Part of the concept behind trashmas ornaments was to donate the proceeds to Bladensburg Waterfront Park as a thank you and to help offset the very real expenses the park has incurred associated with with our trashyaking efforts. Throughout the entire trashyaking journey Bladensburg Waterfront Park has been right there, cheerfully supporting our efforts. Kelly, Ani, and I are sincerely grateful to you all.
You see a lot of pictures of how nasty the Anacostia River is on this blog. The river is also really pretty. Last month Kelly saw an OTTER. An otter. I was wrassling a big ol’ tire out of the mud when Kelly told me what I missed while tire wrassling. I cried with joy, otters don’t live in polluted rivers.
The city of DC just released a summary report of the results of their citizen science water quality monitoring efforts for 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. There are some really exciting results with regard to turbidity and water temperature. However, the most exciting results are the bacterial levels recorded. Long story short, most of the time most of the river passes health standards for contact recreation.
Thank you to all the citizen scientists responsible for these data. Your efforts documenting water quality show the results of the efforts and investments of the Anacostia watershed community are bearing fruit. Thank you.
I am honored to provide a post written by Steve Bouffard. This was originally written as a comment to a previous post. I simply can not say enough good about Steve.
Your post and picture of Gattinger reminded me that in most Western cultures we don’t honor and respect our elders enough. We don’t value their accumulated knowledge and wisdom. I was educated to this fact in summer 1968. I worked for VT Fish & Game Dept. doing an inventory of VT wetlands. We had to identify riparian and wetland plants. This was a challenge for a college freshman who never had seen or heard of taxonomic keys, especially early in the summer when there were no reproductive structures on the plants. Our ace in the hole was Frank Conkling Seymour, curator of the Pringle Herbarium at the University of Vermont. He had to be in his 70’s, having completed and retired from a previous nonbiological career. I brought him 3 full plant presses. He rattled off genus, species, variety and authority faster than I could write them down. I was duly impressed, but what he did later that summer left me awestruck. We collected a pink water lily (Nymphaea sp) that we couldn’t identify to species. He took one look at it and pronounced it not native to VT. He pulled out a book and keyed it out. Pondering for only a moment he said the author was wrong. I was dumbfounded; at my level of knowledge and education, if it was in a book it must be true. I never met anyone who had the knowledge an self assuredness to proclaim a book wrong. He pulled out a second book. He said “this is interesting, this author disagrees with the first author; they’re both wrong”. Double WOW! He pulled out a third book and said “this author got it right”. The next summer he published “The Flora of Vermont” and “The Flora of New England”. If that wasn’t enough, he was writing keys for plants of Nicaragua from his annual collecting trips. A few years later he published a checklist to Nicaraguan plants. These quiet, unobtrusive men who contributed so much to biology deserve our profound respect.
biologistsoup 