Wildlife sighting!



Watch out, buddy. Don't you know it's hunting season?

This picture was taken at around 4:30 pm. Did you know that deer are crepuscular?  That means that they're mostly active at dawn and dusk. You may see deer out during the day as well, particularly when it is overcast. Predators are often active either in the middle of the day or primarily at night, so when prey animals, like deer, are active during those in between times of dawn and dusk, they are at a lower risk of getting eaten!

Time for another rousing game of Slug or Flower! 

While our somewhat slimy gastropod friend does bear some resemblance to a pitcher plant, he is definitely a member of the kingdom Animalia.



You never know who or what you might run into on your lunch break...



So lush! So green! So invasive!

Controlling water chestnut is a long-term and time-consuming process, but we've noticed marked improvement in our rivers and ponds over the past number of years. Some conservation grups have reduced the water chestnut investation in their ponds by so much that they can count the individual plants they remove!  We're not quite there yet along the Sudbury River, but we're making progress.

Workplace hazards

Leeeeeeech!

Volunteer Opportunities - Water Chestnut

The harvester at Carding Mill Pond in Sudbury

One of our partners, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, generously lends their big, bright orange, mechanical aquatic harvester to other CISMA (Cooperative Invasive Species Management Area) partners to harvest water chesnut. Fish and Wildlife will be using the harvester themselves from July 23 through August 3rd, and they're looking for volunteers!  If you liked our post about the Water Chestnut Pullathon, have heard people talking about it, or just think that canoeing on the Sudbury River and getting a little messy sounds like fun, then this may be the opportunity you've been waiting for!

The work parties will run from 8:00 am to noon and from noon to 4:00 pm. Volunteers of all ages are welcome, but if you are under 16, please bring a parent or guardian who will also be participating.

Meet them at the public boat launch off of River Road (near its intersection with Route 27) in Wayland, MA. You should bring shoes and clothes you don't mind getting wet and dirty, sunscreen, bug repellent, water, and a snack.  They do have some canoes available, but resources are limited so sign up soon! Volunteers are welcome to bring their own boats. 

All participants must register with Amber Carr prior to the event. Call or email her at (978) 443-4661 ext. 33 or amber_carr@fws.gov.  The dates for the pulls are below:

Monday 7/23
Tuesday 7/24
Wednesday 7/25
Thursday 7/26
Friday 7/27

Monday 7/30
Tuesday 7/31
Wednesday 8/1
Thursday 8/2
Friday 8/3


Hope to see you there!

First Annual Water Chestnut Pullathon!

Water chestnut control is an on-going project here on our rivers and ponds. This year for Riverfest, we tried something a little new. We turned it into a contest!  We challenged high school-aged students to compete with other sites to pull the most water chestnut they possibly could. Three sites participated - Icehouse Pond in Acton, Carding Mill Pond in Sudbury, and near the Route 27 Bridge on the Sudbury River in Wayland. What better way to spend a summer morning than canoeing, kayaking, and pulling some weeds?!  We will be hosting additional water chestnut removal events through until mid-August, so stay tuned for more opportunities!

Over 30 people, from kids to adults, volunteered and helped us pull water chestnut. Students from local schools, including Lincoln-Sudbury, Acton-Boxborough, Concord-Carlisle, and Hudson High participated as well as several girls from a Concord Girl Scout troop. 

Erikson's Ice Cream in Maynard and Eastern Mountain Sports in Acton graciously provided small prize items to our winning team and other participants.

Ultimately, our volunteers in Acton took home the prize, but not without a good run for their money!  Scroll on for some photos from the event!



The winning team with their pile!

Big News!

We have some awesome news!  Our new Junior River Ranger Activity Book and Guide v 2.0 is now live!!


We're very excited about this and will be distributing the books very soon!  In the mean time, you can download the book as a PDF and print it out at home! Click HERE to download it - the file is hosted with Google Docs, so just select "File" and then "Download" to save a copy.

The books will be available at the Visitor Centers are Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge - Sudbury, and Minuteman National Historic Park - North Bridge. Children can bring their completed booklets to any of these three locations to receive their official Junior River Ranger badge and signed certificate.

If you are unfamiliar with the program, please check out our Junior River Ranger page on the blog for more information.


We will be releasing a slightly updated v 2.1 of the booklet later this month, but we do not anticipate any significant changes. Stay tuned for the release of that version, but please don't hesitate to get started with our current booklet!


Our Junior River Ranger program is still young, as we only just launched our pilot last summer. As always, please feel free to give us suggestions on how we can improve the book or program to make it the best it can possibly be!  You can contact us via our blog email at suascoriversblog@gmail.com, or contact Katrina directly at katrina_scheiner@nps.gov.

Bio Control Phase II - Beetles!

If you've been over to Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge this week, you may have noticed a strange set up of kiddie pools, plants, and mesh-covered tomato cages. What the heck are we doing now?

You might remember that we're growing purple loosestrife plants in those kiddie pools as part of our bio control efforts to keep wild purple loosestrife in check. The addition of the cages and nets are part of Phase II of our project - raising the beetles!


Dani (back) and Matt collect beetles at the Concord impoundments

On Monday, Katrina, Dani, and Matt visited locations within the refuge complex where Galerucella sp. beetles were released in the past.  Ultimately, they collected beetles from loosestrife plants growing around the edge of the ponds at the Concord impoundments. There are a lot of beetles still living in the impoundments, which is great news because we haven't been able to release new beetles there in several years!  We want the beetles to be able to sustain their populations in the wild so that they will continue to feed on the loosestrife and so we eventually won't need to continue helping them along with our breeding programs.


Beetles congregating at the top of a purple loosestrife plant



Eventually, the beetles will eat enough of the loosestrife's leaves that the plant will die


We collect the beetles one of two ways. The first is with an insect aspirator:

Aspirators are a little strange looking, but they are essentially human-powered vacuums that are used to suck up small insects (though you should never use this type of aspirator to remove insects from the nests of mammals or birds - the mesh keeps insects from flying through the chamber and into your mouth, but not bacteria, viruses, or microscopic parasites). To use an aspirator like this one, place the open end of the straw with the yellow mesh in your mouth. Direct the tube close to your target and suck in sharply. The insect should be sucked through the tube and into the chamber. The length of the tube can make it difficult to suck up your targets as you need a reasonable amount of suction to draw them all of the way through the tube. If you can get close enough to your target, you may also remove the tubing and simply draw the insect through the other straw.  Once we had about 20 beetles in the chamber, we transferred them to a collection vessel, which brings us to our second method of collecting beetles.

Fortunately for us, collecting beetles doesn't require a lot of high-tech equipment - just a little bit of ingenuity and finesse. To make our collection vessels, all we did was cut the top off of plastic bottles, duct tape the edges so we wouldn't hurt ourselves, and then invert the tops. When we got to the collection site, we put some loosestrife stems in the bottles to help shade the beetles and give them something to munch on. The funnel created by the top makes it more difficult for them to escape as we tapped them in from the aspirator, and then we just used a rubber band to hold a piece of mesh fabric across the top of the bottle to keep the beetles in line.

While we used these bottles to transfer beetles from the aspirator collection chamber, we also collected directly into the bottles. To do this, all we had to do was gently shake the leaves that the beetles were on over the open bottle. Galerucella beetles naturally drop off of leaves as a defense against predators, so they dropped right in to our bottles.

Once we have all the beetles we need (about 10-15 per potted plant), we get back to our rearing facility right away. We don't want to keep the beetles in the bottles for too long, because otherwise they might overheat. It wasn't too warm on Monday, but if it was hot out we would have kept the bottles in a cooler with ice. Because we put all of our beetles into two collection vessels, we had to count out the necessary 10-15 beetles for each pot as we transferred them to our plants. This proved a little more difficult than we expected...

Matt and Katrina carefully attempt to transfer beetles to our plants

Not all of the beetles we collected congregated on the stems and leaves we gave them, so several flew away as soon as we cracked open the bottles. Fortunately, about half of our loosestrife plants weren't tall enough to add beetles to yet, so they didn't have nets over them. Most of the beetles that flew out of the bottles landed on the exposed loosestrife, and we were able to put them back into the nets.

After only a day in the nets, our beetles are foraging away and some have even already laid eggs! We hope that by next week the other half of our plants will be tall enough to add beetles, and we will venture out on a second collection mission. We should also see larvae next week, as the eggs will hatch after 7-10 days. Stay tuned!

Galerucella eggs

Spring is in the air!

(click image to view it larger)

We may still have a week and a half until spring officially starts, but with our mild winter it seems like it's already in full swing. You've probably noticed that a lot of grass was able to stay green throughout the season, but new growth is starting to wiggle its way up through the turf as well.

Here at Great Meadows in Sudbury, the mosses are getting a jump on things and sending up their sporophytes. Unlike most plants you may be used to, moss produce spores instead of seeds. The spores are contained in the sporophytes, and will fall off to be dispersed by the wind when they are ready.

Mosses also don't have vascular tissue like a lot of plants and trees. That means they don't have tube-like structures in their stems that bring water to all parts of the plant. Without those tubes, mosses have to get their water by letting it absorb from one cell to the next. That is why mosses are low-growing, and you will always find them in wet areas!