Findings on the Buffalo

So the interns are starting to move in for work this summer, which I think we are all excited about!!  On the Buffalo River the other day, HFF counted and measured the number of fish in the outmigrant trap and fish ladder trap around the hydroelectric dam. Joining this process with Matt Cahoon and Anne Marie Emery for the first time were me, Kendra Sultzer, and another of Henry's Fork Foundation interns for the summer, Chase Douglas. Along with measuring and counting the number of fish, we encountered a few other species. Collecting the organic matter from the top of the screens leading to the outmigrant trap, we found a giant water bug, or Belostomatidae. We released it back into the river, but it didn't want to leave the pavement and clung to the edge. Watch the video below and keep following to read about more exciting experiences throughout the summer! 

The past couple of days were unique in that we were able to devote the majority of our activities to the educational aspect of the Henry’s Fork Foundation. On Friday, July 15th, we attended the Island Park Craft Fair at the Buffalo Run Campground where we set up a Henry’s Fork Foundation-sponsored craft tent for children. At the tent, children ranging in age from 4 to 12 were able to make and decorate their very own plant presses. The presses each consisted of two pieces of cardboard and newspaper bungeed inside of two pieces of painted plywood-like material to which the children added their own paintings and glitter. While the paint dried on the presses, Ann Marie took the children on a brief nature walk where they could locate their very own wildflowers to press and bring home. The presses ended up being a huge success! Many more children came than anticipated, but there were enough presses to go around and the children went home excited to go out into nature and find more plants to press.



Kids work away at designing individual hand-held flower presses.




Children sort through sediments to find macroinvertebrates.

On Saturday the 16th, we again set up a station at the craft fair. This time, however, we planned a very different sort of activity for the children: bug hunting. Prior to the fair, Anne Marie collected a bucket full of sediments and water from the Buffalo River and then divided it into smaller samples within petri dishes. The children who came to the tent were supplied with tweezers and microscopes so that they could pick out as many bugs from the samples as possible and put them in a separate water-filled container, from which Anne Marie taught them about what they were seeing. Stoneflies, Caddis cases, leeches, snails, and snail eggs were just some of the exciting critters which the children were able to discover and learn about in the context of their life cycles and their importance to river ecosystems.



Anne Marie explains the life cycle of a stone fly to a group of children.


Yesterday, Monday the 18th, Thomas and Eli spent the day cleaning and monitoring the Thurman Weir and Buffalo River fish traps. Meanwhile, myself and Heidi assisted Anne Marie in designing and going over some of the material for Trout in the Classroom as well as planning and improving an annual fieldtrip that local fifth graders make to the Chester Wetlands. The highlight of the day was definitely making a field trip of our own where we were able to meet with Josh Rydalch, the wildlife biologist working for Idaho Fish and Game at the wetlands. Josh took us on a brief hike of the wetlands which he thought could be added to the field trip program in order to enhance the children’s enjoyment and appreciation of the wetlands. From this little adventure, we were able to get an understanding of the diversity of plants, insects, birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians which are found in the Chester Wetlands, thus enabling us to begin forming a vision of how to build upon the material discussed in the previous years to really emphasize the importance of the Chester Wetlands to the children. The next couple of months will consist of building upon these ideas so that the field trip could potentially take place this coming September, rather than when it ususally occurs in May. This change in timing would be ideal in that the weather will potentially be more enjoyable than in May and the children will hopefully also have a chance to view an endangered orchid which blooms in the wetlands around August/September of each year.

Barbed Wire and Calderas

This being my first post I'm not really sure how to start...so I'm just going to jump right in where Heidi left off. Last Thursday, July 7th, we interns spent our first full day off of the water in a long time to help out Kim Ragotzkie, the Stewardship Director at the foundation, with the very important task of fencing. After dealing with some unanticipated car problems first thing in the morning (aka attempting (and failing) to jump Anne Marie's car at the Shell station) we met Kim by the Mesa Falls exit off of Route 20 so that we could head over to Harriman State Park and begin working. And that's when the real fun began. Now when I heard that we were going to spend the day putting up barbed wire fencing I wasn't really sure how this task would stack up in comparison with our more regular duties; however, the day ended up being beautiful and fencing itself proved to be a task which gave us all a sense of accomplishment. By the end of the day we had replaced the fencing which had to be taken down for the winter (so as to prevent snow-induced damages) next to the portion of the Henry's Fork River running alongside of Route 20. While working with fencing is not something which we interns do all that often, ensuring that effective riparian fencing is in place is essential to the health of the Henry’s Fork in that it prevents cattle grazing from causing degradation to the riverbank. Thus, our day proved to be an extremely well spent break from our usual order of business.



After the weekend, we returned to work today for a field trip! Seriously though, who gets to go on field trips while at work…how awesome is that?! We were fortunate enough to spend the day with Dr. Bill Hackett, a local geologist, in order to learn about the unique geological history of Island Park and its surroundings. The highlights of the trip included stops at Mesa Falls, Big Springs, a location near the Island Park Reservoir, and various outcrops in the area primarily to discuss how the Henry’s Fork Caldera formed. We learned a lot of really technical stuff, but essentially continental drift along a hotspot, which is now in Yellowstone, combined with a series of volcanic activities roughly 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 600 thousand years ago, are the things which have formed both the roughly 20-mile wide caldera in which Island Park lies as well as the neighboring caldera in Yellowstone. It was super interesting to be able to see Island Park from the perspective of a professional geologist, who looks at a landscape and sees things in a completely different way from most people. Today was truly a unique and informative experience for us interns to learn about this area where we are spending our summer.

Biocontrol, electrofishing, and feminine crawdads

Last Friday, Katie and I accompanied Kim around Harriman State Park to release bio-control flies. The flies were designed to control the Canada thistle that is invasive in the area. They had really pretty wings with a black and white striped pattern. We got to see new areas of the park and climb through sagebrush to place the flies on the thistle. Apparently the flies are a more efficient and cost-effective method of controlling the thistle and don’t involve putting chemicals in the park. They have been thoroughly tested and don’t attack the native thistle. It seemed like an ideal solution.

After a long Fourth of July weekend, we went to Thurman Creek to go electrofishing yesterday for the first time. All of the interns were there working, but it was definitely hard work! Two people were carrying the electrofishing equipment and shocking the fish while two others had nets to catch the fish and two more had buckets to carry the fish we caught. We were all learning how to do it (except Anne Marie, of course) so we had a couple more fish fatalities than we had hoped for. It was fun to see the number of fish swimming in the creek. We saw larger ones than we had seen before there. Because we were so new at electrofishing, we saw a couple big fish that we didn’t end up catching, but I am sure with practice we will get more efficient.

While we were waiting for everyone to get to the weir earlier in the day, Katie and I counted the fish and crawdads in the trap. The number of fish was much lower than it has been for the last few weeks, but the number of crawdads was huge. We counted more than 400 of them! We decided to try informally tracking the crawdads to see if they move much in the creek, so we took a random sample and painted them with coral colored nail polish on their shells. We don’t know if the nail polish will stay on or if tracking them will change anything, but it will make counting them in the future more fun.

New Summer, New Projects

It is hard to know where to start to start the blog with a whole new group of interns for the summer. There are five of us – one local intern and four from out of the area. Matt is the local intern and he went to BYU-Idaho. Eli and Thomas attend Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Katie is a rising senior at Colgate University in New York and Heidi graduated from Stanford University before coming out to Idaho for the summer. For the past two weeks, we’ve had a volunteer, Stuart, working with the crew. He is a rising high school senior in Salt Lake City.

Our biggest project so far this summer has been rebuilding the weir on Thurman Creek in Harriman

The group working on the weir

Eli working hard

State Park. We wanted to move it because the conditions were better down the creek about 100 feet. To make the weir, we set up metal frames, keeping them in place with rebar, and put metal poles through the holes in the frame. We didn’t have enough poles and frames to fill the wider part of the creek so we used rebar and plastic netting for most of one side. Since building the weir, we’ve been really successful in catching fish in the trap. The first day we checked the trap, we were all stunned by the number of crawdads in the trap. There were a couple hundred in there! We had to hold back the urge to take them home for dinner. In addition to the crawdads, there were a ton of sculpin and shiners, a few dace and chub, and a rainbow trout. Katie learned how to pit tag the trout, which I’m sure she’ll write about soon.

Other projects we’ve been working on include checking and cleaning the traps on the fish ladder on the Buffalo River, helping with landscaping at Harriman State Park, setting up for Henry’s Fork Day, and doing a creel survey along the Buffalo River. We’ll write about all those projects in detail soon!

It’s been a great summer to be an intern – the people are great, the weather is beautiful, and the work is fun. We are all looking forward to an amazing summer!

Brook Trout Genetics

Although I am back at school at Colgate University now, I will continue to update the blog to provide more information on what the Henry's Fork Foundation interns got up to this summer. The second-biggest project we worked on in addition to the Caldera Project tributaries study was collecting brook trout genetic samples for Trout Unlimited. This project started when TU approached the Foundation and requested that we help them out for a project seeking to assess the genetics of the invasive brook trout in the streams of eastern Idaho.

You may wonder why researchers care about the genetic quality of brook trout when it is the pure strain of yellowstone cutthroat that most anglers are after. However, in our long term monitoring of many different streams in the Henry's Fork watershed, the foundation has found that some streams can support both yellowstone cutthroat and brook trout without the brook trout ever completely taking over the area and wiping out the native cutthroats. On the other hand, some streams have seen the brook trout completely out-competing the native trout. While many factors could be at play here, it would be interesting to see if the genetic stock of the trout has any affect on the balance of species in these streams, i.e. if one (or a few) particularly well-suited groups of brook trout are capable of wiping out cutthroat while other less well-adapted brookies are not able to fully invade. This project will help to establish the genetics of the brook trout in the watershed and will hopefully help further the Foundation's goal of promoting the health and abundance of wild cutthroat.

To undertake this project the intern crew and Anne Marie Emery-Miller traveled to four widely distributed and ecologically varied streams within the watershed in order to collect a sample of brook trout from a wide range of habitats. The streams we visited included the East Fork of Dry Creek, Targhee Creek, Warm Springs Creek, and Squirrel Creek. Over a number of days we visited these sites and collected 35 brook trout from each stream, with around 10 fin clips being taken at each site. This method allowed us to gather a useful collection of genetic material for analysis by Trout Unlimited. Hopefully the results from this study will contribute to furthering the Foundations goals in the future. Check out the sites from this study in Google Earth and look at our photos from this project at our Picasa page (links also on the right-hand sidebar). Stay tuned for more news about the summer crew's work.

The Caldera Project and Saying Goodbye

It's hard to believe that I'm leaving in only 2 days! Where did the summer go? As I ponder this question, I begin to reflect on the projects that the other interns and myself have been working on for the past 8 weeks. I will focus on the Caldera Project for this post, as I have worked on this project for the past two summers.

I am a bit of an anomaly in the history of HFF interns as I have worked as an intern for the HFF for two consecutive summers (I loved it here so much I couldn't stay away!). One of the benefits of being here for two consecutive summers is the ability to see how the work you performed the past summer affects the momentum and success of the projects the following summer.

The Caldera Project has been one such occasion where I can look at the data collected from the 2009 electrofishing forms and compare them to the data from this 2010 summer. The Caldera Project is in part, a means to examine fish passage between the tributaries of the Henry's Fork and the main stem of the Henry's Fork. The tributaries that have been monitored include Blue Springs Creek, Fish Creek and Thurmon Creek. The data collected on these three tributaries throughout the past few years suggests that in the summer, fish density in the tributaries drops dramatically, most likely due to warmer temperatures and lower flows. This in turn suggests that the fish that wintered in the tributaries pass back into the main stem of the Henry's Fork in the summer, seeking cooler temperatures. This is good news for the summer angler!

Although this aspect of the Caldera Project is one in which the summer interns have had the most exposure both this summer and in 2009, there are many other working parts to this research machine. For more detailed descriptions of the Caldera Project, please check out this link: http://www.henrysfork.org/node/12. Furthermore, if you would like to see a map of where the interns and Anne Marie have conducted studies, click on this link. For each site on the map, if you click on the site there will be a slideshow of the trout that we found.

On a more personal note, I will be sad to leave the HFF after having two wonderful summers working on such a beautiful and dynamic watershed. I hope this is not the last I see of Island Park or the Henry's Fork, or of the friends I have made at the HFF. I wish you all the best for this year, and don't forget to write us if you have any questions or comments!