …
Every stream is different. Two months ago, we stood in Wilfred Creek with the water rushing by up to our waists, threatening to topple anyone not paying attention. Six weeks later, we stood in the exact same spot with the water meandering slowly by at a comfortable calf-level. But while …
Especially if you carry a car battery into the field, pound metal stakes into the ground and connect them to the battery posts with cables. Why would you do such a thing? In order to “see” below the surface of the earth. Around here we have lots of sand, gravel, …
Tests are important. They allow us to assess progress and gauge preparedness. Some of us still remember tests from school. (And some of us, who were chronically unprepared, may not have the fondest memories of those tests.) But what’s better than the feeling you get when you pass a test …
It’s fun to make new friends. They offer new perspectives and provide new information. They also present challenges and opportunity. Of course, new friends don’t replace old friends. We at Beaufort Watershed Stewards (BWS) have no plans to abandon our old friends, Wilfred, Cowie, Mud Bay, Hart, and Waterloo but …
You can’t see the specific conductivity of water but you can measure it. Can you taste it? Our YSI meter measures specific conductivity and gives us a precise number (microSiemens per centimetre). Specific Conductivity is useful as an indication of mineral content. Are there other ways to determine specific conductivity? …
For the Beaufort Watershed Stewards it is our ambitions that have grown the most in the past several months. Stream sampling, our first love, is our core activity. It’s been a couple of years since those heady, early days when we were setting up the program and making lots of …
Change is inevitable. Sometimes it is sudden and unexpected. No one saw a pandemic coming a year ago. Other times, change is the result of hard work and intention. Three years ago there was precious little information on the health of our local creeks. Now we have rich data sets …
Wasps are an occupational hazard for the Beaufort Watershed Stewards. Not so much because we run into them when we’re sampling but rather because they’re attracted to our beer cans. But before you form a mental picture of a tipsy group of citizen scientists thrashing drunkenly through the bush, let …
