For years, I’ve known that the river’s health is affected by much more than shopping carts and trash that finds it way into the water. Yet every time I looked at a monitoring program to look at the other qualities of the water, it was glaringly obvious that it would take a long-term effort by many volunteers at least five times each season to get a sense of the river’s health.

That would take not just time, but money as well. Money for buying the sampling kits and chemical reagants, or money to ship the water samples to a lab for professional testing.

Taking a sample of water, even every two weeks, is still getting just a snap-shot of the river’s health. What if you fill a sample bottle just after a heavy rain, and lots of beaver waste had washed into the river from an upstream pond? Your bacterial counts will be very high! But is that indicative of poor overall water quality? Unlikely. But that is what your sample will show.

I began to look at the tiny insect larvae that spend a portion of their lives on the river-bottom; these little critters can be a real source of information about the long-term health of the water! Some critters can’t stand even small amounts of pollution, others don’t mind it at all. Some need very cold, well-oxygenated water, others can handle a hot bath. So taking a good look at what is living in the river over a season can go a long way to telling us what the water is like.

Come join us for a Bug Hunt! We’ll gather aquatic insects from the bottom of the river, sort them by body type, then identify and count them. Over time, we’ll start to get a good picture of the quality of the river.