Springdale Job Corps Protects Beaver Creek

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Friday morning, a group of 5 very hard-working women from the Springdale Job Corps came out to volunteer at Beaver Creek. There has been a lot of work going on at this site, and we have gotten a lot of plants in the ground with previous community groups and volunteers, but there is still much to be done. Beaver Creek is very aptly named and there is a very healthy beaver population residing there. One of a beaver’s favorite snacks is young saplings, like the ones we have been planting. While we are excited that there are so many beavers at the site (they add large woody debris to streams and complexity to the stream bed), we want to encourage them to find other sources of food rather than the young trees and shrubs volunteers have spent so much time planting. That’s where the hard-working ladies from Springdale Job Corps came in. They spent a couple of hours Friday morning unrolling, bending, and cutting wire fencing to create over 50 cages that we can put around the saplings to protect them from beavers until they grow big enough to withstand a little beaver gnawing.

Thanks so much Springdale Job Corps! SOLV and new arrivals at Beaver Creek thank you for helping protect them!

Springdale Job Corps Busy at Beaver Creek

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Green Team staff has been very busy running around these past few weeks planning all of our Green Team events for this coming school year! We are excited to spend more time monitoring our streams’ health by looking at macroinvertibrates (read: bugs) in our stream systems this year.

Meanwhile, there is still much work to be done in the field to water and take care of the many native plants past Green Teams have planted, especially in this unusally hot weather! Last Friday, some members of the Springdale Job Corps came out to volunteer with us at our Beaver Creek site in Troutdale. Our volunteers, Michelle, Doug, and Chanel, were awesome workers. Despite the muggy heat and the sweat that was dripping down our faces and the cottony fireweed seeds we kept inhaling, we got a lot of work done!  They cleared blackberry and fireweed that was threatening to shade out over 100 native trees and shrubs that were planted earlier in the year. Then we added mulch to the bottom of the plants to prevent further weeds from choking them out.  This also prevents their roots from drying out too much.

We love having the Springdale Job Corps come out and helping with our sites, and they seemed to have a great time too!

Springdale Job Corps on a Tracking Mission

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This week, four students from Springdale Job Corps, Meghan (SOLV), Charlie (SOLV), and I (Gina), spent a very sunny morning at Beaver Creek watering our recently planted native trees and shrubs and casting tracks we found along the stream.  These students eagerly grabbed 5 lb buckets, filled them with water from the stream, and fearlessly walked through stinging nettle and blackberry to give our natives the water they needed to survive and conquer!  Even though we have had a fairly rainy summer, these new natives were definitely in need of more water after all of the sunshine we are getting now.  After lots of hard work loading, carrying, and pouring these buckets, we were excited to get to play with plaster and just have fun.

We each filled a small bag with plaster and set out to discover the most intriguing tracks we could find.  Many animals call Beaver Creek home including beavers (of course!), Great Blue Heron, racoons, garter snakes, and much more.  We walked along the stream and stumbled upon fresh racoon tracks!  They were all over the place so a couple of us chose the most detailed track we could find and poured our plaster down.  A couple more of us traveled up the stream a ways, really investing in this mission to find the perfect track.  We all grouped back up, found our hardened tracks and took our new souvineers home.  We are so glad to have all sorts of animals living near Beaver Creek- perhaps we will even see one in action on future visits!