A Watershed Cinderella Story

The other day I trained a new volunteer who is helping the NSRWA read our stream gauges in Third Herring Brook. (This is something you can do too! Just contact us - we need you!) As part of the training we walked down the street to the Mill Street gauge, and I was embarrassed to find it unreadable due to an accumulation of scum and organic gunk during the lower flows of the summer. It was time to do some scrubbing.

I like to say that ecologists are the MacGyver's of the science world - we tend to use a lot of household objects and ordinary things to accomplish what we need to do. Behold the official NSRWA Stream Gauge Scrubber. It gets the job done.

I went first to our River/Broadway gauge, which is the easiest to access. I scrubbed it clean and was a bit chagrined to notice that somebody had been taking potshots at it. I'm hoping that the appeal of such activities has worn off. The next stop was the Route 123/Jacob's Pond gauge. I wonder if people passing thought I was a bit off, walking around in hip boots wielding a scrub brush. I climbed down into the stream, and flows were low enough that I could look through the culvert under Rt. 123 and into Jacob's Pond. For being essentially underneath a busy road, it was very quiet down there. I always feel special when I get to explore small, quiet places in the watershed that might go unnoticed by others.

My final stop was the Mill St. gauge. The road over the brook is narrow and immediately after a corner, and people tend to drive far too fast over the little bridge. I climbed over the guardrail as soon as I could and looked for a good spot to hop down off the culvert. The best spot was occupied by a big, beautiful web woven by a spider with an opalescent abdomen - I apologized to it and neatly disconnected the bits of web that were in my way and shooed it onto a branch (what can I say, I took this book to heart as a child). I carefully stepped along the stream bottom, hoping that one of the boulders concealed by the murky water wouldn't be the snapping turtle who was hanging out there a couple weeks ago. I scrubbed the gauge clean, said hello to a few more spiders and some bumblebees busily harvesting from the jewelweed (a fascinating plant - it is also called touch-me-not because of its seed pods that spring open upon contact, and is a folk remedy for poison ivy), and walked back to the office, having retained both my boots (glass slippers?).

Now that the gauges are clean, you can help read them! Let us know if you want to help out. It only takes a couple minutes a day. If you want to see what we've accomplished so far, check out the page for our gauges on the Riverways website, the folks who make these gauges all the rage.)