Update on Minnesota's watersheds and local #phenology

This morning we followed up on something the Better Half mentioned yesterday regarding our post. She informed us that the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has a curriculum on watersheds. It took more time than we think it should have (but that time was not spent reading political news 😂) to finally find what we think she was referencing. It's the Minnesota Project Wet (Water Education for Teachers) program, which has produced a Water Primer and Project Wet companion book titled Water Ways, available as a free downloadable PDF. We skimmed through the contents and they look pretty good. One thing we've noticed with some dismay is that there doesn't appear to be any mention of either the Trout Unlimited Trout in the Classroom program nor the international River of Words art and poetry contest for children 5 - 19. We believe there's a fantastic opportunity for Minnesota to formulate a highly productive partnership among these three programs and use that to help create a better basis for a real Minnesota water ethic.

As we were searching the internets for the watershed curriculum, we decided that one of the problems we all are faced with is a really poor signal to noise ratio when it comes to watersheds. There's lots and lots of information, plus even more data, with too little structure or very much in the way of really useful information architecture. Here's an example on the United States Geological Survey website Science in Your Watershed. Water Ways does a much better job of teaching us what we need to know about our watersheds, but it took a lot of searching to find it.

[While we were at it, we also found the "missing watershed" we posted about yesterday. Perhaps tomorrow we'll share those findings.]

On the local phenology front, here's the update:

• Purple love grass is maturing. Our fields are taking on a pinkish tinge.





mature purple love grass


Photo by J. Harrington



• Yesterday we confirmed the simultaneous arrival at the nectar feeder of three female hummingbirds. One may have been an immature? Two seemed friendly and the third kept trying to chase everyone away from the feeder.





tussock moth larvae on milkweed


Photo by J. Harrington



• Today we confirmed the tentative tussock moth identification of a few days ago. We noticed more hatchlings and a later stage instar on a different milkweed plant.

A Walk to Carter’s Lake

By David Bottoms

Look, above the creek, hummingbirds in the trumpet vine.

Not too close, wait. See the green blurs

stitching the leaves?

Here at the edge of the millennium

I don’t imagine

you’d call them anything as archaic as angels.

But aren’t they agents of a sort, and secret,

dissolving and solidifying,

spying from their constantly shifting perches of air,

always nervous

of us, risking only a stab

in a bell of petals?

Don’t look so stunned, lay your pack

in the needles and catch a breath. I know,

you thought you knew me,

and now to hear me talk this way ...

I’m glad I’ve stopped pretending

to love people

and the cities where people can’t love themselves.

This is what the quiet accomplishes,

and the water trusting

the shadows to eventually peel back to the trees.

Small wonder the angels are said to despise us.

Still, without them

how do we account for our meanness?

Look at that, what else can promenade

in the air? And how easily

they’re alarmed,

revving off into the mist.

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