July 11, 2025
This week was new and different, because we conducted 3 bank swallow surveys. Everyone on the crew got a chance to go out and walk the beaches of our watershed looking for these little birds. The Island Nature Trust monitors this threatened swallow species through volunteer scientists, and after having conducted surveys for them in 2023 when they asked all of the watersheds to survey their areas, we felt very prepared to conduct some this week. We are happy to report that the bank swallow colony in Victoria is thriving and if you want to learn more about these adorable birds, why they are threatened and what you can do about it, email us at sswaprojects@gmail.com or check out INT’s bank swallow review from a couple years ago.
Speaking of swallows, we finished up banding all of our tree swallow chicks on Thursday so there’s another year of tree swallow monitoring under our belts. We are looking forward to watching the last few nests of chicks fledge and are hoping to put up more boxes for next year to expand our part in this project. A huge thanks to the Wildlife Conservation Fund for their part in this, Forest Fish and Wildlife for helping us band the birds, and all the other watersheds involved, especially Trout River Environmental Committee who is organizing the project this year.
We also received some bat monitors from the Watershed Alliance to conduct bat monitoring surveys in our watershed. This is important information for us to have, and the Alliance tries to cover most of the Island with these surveys to get a whole picture of the health of the bat population, what species are located where, and how many of them there are. It is always exciting to see where we have a lot of bats in the watershed!
Other than that, we removed invasive species, installed 7 brush mats in Tryon and Westmoreland, and restored stream on the west branch of Westmoreland to connect fish passage between two areas we had restored last year. We are happy to be seeing progress towards our restoration goals this summer, and it always feels good to be making a difference.
Keep an eye out for Swim for the South Shore information going live on Monday! We hope to see you out this year, and we have a new 0.5 km option for those of you who are feeling slightly less intrepid.
Hope you are all staying cool and dry!
Love, SSWA
