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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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.

Shedding light on our watersheds

We've spent some time today poking around on the internet looking for insights on why so many Minnesotans inaccurately think the state is on the right track for protecting water. Our first stop was the Department of Education's web site. We were curious to see if any part of Minnesota's "Core Curriculum" or arts or scientific standards included teaching about bioregions and/or watersheds. We're still curious because we couldn't discover any content matter requirements. Neither could we find reference to poetry under any of the standards including English Language Arts.

are we doing enough to protect this?

Photo by J. Harrington

Undaunted, we proceeded to poke the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources web site where we discovered:

Minnesota's watershed basins

This map shows the 8 major basins and 81 major surface water watersheds (there are none numbered 6, 45, or 64 in Minnesota)...

 We were dismayed to learn that our watershed, the Sunrise River, which flows through the Eastern portions of MnDNR's very large Carlos Avery Wildlife Management Area, is not identified. It's incorporated into the "St. Croix-Stillwater watershed."

Perhaps it's understandable that MnDNR seems to have misplaced a watershed, since the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, on their very own web page of watersheds, tells us that:

Minnesota has 80 major watersheds located within the 10 major water basins of the state.

 If two of the primary state agencies responsible for working on watershed management can't agree on the number of major basins (8 versus 10) nor the number of watersheds (81 versus 80), it could be quite a challenge for educators to try to teach their students which watershed they live in or attend school in. And yet, were we to propose that Minnesotans become much more aware of water resources and develop a water ethic, we'd really like to be sure that students from grades K through 12 learn, as part of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, ARTS, math) about the watershed and bioregion where they and their families live.

Misplacing watersheds such as the Sunrise river seems particularly egregious for the MnPCA, since a search for Sunrise River on the agency's web site yields 296 results. That seems like quite a bit of information for a watershed that isn't officially acknowledged. For example, here's the Sunrise River Watershed Restoration and Protection Strategy Report - Final. It notes that

The Sunrise River Watershed is approximately 385 square miles and is located in parts of four counties (Anoka, Chisago, Isanti, and Washington) with the largest area in Chisago County. The area includes eight incorporated cities (North Branch, Stacy, Wyoming, Forest Lake, East Bethel, Chisago City, Lindstrom, and Center City) and covers portions of nineteen townships...

We don't need to reinvent the wheel to get a handle on this slippery subject. We needn't continue to let reality slip between our fingers. Several years ago, the University of Minnesota's Water Resources Center produced a Water Sustainability Framework. That referenced DNR's basins. It also identified a substantial number of agencies that often work on issues in an uncoordinated fashion. Were we Minnesota's water czar for a few years, we'd work intensely with the legislature to ensure that the process outlined in the Framework was adopted or improved. To our knowledge, the Minnesota legislature has done nothing substantive in response to the Framework Report. Does Minnesota's need for a water ethic start with the legislature?

For the Children

Gary Snyder

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
The steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down. 

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it. 

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children: 

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.