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By Kit Johnston
and Beverijy Hunter
Special to the Rappahannock News
Composed of 20 eager learners from the Rappahannock County area, along with several trainers, principally from the Culpeper Soil and Water Conservation District (CSWCD), the Izaak Walton League’s Save Our Streams gathered recently at Cliff Miller’s Mount Vernon Farm in Sperryville for a handson workshop on how to monitor stream quality.
Leading the workshop was Greg Wichelns, manager for the CSWCD, and Jay Gilliam, who long ago started the League’s SOS for western Virginia, in cooperation with scientists from Virginia Tech.
Wichelns provided handouts of the Rappahannock River basin and tributary monitoring stations where volunteers who have already received SOS training and certification are performing biological and chemical monitoring.
He invited those who received training today to continue until they received their certification so they could help add to the number of stations being monitored.
A number of stations in Rappahannock, Madison, and Culpeper are still in need of monitors.
Looking for
tiny critters
The focus of the workshop was on how to sample for and identify macroinvertebrates— aquatic creatures observable to the naked eye and that have no backbone, which provide one measure of stream health under a scoring system developed by Dr. J. Reese Voshell, Jr., and colleagues at Virginia Tech.
Wichelns demonstrated how to use screens to capture a variety of aquatic life, ranging from worms to leeches to crayfish to snails, clams, and beetles, including “water pennies” and clams and the larvae forms of stoneflies, mayflies, dragonflies, black flies, and so on. Some of these are commonly found in many fresh streams of western Virginia; some are most commonly found only when a stream is clean in terms of chemistry, nutrients, and sediment.
Teams waded into the Thornton River next to Miller’s largest bam looking for target “riffles” with underlying cobble
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