June 20, 2025
Week 3 started off with some more of our annual stream and head water surveys. This information is greatly needed for us to decide an action plan to ensure the stream remains as healthy as possible. We also finished checking the remainder of the trail camera photos that we collected last week. One of the cameras had a snowshoe hare that we slowly watched change back to its summer coat. Every time it ran past the camera it was a little more brown. And where was the boss when all this happened? NOWHERE TO BE FOUND!!! Just kidding, Matt spent some time on Monday learning how to do a forest bird count survey in Belfast. We may start to introduce this monitoring protocol into our work, so it was good to learn some more about how BAWG does it.
Speaking of bird surveys we continued to monitor our tree swallow boxes to check for eggs. While we found nests and eggs from tree swallows in many of our survey sites, we also had a surprising discovery that a Black-Capped Chickadee decided our survey box is more suitable for its nest than those pesky tree swallows. So now we are tracking the progress of a Chickadee nest as well. We also continued with our Quadrat Salt-Marsh surveys and our fish trap survey. This marks the first week we ever got fish every day we checked the trap.
During the mid-late week our attention was shifted to trees as we received trees for our first major planting project this year. 1800 trees were delivered to SSWA this week as we begin the largest planting season SSWA has ever seen. The next week or so is going to be spent planting a coastal buffer zone with around 1300 trees and shrubs! Look out for before and after pictures over the next year as this project progresses.
Thursday we did our second public event of the season with Ron. The crew and members of the public gathered at the Tryon Trail and went birding. Ron, an avid birder in the area, led us around as we looked and listened for the birds as we tracked them on the Merlin Bird ID app. We were excited to hear a catbird and a Northern Cardinal but did not see either of them. It was fun to learn from such an experienced birder, and some of the crew got excited to start using Merlin in the field.
To wrap up this busy week we conducted another stream assessment and headwater survey, did some park maintenance at the Daryl Guignon Memorial Park in Crapaud and planted even more trees.
Stay tuned for more interesting updates as our season progresses!
Love, SSWA
