At 9:00 am, on a lovely saturday that was slightly cool but very sunny, some of the club met together in front of school for the Adopt-a-Beach program at Van Buren State Park. The six of us all jumped into the envirovan and away we went! (Incidentally, this is the first time we have used the envirovan, it won't be the last ^_^). After several hours of hard work, we had a whopping 107.5 POUNDS OF TRASH! The beach was absolutely beautiful, and we did manage to find time to bury Tina Violante in the sand :)! We also collected water samples (which will be incubated and analyzed soon) and did different kinds of beach inspection. We plan to continue this program, meaning that this visit was one of five. Hopefully, we can also do this program in conjunction with coastal clean-up, which has many of the same requirements!
UPDATE........PICTURES POSTED!!!!
-4/16/04 - Land Conservation
Another early saturday event for us at the Chipman Preserve! The mission - transplanting wild prarie plants from a safe area onto a plot that will be used for a designated walking trail. The plants were rescued from a property last year, and some of them are quite rare. In addition, some are extremely beautiful when they bloom - we found and identified several blazing star bulbs, which (we are informed) will become very showy red flowers. We met with the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy, and armed with shovels and a flamethrower, we soon had scorched the land of all weeds and planted the dormant cakes of dirt, bulbs, roots, stem, etc. In addition, a reporter from the Kalamazoo Gazette was present, as well as a cameraman from News 3!!! Everyone, watch the paper! We will (hopefully) be going back in July to see the blooms. Pictures soon!