August 22, 2025
Hey everyone, hope you enjoyed the beautiful weather this week! We sure did, and especially on Saturday with our Swim for the South Shore. A huge thanks goes out to everyone who showed up and supported us. It was a great turnout and an exciting day was had by all. If you didn’t manage to make it, we hope to see you next August!
The rest of the week was spent working on tasks to finish up the field season. This coming week is our last with the field crew (they will be missed!) and we want to make sure that we have all of our in-stream restoration work done by then. This meant more brush mats made in each of our three main watersheds–DeSable, Westmoreland, and Tryon–and also a new focus on fish cover logs. This is something that is newer to the current crew and they tackled it with vigor. These logs are cut from dead trees and are positioned at an angle over pools in the stream. They help provide shade for the fish and help keep the water temperature down, but most importantly they provide cover from airborne predators to the fish. This provided many opportunities for teamwork and hard thinking as we needed to move the logs around and make sure we were cutting them safely.
Thursday saw us conducting the penultimate water quality check for the season. Things are looking good, even with that very hot week in there, and we are pleased with the water conditions despite the low levels of pretty much all of our watersheds. It’s always interesting to compare the results with previous years and see where there might be differences and similarities.
Friday we started building some birdhouses to expand our swallow monitoring program. These boxes are specifically designed to help with bird banding and have a hinged lid. They are extremely useful, but also more complicated than the normal bird boxes we make, but we were up for the challenge. It was a good way to switch up what we were working on and get started on preparation for next season at the same time. We are looking forward to installing the boxes and hopefully finding birds in them next spring!
We hope you all are doing well as the summer winds down and are looking forward to fall. Wishing a few more good beach days to everyone on the island!
Love,
SSWA
