"What is a Watershed Association?" (Interning)

As an intern at NSRWA, I have been asked this question a lot in the last couple months. Trying to explain what I do is not always easy, seeing as I have a lot of different things on the agenda in a given day. I usually just say "Oh, its about the environment." or "We do stuff with rivers and water." You, lucky readers, get to know what it actually means. So here we go;

In the mornings, I go to Scituate and get to spend a lovely bit of time doing stream observations. This involved going to two stream locations and reading gauges, taking some other measurements (temperature and dissolved oxygen) and generally commenting on the habitat I see. "Is there water flowing?", "Is there vegetation?" and the like. I have been startled by a large bird flying out from under the bridge at Old Oaken Bucket and have found a poor fish thrashing about on the rocks mid-stream trying to find water again, to name a few of the not-so-common events.

The observations I do will help with the First Herring Brook Restoration Project, which is aimed at allowing Herring to return to these areas in which they once thrived through efforts to restore the habitat. This involves working with the Scituate Water Department and trying to restore consistent, more natural flows in the streams controlled by the water system. (http://www.nsrwa.org/Page.109.html)

I also get to do Greenscapes activities, which are really fun! I was able to go into 5th grade classrooms at the start of the summer with the Water All Around program (http://www.nsrwa.org/Page.137.html) and teach kids about pollution in watersheds-where it comes from, how it gets into the water, and what we can do to help prevent it. The kids were very cute and had a lot to contribute. The parent volunteers also learned a lot from the different stations we set up and the kids got to go on field trips as part of the program.

Now that its the summer, I have been going to farmers markets all around the South Shore promoting Greenscapes (http://www.greenscapes.org/). This past weekend I went to the Pembroke Farmer's Market where I got to sip on some homemade iced tea and see a belly dancer perform while handing out information on how to save water and keep a healthy, beautiful lawn over the summer! I met some interesting people and got to share information on native plants, lawn mowing tips, and more ways to help your lawn survive.

Those times when I'm in the office, I am working on data that relate to water conservation. I work on figuring out where all the water a town pumps is going, who is using it, and when people use the most water. The watering ban put into effect this summer in Scituate is part of my focus, and I am doing analyses to see if it has had an impact on reducing the towns water use. Number crunching is never a thrilling task, but knowing that the information I am working with will be used to inform future policy is really exciting.

So, there you have it! A little bit of ecology, a little bit of outreach, some statistics, some teaching, and a whole lot of Watershed fun- that is what it means to intern at the Watershed Association.