POBR - Wellpinit Fairgrounds - Day 5

 

People of The Big River

Location: Wellpinit Fair Grounds

Day 5

Day five was another early day I got up and it was so cold especially since I went to sleep with my hair wet (very bad idea, never again, what was I thinking). Again, with our morning routine of breakfast, getting ready and packing lunch. Today we got to measure the health and potential growth of a creek running through the reservation and off of it onto a member of the community’s land. We got to use a special tool to figure out how deep the creek has cut into the land and the tech professionals that we were with for the day explained to us that a healthy creek is supposed to spread through the plains and valleys rather than cutting through them making them deeper. That was really interesting because it was a spot a group that took this class previously had helped out with a different part of that project, so it was cool for their instructors to see the growth and changes. However, I think the best part of the day was going shock fishing to see if we could catch some of the native and non-native fish flowing through the same creek in a different area. The shock fishing was so cool I had never seen anything like it before. Jordyan Matherley and Josh Keiffer showed us how it all worked with their shock backpacks and how it only numbed the fish enough for us to catch them without actually hurting them. We caught so many different fish all relatively small, but my team also caught a crawfish which was super cool. After that we tagged the Red Band fish they were looking to see the progress on from another project they had been monitoring. They let them go and killed the non-native fish, so they didn’t return them to the water. We also collected water samples there too and tested for all our different categories. Nitrates, pH, the turbidity of the water, temperature, and the velocity of the creek. They also let us swim in the same creek and that was a ton of fun even though it was super cold at first. 

While we were with Jordyn and Josh, I asked Jordyn a ton of questions about her career and how she had acquired the position she currently had. She was very informative about how the jobs she’s had led her to find the ideal one for her. She specifically said that she really liked doing what she does because she loves being out in the field and she’s not constrained to a desk for a big portion of her time at work, she works as a tech two which she described as doing grunt work or field work. They both seemed very passionate about what they do, and they were a ton of fun to work with throughout the whole day. After that we had dinner and watched a part of the second Hunger Games movie, but it was cut short because our projector died on us at the most exciting part and that was it for day five. 


 

 

 

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