The Rivanna Rambler

December 18, 2008

Learning to identify trees is the business of the amateur naturalist — and these days, one that includes learning about and spreading the word about invasive pests that are threatening whole species, such as the Emerald Ash Borer.

Last weekend I took a short walk along the scrubby and thinly buffered banks of the Rivanna near Free Bridge with some fellow Master Naturalists.  We were out to hone our tree identification skills – best done, I’ve found, after the fall of leaves when one is forced to use the most reliable tools of branching, bark, and leaf scar shape to confirm the ID.

Land disturbance and compaction at this site along the river has been pretty much uninterrupted

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December 11, 2008

 

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This show originally aired on December 11, 2008  on “The Rivanna Rambler,” a weekly public affairs show airing every Thursday at 11:55 a.m. on WTJU 91.1 FM or wtju.net.

There is slow steady winter rain that’s keeping temperatures hovering around forty degrees and the skies dark with winter gloom.  But the rain is good — for our groundwater, for our reservoirs, and it is good for the plants and animals that need this most essential resource to survive.  This rain is also filling our rivers – and I would wager – sending a good amount of water into the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir, along with a healthy amount of dirt.

Now, that dirt is slowly but surely filling the reservoir – each year, decreasing its capacity from 1 to 5 per cent since it was completed in 1969.  In another example of our human short-sightedness, like many public works installations of the era, the design life of this reservoir was only fifty years, at which time the reservoir would be filled to over 50% of its capacity.

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February 28, 2008

In the midst of winter, there are bugs in the stream that are alive and well – and some, eve, are hatching out to become insects, having found their aquatic niche at a time when no others compete.  During StreamWatch sampling on the upper Doyle’s, we find several families of winter stoneflies.

 

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This show originally aired on February 28, 2008 and again on December 4, 2008 on “The Rivanna Rambler,” a weekly public affairs show airing every Thursday at 11:55 a.m. on WTJU 91.1 FM or wtju.net.

The upper Doyles River, like most headwater streams in the Rivanna watershed, is about as pristine as they come.  The waters that collect from springs and drainages of the land that is protected by Shenandoah National Park do not suffer the assaults of sediment and runoff that challenge the health of streams at lower elevations.  For this reason, the community based water monitoring program, StreamWatch, has chosen a spot high on the Doyles as one of several headwater streams that will be used during the next few years as “reference streams” – a standard of “as good as it gets in our watershed” — against which other tributaries of the Rivanna will be evaluated.

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