Week 10/15-19

This week we have made several connections in preparation for the project we must submit for the Lexus Eco Land and Water Challenge. We talked to several teacher in the Hoover City Schools system about incorporating aspects of our trail into their curriculum. We connected to Mr.Abernathy and White about visiting to talk to middle schoolers about environmental issues and the cahaba. We also connected to Mrs.Flynn to take her class out to our trail for one of her projects. We are also planning an event with Home Depot to make bat bird and butterfly houses to set up along the trail.

For my individual project, I have completed my outline for my EE. I found that erosion and sedimentation control practices are actually effective, if correctly implemented. I had actually expected that the practices would not be sufficiently effective. I guess it's a pretty good thing that my expectation was wrong! 😃

Search for Mussles! 10/12

Today we want out to the beach site to look for clams and mussles. We definitely found a ton of clams! Finding the mussels was difficult and we only found one live mussel. Interestingly, the many dead mussels we found were all concentrated in one area along the shore. Our only living mussel just HAD to be named..Bartholomoo. Hopefully he is still living when we return to the site. We also found a huge mussel that was dead. After consulting Dr. Haddock of the Cahaba River Society, we learned it is unlikely to find mussels this large this far up the Cahaba.

Another interesting find is unrelated to our search for mussels. Once we got to the site we saw the largest fish that we had ever seen at that site.