Dear Watershed Neighbor,

It feels like spring is well and truly here! While we hope for more rain, we've been soaking up the sun and enjoying spring blooms.

Last month we welcomed two new board members, Stuart Myers and Rebecca Crosby. Both Stuart and Rebecca have been tuning into Tryon Creek Watershed Council's meetings since before COVID led us to meeting online! We're really glad to have them join us. Rebecca is also a board member with Friends of Tryon Creek, and will be opening a direct line of inter-organizational communication at the board level that we look forward to. Stuart is a longtime watershed resident, and as an ecologist and restoration practitioner we're eager to welcome his expertise and enthusiasm. Get to know our board members here.

Through our Watershed 101 Workshop program we have provided watershed-based environmental education to various youth groups in the past few months. Over Spring Break, we got to connect with students from the Oregon Refugee Children's Assistance Services (ORCAS) - you can scroll down or click here for our blog post to read more about our Virtual Spring Break workshops with them. What do popping boba have to do with fish? When working with a Girl Scout troop, a hands-on activity helped them work towards their Animal Habitats badge, with the popping boba (the little juice-filled fruit bubbles you may know from froyo shops) representing porous salmon eggs laid in gravel beds. You can scroll down or click here for our blog post to read more about the activity and how this workshop gave us an opportunity to share about women in STEM.

Exciting news: We are eager to share the City of Portland Bureau of Environmental Services' announcement of the completion of the major habitat restoration and bridge-building project! The new Tryon Creek bridge allows the creek to flow freely; it replaced an aging culvert that had restricted water flow, causing erosion and flood surges and blocking fish and wildlife. The new 125-foot span includes two travel lanes, wide sidewalks and a trail for people and wildlife underneath it. SW Boones Ferry Road at SW Arnold St will be opening 6pm on Friday April 16. Read the update and see project photos from BES here; check out our walkthrough from last fall here!

Behind the scenes, we've been busy with grant application season, getting started with a PCC GIS student project, participating in a regional Community-Based Social Marketing peer group, attending conferences & trainings, and more. Whether you're in the Tryon Creek watershed or not, we'd like to bring a spring-related way to support our ecosystems to your radar: while Osoberry (Indian Plum) and Trilliums are early signs of spring, there's another bloom that isn't such lovely news: Lesser Celandine is an invasive plant in the buttercup family that has been spreading increasingly in recent years. If you've noticed yellow flowers growing amidst dark green, shiny leaves, we'd like to encourage you to (carefully!) work to remove it. This brochure has more information - and, as a bonus, you can print it and share with neighbors to help spread the word: it's something you'll want to handle delicately and bag up, not compost, so read carefully! 

Stay safe and well,

• Upcoming Events
• Watershed 101 with ORCAS
• Watershed 101 with Girl Scouts
• City Nature Challenge
• Boones Ferry Culvert Project Update
• Social media spotlight

Upcoming Events

Virtual Spring Break with ORCAS

Each spring, Tryon Creek Watershed Council welcomes a group of students from the Oregon Refugees Children’s Assistance Services Program (ORCAS) to the Tryon Creek State Natural Area. This is a special opportunity for the Watershed Council to welcome new Portlanders to Oregon. For many of the students, it’s their first time visiting Pacific Northwest forest, and on our hike we share about watershed health in the context of our region (especially regarding urbanization!). This year, due to COVID-19, we weren’t able to welcome the group to the park in person, but we were still able to connect:

When our Spring Break trip with ORCAS students happens in person, multiple staff members provide translation for several different language groups. We knew that translation into multiple language groups in one Zoom meeting would be tricky, and with ORCAS staff input, we created a video welcoming students to Tryon then met in small online groups with staff members and students by language group, to watch the video together and have more conversation.

ORCAS students don’t necessarily live in the Tryon Creek Watershed, so in the video we made sure to explain watersheds conceptually rather than just the Tryon Creek watershed. We connected the Portland metro area to the Pacific Ocean, and explained anadromous fish movement. After watching the Virtual Spring Break video together each time, pausing for translation with some groups, we brought Google Maps up on screen-share and identified natural areas and creeks near where the students themselves lived. Thanks to Street View, we were able in some cases to show students the route from familiar intersections to parks and creekside areas, so that they may more readily venture to these pockets near them. 

One of the highlights of our several online sessions was with the Arabic-speaking group, when at the conclusion of the video, the interpreter said “wait just a moment”, stood up with her computer and stepped outside. She turned around, and behind her was a beautiful view of some forested hills and a rushing river! It turns out that she lives in Welches along the Salmon River, and we simply asked her to share about what she enjoys about spending time outdoors here in the Pacific Northwest. Representation in the outdoors is so important, and this moment felt extra special. We were able to connect the river in her “backyard” to the Sandy River’s confluence with the Columbia just outside of Portland. The ORCAS staff members who have come on the spring break trip to Tryon before also shared about their experience, encouraging students to look into visiting Tryon and other natural areas and parks with their families. 

We have our fingers crossed that next year, we’ll be able to welcome students to Tryon Creek State Natural Area in person. 

Our Spring Break trips with ORCAS are a modified Watershed 101 Workshop, a program funded by the Community Watershed Stewardship Program through City of Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services.

Popping boba & women in STEM: Watershed 101 with Girl Scouts

We also recently delivered a fish-focused Watershed 101 workshop to a Girl Scout troop based in the Tryon Creek watershed. These Juniors were working towards their Animal Habitats badge, and we were able to address several components to help them work towards that! Because of the focus on habitats, we included information about wildlife corridors in our presentation by showing the Wildlife Corridors layer from our interactive web map, and discussing how Tryon Creek’s confluence serves as a cool water refuge for migrating fish.

For the “Create an Animal Habitat” badge requirement, each girl got some gravel and a container that they filled halfway with water. They also got a spoon and a fruit cup with the popping boba bubbles representing porous fish eggs. They could eat (or not eat) the fruit, and used the spoon to move the boba eggs to the gravel, then again used the spoon to gently cover the eggs without harming them - or, at least, trying not to!
This connected really well when we were asked why there are signs asking people not to play in the creek: because we have coastal cutthroat trout, and other, smaller fish (= smaller eggs!) in the Tryon Creek system, one reason is to avoid potentially stepping on in-stream habitat and damaging delicate eggs! The photo below is a screenshot - for the full slider, view our blog post.

A final neat part about this presentation was that, with the habitat focus, we explained fish passage barriers and projects to remove them. In sharing the Boones Ferry culvert project specifically, one of the photos shared was of our project walk-through earlier this year: From the Public Works Supervisor, to Botanic Specialist, Park Rangers, and Program Coordinators, everyone there was a woman! Sharing the photo/story -and explaining the engineering side of fish habitat work- was a great chance for us to provide real-life examples of women in STEM. 

City Nature Challenge

Partners from around the metro area are organizing our region’s first participation in the City Nature Challenge! The City Nature Challenge is a global bioblitz - an effort to find and document as many plants and wildlife as possible in a short time period. What started out as a friendly competition between naturalists in San Francisco and Los Angeles has grown into a worldwide event that, this year, is happening in 416 cities across 45 countries.

The City Nature Challenge happens in two parts, and you can participate in just one or both. From Fri 4/30 - Mon 5/3, collect observations on iNaturalist. From Tues 5/4 - Sun 5/9, help identify others' observations on iNaturalist. Total species and observation counts will be announced on Monday 5/10.

This event will follow all up-to-date COVID safe-distancing guidelines and will include trainings for using iNaturalist both in-person and online, small group outings led by regional naturalists, web-based identification parties with focused areas of interest, and...your participation at any level you are able!

Find the project on iNaturalist here: City Nature Challenge: Greater Portland-Vancouver Metro Area.

We're excited to see how many observations we can collect in the area's first City Nature Challenge!

Boones Ferry Culvert Project Update

We're boosting the following:
The City of Portland Bureau of Environmental Services is proud to announce the completion of a major habitat restoration and bridge-building project over Tryon Creek and the reopening of SW Boones Ferry Road at SW Arnold Street on Friday, April 16.

The new Tryon Creek bridge allows the creek to flow freely. It replaces an aging culvert that had restricted water flow, causing erosion and flood surges and blocking fish and wildlife. The new 125-foot span includes two travel lanes, wide sidewalks and a trail for people and wildlife underneath it.

SW Boones Ferry Road will open at 6pm on Friday, April 16.

While SW Boones Ferry Road will completely reopens, crews will continue to finalize work underneath the bridge during the week of April 19. Please expect partial pedestrian trail closures during this time.

Social Media Spotlight