Watershed Protection River Community Education Natural History Conservation Wetland Restoration Water Quality Protection Partnerships Diversity Non-Profit Kansas 412 East 9th Street, Lawrence 66044 phone 785-840-0700

In July, Lawrence teachers took part in a workshop designed to strengthen teachers’ ability to use fine arts to teach science.  Wetland Learners Coordinators Sandy Sanders and Alison Reber took teachers on a virtual field trip to the Wakarusa River Valley including wetlands and pollinator ties to Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Science, Art and the Environment In this session we’ll take a virtual field trip to local wetland areas and explore ecological concepts that have a strong cross-disciplinary reach.  Session participants will get an overview of the Wakarusa Wetland Learners Project, wetland functions, and the relationship between wetlands and pollinators.   portion of the session will focus on hands-on activities with easily obtained native plants and insects.  (Ties to the Lied School Performance of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and other Etic Carle Favorites.)

For props we used a large satellite map of the Wakarusa River Valley, live plant specimens, a variety of preserved pollinators, and live aquatic animals.   We also had a collection of photographs of the wetlands.

Greetings and salutations!  Just a quick heads up that I’ve been adding new revolving content to “In the Watershed” - see right hand column. Theres also a new category called “Partner Notes”. I’ll be slowly but surely adding information about the different groups we work with.

Also, if anyone’s keeping track, we’ve just upgraded to Wordpress version 2.6.1.

Many thanks, Alison

A few weeks back I found a large black woolly caterpillar walking along the edge of the sidewalk near my office.

I picked it up and it coiled into a circle and exposed bright red bands that had been hidden between rings of black bristles. Pretty impressive! I showed it to my daughters but none of us knew what it was.

Fresh out of field containers, I scavenged a paper cup with a wad of napkins for a temporary home. It worked long enough to get us home and inside but somewhere between the kitchen and the family room we set the cup down long enough to lose track of this black beauty.  Open screen-less windows make it pretty easy for quasi-pets to escape so, after a cursory search, I presumed she was settling into a cocoon in and amongst the great outdoors.

This morning there was a nasty storm - the kind of wind & rain that makes weathermen break into regular programming to give us the blow by blow. Our regularly sun-filled family room was dim with stormy purple-green light. The kids were camped out in the bathroom with our dog, Buster. He’d taken refuge in the shower, refusing to be coaxed out for even with warm-from-the-oven-sugar-cookies.

Anxious and grabbing up odds and ends on the off chance we decided to head to the spacious safety of our crawl space, I weighed my shoe options. My rubber boots were by the back door in the darkened family room. Something bright caught my eye. Suddenly it registered that there was a large bright white moth on the back of one of my black rubber boots. Storm-be-damned I got a jar, hastily stuffed in some climbing sticks, and gently nudged the impressive moth into the make shift habitat.

It was 3 or 4 inches long with white fuzzy antenna and black circles & shapes on it’s robust iridescent white wings, thorax, & head. There were watery yellow-green droplets on either side of it’s head. None of us had ever seen anything like it. There was nothing like it in our guide to the butterflies & moths of North America. While it rained and hailed, we focused on finding the name of this pretty guest.

I scrolled through several Google screens of white moths with black circles. Some of them were close. Some

of them weren’t even moths. Finally between the field guide and online info, I narrowed it down to a Giant Leopard Moth. The description of their black and red caterpillars brought back a recollection of our long lost black beauty.

Clear sky was on the horizon just as we solved 3 mysteries - what was the caterpillar, where did it go, and

what kind of moth was this. Ready for some puddle jumping, we pulled on our rubber boots and headed out to straighten our wind-blown yard.

Somewhere along the way I’ve managed to get into poison ivy. My arm is slightly swollen with one nasty looking rash painted a flaking chalky pink. Lovely. I also twisted my wrist funny while biking along the river yesterday so I’ve got this nappy wrist wrap on, too.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be filming some of the Wetland Learner activities as well as being photographed myself for a feature in the Lawrence Magazine later this summer. I think I’ll wear long sleeves.

I have to say that the poison ivy at the river seems to be thriving while the tomatoes I cleverly planted before July this year seem to be getting paler by the day. The trials of gardening in Kansas.

In today’s Dragonfly Messenger I reported on the availability of a number of historic publications through KSU’s Research & Extension. I took a lull in the afternoon to flip through Walter Balch’s 1937 bulletin on Home Vegetable Gardens. He included a horse-drawn-cultivator-friendly layout for the average 1/2 acre Kansas home garden, encouraged the autumn application of well rotted manure, and discouraged the use of imported seedlings suggesting it would be better to focus on overall production quality than force early production. My tomatoes are looking even paler now!

Archived mailing

Earlier this week Eileen Ernst’s 3rd graders sampled Indian Creek near the North Topeka Recreation Center. Notebooks in hand, they compared their findings with the information they gathered last fall. The most noteable difference - stream flow. There’s actually enough water in the stream to watch it spilling over rocks. The mayfly nymphs are bigger and they found dragonfly nymphs.

When we got to the site a work crew was repairing a waterline crossing the stream. The work crew was openly impressed and they suspended work long enough for us to complete our sampling without having to compete with the noise of heavy equipment. I noticed them lingering a bit to watch the students in action.

Over the last 9 years StreamLink has been an important component of the 3rd grade curriculum. The field excursions are much anticipated by Rochester students and remembered for years into the future. Her first set of StreamLink students are now seniors.

Nominated for a 2007 Kansas Wildlife Federation Award, Eileen has set a marvelous precedent and provided an extraordinary example for other elementary teachers. She’ll retire as a classroom teacher at the end of this school year but I fully anticipate we’ll be seeing her again soon. -Alison Reber

NEWS FLASH!  The event scheduled for tomorrow morning has been postponed.  Thunderstorms are being forecast.

Sping’s finally here!  I’ve got the doors to the office open and giant dust bunnies are blowing off the ceiling fan.   That explains my sinus headache….

We had a wonderful wetland event yesterday and the pictures are already up on flickr.  I’m working on getting our facilitators more appropriately acknowledged.  Check ‘em out.

Last week’s poetry reading was awesome - many thanks to Stephanie Barrows with the Lawrence Poetry Community for the hours and hours she’s spent coordinating the Spring Poetry Series.

That’s the short & sweet for now.  The calendar has info about wetland learners events that are coming up.

From Patty Ogle, Event Coordinator: First, I would like to thank everyone for their participation. I hope you have all recovered nicely. Please thank your volunteers for me as well. Everyone seemed organized and well staffed this year, making this year’s festival another success.

I have included some numbers from activities. I would be interested if anyone else kept a tally. I also have photos if you need them for supervisors, reports, etc.

Incredible Journey bracelets made - 269
Homes located on Watershed Map - 225
Completed cards /prizes give out - 200
Earth Day organizers crowd estimate 800 - 1000

We did receive a $1000 grant from KACEE. We will be using the money to cover our new permanent signage and banners, prizes, advertising, etc for this year. We will use the remainder to order more prizes for next year. We gave away 200 sports sacks in less than 2 hours! I would love to have more prizes next year, which costs more – so as you plan your budgets for next year, please consider a small amount to help with this expense.

As always, I welcome any feedback – good or bad. We want the festival to grow and improve each year, so feel free to send your suggestions. Thank you again – I’ll be in touch for next year!

Patty Ogle Stormwater Quality Technician | pogle@ci.lawrence.ks.us
Public Works Department - City of Lawrence, KS
PO Box 708, Lawrence, KS 66044
office 785-832-3136 fax 785-832-3398

See additional coverage at Storm Water Solutions

Army Corps and EPA Improve Wetland and Stream Mitigation

(Washington, D.C. - March 31, 2008) The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today released a new rule to clarify how to provide compensatory mitigation for unavoidable impacts to the nation’s wetlands and streams. The rule will enable the agencies to promote greater consistency, predictability and ecological success of mitigation projects under the Clean Water Act.

“This rule greatly improves implementation, monitoring, and performance, and will help us ensure that unavoidable losses of aquatic resources and functions are replaced for the benefit of this Nation. This is a key step in our efforts to make the Army’s Regulatory Program a winner, and the best it can be for the regulated community we serve and those interested in both economic development and environmental protection,” said John Paul Woodley, Jr., Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works.

“This rule advances the president’s goals of halting overall loss of wetlands and improving watershed health through sound science, market-based approaches, and cooperative conservation,” said EPA Assistant Administrator for Water, Benjamin H. Grumbles. “The new standards will accelerate our wetlands conservation efforts under the Clean Water Act by establishing more effective, more consistent, and more innovative mitigation practices.”

Benefits of the compensatory mitigation rule include:

• Fostering greater predictability, increased transparency and improved performance of compensatory mitigation projects
• Establishing equivalent standards for all forms of mitigation
• Responding to recommendations of the National Research Council to improve the success of wetland restoration and replacement projects
• Setting clear science-based and results-oriented standards nationwide while allowing for regional variations
• Increasing and expanding public participation
• Encouraging watershed-based decisions
• Emphasizing the “mitigation sequence” requiring that proposed projects avoid and minimize potential impacts to wetlands and streams before proceeding to compensatory mitigation

Each year thousands of property owners undertake projects that affect the nation’s aquatic resources. Proposed projects that are determined to impact jurisdictional waters are first subject to review under the Clean Water Act. The Corps of Engineers reviews these projects to ensure environmental impacts to aquatic resources are avoided or minimized as much as possible. Consistent with the administration’s goal of “no net loss of wetlands” a Corps permit may require a property owner to restore, establish, enhance or preserve other aquatic resources in order to replace those impacted by the proposed project. This compensatory mitigation process seeks to replace the loss of existing aquatic resource functions and area.

Property owners required to complete mitigation are encouraged to use a watershed approach and watershed planning information. The new rule establishes performance standards, sets timeframes for decision making, and to the extent possible, establishes equivalent requirements and standards for the three sources of compensatory mitigation: permittee-responsible mitigation, mitigation banks and in-lieu-fee programs.

The new rule changes where and how mitigation is to be completed, but maintains existing requirements on when mitigation is required. The rule also preserves the requirement for applicants to avoid or minimize impacts to aquatic resources before proposing compensatory mitigation projects to offset permitted impacts.

Wetlands and streams provide important environmental functions including protecting and improving water quality and providing habitat to fish and wildlife. Successful compensatory mitigation projects will replace environmental functions that are lost as a result of permitted activities.

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Contact Information: Corps of Engineers - Gene Pawlik, (202) 761-7690 / eugene.a.pawlik@usace.army.mil or Doug Garman, (202) 761-1807 / doug.m.garman@usace.army.mil; EPA - Shakeba Carter-Jenkins, (202) 564-4355 / carter-jenkins.shakeba@epa.gov