Watershed Festivals a HUGE success in Southwest Missouri!

In March, I finished my volunteer stint with local watershed festivals. We exposed over 3000 local fifth graders to water quality. Last November, I helped with the two day Barry County festival. This year started with five days at the Christian County festival, one day in Stone County, and the school year was completed with a two day festival in Taney County. The post survey completed by the fifth graders, over the last several years, indicated they weren't retaining much of the information presented in the "Build Your Own Watershed" activity. Guess which activity I was presenting? The pressure was on! For the Christian County festival, it was decided to present the information differently. After two days, I found the students were not engaged with the activity. So on the third day, I brought a special friend with me to help. I brought Slimy, a yellow, plastic frog! (Can you find him in the picture?) Slimy was a HUGE hit. I liked watching the students interact with Slimy and care about what was happening in his watershed. He will definitely be back next year!

Trash Bash - Creve Coeur Creek

These dedicated volunteers worked very hard to help clean-up Creve Coeur Creek during the Trash Bash on March 28. They filled a dumpster in addition to gathering up a large pile of plastic strapping. This was part of a larger effort being held at many different sites across the St. Louis area. The boyscouts on the left did not let the rain and cold scare them away. Their biggest challenge that day was deciding who had to pick up the dirty diaper they found.

Business Expo in Anderson, MO

The Elk River Watershed Improvement Assoc. had a booth at the Business Expo in Anderson on March 28th. The day started off sleety and snowy, but I think that helped bring in that many more people- they had a great turnout! Drew and I spent the day talking to many people about our watershed and the Stream Team program. I talked to quite a few 5th graders that remembered me from either the Water Awareness Festival or the follow-up classroom presentations, and they were excited to get involved with a stream team activity! ~Bev

March Madness

Well we kicked off March with our first big clean-up of the year, the Mari-Osa Dump Clean-up part 2! We have now been working on this massive eyesore of an ancient dumpsite on the beautiful Osage River for two year's in row, and the stories & photos from this adventure are just priceless! Check them out on Missouri River Relief's river notes blog: http://riverrelief.blogspot.com/search/label/Mari-Osa

There's even a fun video Jim Karpowicz made of the ingenious trash flume some of our crew members designed to shoot the mass of broken glass & tin cans down the hill in a quick & efficient manner. It's pretty funny, here's the link to the page from our website, scroll all the way to the bottom for the video: http://www.riverrelief.org/event/mari-osa-dump-part-2/ Lot's of fun event results posted there too!

It's been a busy Spring so far, and it doesn't look like we'll be giving our clean-up efforts a rest anytime soon. So stay tuned in for more fun stories & future event postings! www.riverrelief.org

Confluence Trash Bash - What's a Little Rain?

Steady rain and cool temperatures were no problem for about 300 volunteers who turned out on March 28 to pull trash from streams and rivers around the City and County of St. Louis. We spread out to a dozen locations throughout the region, including Creve Coeur Lake and Creek, Cowmire Creek, Coldwater Creek, Maline Creek, Watkins Creek, North Riverfont Park on the Mississippi River, the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge over the Mississippi River, and the Missouri River on boats operated by Missouri River Relief. After about 3 hours of work, the dumpster above was full of trash, another was full of tires, and one more was about half full of scrap metal. A few hearty souls even stuck around for a rain-soaked BBQ lunch. View more photos of the soggy adventure at http://www.flickr.com/photos/26071682@N05/sets/72157616136896548/ Many thanks to the many sponsors and partners, and most of all to the hearty volunteers!

Invasive Species Removal at Kiwanis Park

(Photo: Pam Venable showing off some recently pulled up Japanese Honeysuckle, photographed by Katrina Thomas)

Much of February was spent staying out of the cold, but there were a few days that great for getting out. On February 7, we worked with TreeKeepers to do another Japanese Honeysuckle removal at Kiwanis Park. [We had done one previously in October 2008] The chipper was filled up in about 2 hours, but there was another chipper load or two that were left as "rabbit habitat" out in the park. There was so much honeysuckle left where it was cut that many people, including myself, would make their way to cut down a nearby plant only to find that the plant was already cut. The best part of the

event was at the end when I was walking through the park back towards the parking lot and seeing the area clear of honeysuckle, and the pile of honeysuckle that had been put in place in the parking lot.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Activity

In January, there was a lot of promotion for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to be a "day on, not a day off." In honor of this we decided to give a small presentation to the children at the Intersection here in Columbia. Melanie [Cheney] gave an excellent presentation about how we serve with the Missouri Stream Team Program as assistants, and about all of the good things that stream teams do for our waterways here in Missouri. The kids seemed to be really interested in possibly getting out there to pick up trash or even to get to go out on a boat ride on the Missouri River. Afterwords, we took the kids to a back room so that they could paint a rain barrel that we had brought [donated courtesy of MRCN]. The rain barrel will be used to catch rain water at the Intersection for they garden. All in all it was a great time with the kids learning a little about service and water quality.

Katrina, Pam, & Lea helping the kids paint a rain barrel