Last weekend, we had the first Copeland Creek event of the fall semester: a clean-up sponsored by JUMP and the Friends of Copeland Creek campus club. We had a small turnout, but it was a fantastic day out on the creek! Originally, we’d intended to pick up garbage and go after some of the Himalayan blackberry that’s creeping back into the restoration areas. When we went out to get started, however, I decided that there was more wild radish to be dealt with (and it’s much easier to work with than the blackberry – no thorns!!), so we had a radish-removal day instead.
This semester, I helped to organize a Steelhead Trout release on campus, as part of a program where elementary school students release trout that they had raised in the classroom. Back in February, I was approached by Michael Knappman, who volunteers at University Elementary at La Fiesta Elementary in Rohnert Park. One of their classes was participating the the Water Agency’s ‘Steelhead in the Classroom’ program (https://www.sonomawater.org/steelhead-in-the-classroom), and would have fry to release in May. Since, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has designated Copeland among the acceptable release tributaries of the Russian River, Michael wanted to know if I’d be interested in helping him arrange for the fish to be released on the stretch of Copeland Creek that runs through the Sonoma State campus.
My Vertebrate Biology students deployed a wildlife camera on April 7th, which I retrieved on May 20. Water was flowing in the creek throughout the entire deployment. The only unfortunate thing is that I must have set the photo resolution too high, as my 2GB memory card ran out of space on May 2. But even so, I was excited to see the variety of wildlife that we caught on the camera. This entry features just some of my favorite shots. All my wildlife camera photos (from 2016 to present) can be found on wildlifeinsights.org.
Rather than giving my Vertebrate Biology students a conventional written final exam, I decided to do something more adventurous: have them participate in a BioBlitz on campus so I could assess their knowledge of local wildlife and identification techniques. For anyone not familiar with the term, a BioBlitz is an effort to document biodiversity in a given location during a certain period of time. While the structure of these events can vary, the idea is to identify as many species as possible in the time you are given.
Route traveled
For this event, I allowed the students to form teams. They would be competing against one another, and also against me. I allowed them to use any materials they wanted to use – field guides, iNaturalist, etc., in order to make identifications. I, on the other hand, would only be able to count species that I could identify without any identification guides. This was actually a win/win situation for me . . . if I found the most species, YAY, I WIN! But if any of the teams find more species that I do, that means I taught them well, so again, I WIN! 🙂 Plus, I had a big bag of prizes from the dollar store, enough prizes for everyone, although the “grand prize” winning teams had first pick. There were two ways to win: to identify the highest number of vertebrates (which is how the grades would be determined), and a runner-up prize for the team that found the highest number of species across all taxonomic groups.
One of the nine teams did identify more vertebrates species than I did, and another identified more organisms than I did across all groups, a result that I was pleased with. I think the top count of vertebrates was 32 species (identified in a period of 90 minutes). I found 30 in that time. 🙂
For the first time since COVID, I’m able to take my students on field trips again, and we had a fantastic one yesterday. I took my upper division Vertebrate Biology class to one of our university’s preserves: the Fairfield Osborn Preserve on Sonoma Mountain. One of the preserve’s researchers and naturalists – Julie Wittmann – was our host for the day, and our primary target was herpetofauna (reptilian vertebrates and amphibians). We started out by surveying some of the coverboards that were established in 2015, and then we headed down to the creek to look for salamanders. All along the way, we saw AMAZING wildlife, with a couple of absolute highlights for the day.
Surveying coverboards, and a Western Skink we discovered under one of them:
Yesterday and today, we achieved a big milestone in the Copeland Creek riparian restoration project: putting in some native plants! For this first phase of planting, we started out with grasses, rushes, and sedges (collectively known as “graminoids”), all of them planted near the spot we call Snowberry Corner.
The plants were cultivated here on campus, by the Native Plant Propagation class – they provided us with more plants than we were able to get into the ground! Here they are in the greenhouse, the day before our first planting day:
One of my favorite annual events happened today: the annual Science Symposium on campus, part of the campus-wide Symposium of Research and Creativity. I love it for so many reasons, but mostly to see my students – dressed up in their good clothes – standing with their posters and talking about the research they performed during the past year. There’s a great energy and excitement about the event . . . to be honest, I don’t even mind the last minute flurry of crises that inevitably appear as we’re all trying to get our posters ready to be printed in time for the symposium.
I’ve been involved with this event in some way from its very first year, in 2013, when it was created as a way for students in the Science 120 course (a freshman year experience for students interested in STEM fields) to showcase the independent projects they’d completed during the Spring semester. Back then, they all gave oral presentations, and the poster session was relatively small. Since then, however, the event has shifted away from being focused on Science 120, and opened up to the entire campus. Today, one of the ballrooms was opened up as large as possible, and the room was FILLED with student posters. (My Science 120 students no longer do oral presentations at the event . . . they presented posters in the main hall. We’ll be hosting a separate presentation event for them on the last day of the semester).
I had a great morning out on the creek yesterday, taking some Entomology students out to sample benthic macroinvertebrates in Copeland Creek. This project is a true win/win: I’m getting data for a long-term monitoring study of the creek, and the students are fulfilling a service learning requirement for their biology course.
On Saturday, March 25th, SSU collaborated with the California Conservation Corps’ Watership Stewardship Program to start work on our riparian restoration project (more details about the work we did on Saturday coming soon). One of the side benefits of working alongside the creek is encountering some of the wildlife that shares the campus with us. Here are a few of the highlights of our day . . .
