water bugs

This morning the Master Naturalist crew headed out to Pecan Creek at Woodrow Lane to collect benthic macroinvertebrates. Marilyn and Cheryl were kick-netting in the riffle, and got a small haul of mayflies, I think, and Marilyn tried and tried to pick the water-fleas, with frustrating results.

Theresa Page was sweep-netting in the pool upstream of the bridge; Kay and I picked her haul -- well, I held the bottle and Kay picked; she was very neat with the forceps. We had a huge haul of mayflies, BIG dragonflies, some worms, and I don't know what else.

The damselflies are the generally slender ones with the three feathery gill "tails." The related dragonflies are much stouter, big fat fellows with predatory mouthparts.

We didn't ID what we got, because our new liason with the city Watershed Protection crew, Doug I think his name is, spent the hour and a half after we came in teaching us how to do the numbers with our results so as to produce an objective numerical quality score for the stream. We will meet next week to work on today's bugs.

The considerable rain -- yesterday? Wednesday? I forget -- made the access lane VERY muddy, and Kay and I stood up and held the tray to pick. No sitting or kneeling on the bank today!

Checking with the weather page, I see that it started to rain about 10 or 11 pm Wednesday night, and continued till around 7 Thursday morning. It was pretty bright around ten when I walked to Nunn's office, but very overcast when I left. Tomorrow it's supposed to be in the forties, and freeze a bit at night. The poor selloum has been in the basement now for days again; I have to get it up into the house into the light!