Currents \| September 2013

What are you doing from 5-9pm of Monday the 23rd of September? Some of you will be prepping for school, others will be watching TV and some of you will still removing glops of mud post Clean Your Streams Day. We, the Partners for Clean Streams staff and Clean Your Streams Committee, would like to suggest something better. You are invited you to join us at any one of the 6 Buffalo Wild Wings around Toledo and celebrate cleaner streams, rivers and neighborhoods. Download and bring this TICKET and give it to your server and %10 of your purchases (excluding alcohol and taxes) will be donated to Partners for Clean Streams. One TICKET per check is required at each of these 6 Buffalo Wild Wings Toledo locations- Bowling Green, Defiance, Maumee, Oregon, Perrysburg, and Sylvania. Please invite friends and family and pass out these tickets to anyone who might be interested in this celebration of our rivers. We will use the donations generated to keep preserving clean, clear and safe rivers with educational programs and volunteer events, like Clean Your Streams. Thank you for your supporting your rivers in advance. Party on!

As the summer comes to a close, our Get the Lead Out program ends and the Maumee River looks better than ever. Fish, birds, and other local animals thank the 79 brave volunteers who walked along the river in search for lead sinkers, fishing line, and hooks that are recognized as some of the biggest threats to wildlife. Every April, the Maumee River is used as an important breeding ground for walleye and white bass. Thousands of fishermen crowd the shores of the river to catch these abundant fish. This is known as the annual walleye run. As you can imagine, tons of lead, line, and hooks are caught on trees and rocks or left on the shore by the fishermen, often inadvertently. Various types of wildlife often find themselves entangled in fishing line or hooked and also poisoned by eating harmful lead sinkers. Rusty hooks can also harm humans.

To counteract this, volunteers covered a huge area of riverbank this summer. In early June, twenty Toledo ZOOTeens and their adult mentors, kicked off the season by cleaning up from Jerome Rd. to Bluegrass Island in Side Cut Metropark. Our public events were held on July 19^th and August 7^th at Side Cut Metropark. We partnered with a crew from Bass Pro Shop for these two exciting events. A total of 40 volunteers came out for the public events and removed trash from the Towpath Trail, Silver Lake, and Bluegrass Island banks. In July and August, groups like the Ft. Meigs YMCA Leaders Club got the lead out in Towpath and Buttonwood. It’s truly amazing how much lead and line is left at these different sites. After the line and lead are extracted from these sites we recycle them. In total, 79 volunteers gave 135 hours of volunteer work for the Get the Lead Out effort. Join us next summer for Get the Lead Out to see how clean we can make our waterways!

In conjunction with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and the University of Toledo, Partners for Clean Streams hosted a Stream Restoration Workshop featuring Dave Derrick and Rich Fischer, both of the USACE. The workshop was held from Tuesday, August 6 through Friday, August 9. The focus of the workshop was to showcase numerous area stream restoration projects that Dave and Rich helped lead, both in and outside a classroom. Dave’s unique approach to natural stream restoration and distinctive in-stream structures dealing with erosion reduction, stream stability, bank restoration and mitigation have not gone unnoticed, with many professionals wanting to learn the methods. Nearly 70 people, ranging from students to environmentalists and landscape architects, attended the workshop. Attendees were treated to a mix of lecture style presentations and site visits. The project locations included Swan Creek/Highland Park, the Toledo Botanical Garden, Camp Miakonda, Secor Dam, and the University of Toledo restoration work sites. Attendees were given a certificate and a USB flash drive full of presentations and additional information about Dave’s methods. Thank you to those who attended the workshop and made it a success!