Birds, Drinking water, gardens and daylighting - how else would you want to spend your day!
Submitted by Carissa Summers on Wed, 2017-07-12 00:00
The history lessons we are learning are amazing! It is amazing what our pioneers figured out and created and now we are experiencing the results of their effects, sometime good and sometimes not so good - still amazing. We started out the day at the Idaho Bird Observatory - Fabiola, we need to go again this summer, we will need to check their calendar - it is done every 10 days. They had 8 nets set up and were capturing birds, checking nets every 15 to 20 minutes for approximately 5 hours. They collected data about each bird, tagged them and released them. I got to release a couple of them - we caught a few on slow mo video! But watch out for the poison ivy.
Another awesome meal - lunch at the municipal Park - ran out of time to go see the Nature Center walk - Fabiola we can take Madalina there sometime this summer!
The Suez Drinking water treatment plant tour was interesting because its the only plant that uses water directly from the river and not from a well and it is owned by some French company. Surprising they go through all this effort and many Boisians use this water for irrigating their lawns beside drinkng water.
Now I thought we were going to see vegetable garden - this was way cooler - they were native wild plants of Idaho! I love wildflowers. I would love to make a garden like the one we saw at our school. We did an activity counting pollinators and graphing them.
The highlight of the day was the Cottonwood Creek Tour, I want to hike that road up to the top!!!! The landscape is amazing because it is so close to Boise! Our poineers thought they were fixing a problem; however, today we see it differently. The pioneers wanting to prevent flooding of the Cottonwood Creek onto the Capital building and downtown buildings of those days (1800's) so they built a flume (concrete walled canal), years later then others covered it up. Today fish cannot use it as a place to hide when young. Thus the word "daylighting" come into play. Trout Unlimited wants to uncover the last section of the flume nd restore it to its natural state, so fish have a small place to retrieve (this would be near the Boise Zoo). Fabiola, I wish you could experience all this. Check out all the pictures!!!!
Comments
Jealous!!
Carissa,
This sounds like it would have been my favorite day. That is what interests me so much. We definitely need to go and do those things. Madalina would love it too.
I agree with the garden. there is actually a home in my neighbordhood that has landscape made of native Idaho plants. Rhet pointed it out saying that he has seem many of them as he has been out hunting. I truly like that idea.. I would love to be able to do some kind of plant identification activity along with it, allow them to practice a dichotomous key would be fun, something fun. How about we combine it with our food chains and webs layered unit? We can have them take those native plants and contruct their own food web based on research of Idaho wildlife.
I like the idea of introducing pollinators as well. What effect would it have on the ecosystem if the pollinators numbers were reduced? Someone else had blogged that there are many conditions needed for the trout to thrive; you'll have to tell me more later.
Very Jealous!
This would have been my favorite day too! I would have loved to have gone to the bird observatory. I looked up other dates and I am hoping to be able to go sometime. Did you know that they are banding humming birds too?
I keep a small garden at the back edge of my property and when I first began I did not think about having flowers in with my vegetables, but when I noticed tons of honey bees coming in from the field behind my house, I started to include flowers in my gardening. I love watching the happy lil bees enjoying my garden. I love the idea of a native plant landscape, but being allergic to sage brush, blue spruce, and juniper may hinder that idea. I will have to look up some of the other native plants to see what I might be able to incorporate next year.
Not an Expert
I'm no expert, but there are resources out there to help folks build native-only gardens, both in the general sense and specifically for the Treasure Valley. I would recommend researching "Treasure Valley native gardens" or somesuch, rather than specific plants. And, of course, there are several existing gardens you can visit for information and inspiration, I know that the Botanical Gardens at the Old Idaho Pen have a native-garden section where you can stroll through a very well designed plot with plant labels and tips for fire-safety!
Also Jealous! :)
Like the other digi-learners, I'm also jealous of your very awesome day adventure-learning! :)
And, thanks to your post, I learned a new term today, "daylighting", the act of unburying infrastructure, bringing it into the daylight!