Rivervision Field Trips

I am happy to report that we are in our 4th month of programming with participating students at Crossroads College Preparatory School in St. Louis!

Wednesday, March 10 we hosted 73 7th and 8th grade science students. Colleagues from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Great Rivers Resource and Education Center joined Audubon staff to make it all happen. Students spent the morning doing Riverwatch field study (chemical water analyses and macroinvertebrate smapling) in Ellis Bay. We did not find as much as I’d hoped for, some leeches, crayfish, and old exoskeletons. The water was still pretty cold (9°C), so we’ll try again after a warm up. After lunch at the beautiful Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary, students embarked on their field study of the Corps’ successful floating barge habitat for the endangered Interior Least Terns.

Not only did they learn about the process of fabricating the barges, but they also got to do the work. Students refurbished the barges that had been beached all winter in preparation for the upcoming nesting season by pulling all plant material, filling in and raking sand, selecting and placing appropriate driftwood for nest sites and cover, and installing rope barriers designed to allow terns while deterring larger flying predators. Later we’ll place decoys, call boxes, and a web cam. Here is a link to a nice PowerPoint about last year’s nesting season, www.ngrrec.org/ppts/giammaria.ppt that has some nice diagrams and pictures of the barges as well as nesting and fledgling data.

The students worked hard and did a wonderful job. We decided to celebrate a job well done with a little tug-o-war before we hiked back to the busses.

Thursday, March 11 we hosted 60 10th and 11th grade chemistry, AP environmental science, and biology students. Once again, we couldn’t have done it without the generous assistance of our partner organizations listed above. Students toured the Melvin Price Locks and Dam and also the brand new National Great Rivers Research and Education Center field station. For more information please visit their webiste at http://www.ngrrec.org/ NGRREC’s field station is a green building marvel that will provide world class river research, some of which is not being done anywhere else in the world! To bring the experience closer to home for the students, one of our hosts and guides was a Crossroads alumni who is now working with NGRREC.

We have a busy April ahead of us that includes several speakers, in-class activities, screening the film Big River, touring waste water and drinking water processing plants in St. Louis, and canoeing and fishing workshops at Riverlands. Working with participating students over time has been such a wonderful learning experience for all of us, and certainly a model that we here at The Audubon Center at Riverlands will continue to develop and utilize.