A familiar face is back this summer to help kids learn more about nature.
Christianne McDonald is once again host of the Big Lake Environment Support Society’s Summer Nature Centre program this summer. She threw open the centre’s doors Monday.
McDonald says she had so much fun running the centre last summer that she had to come back again. “It’s probably the best summer job I’ve ever had.”
The centre has offered a variety of free nature-based programming since 2003. About a hundred kids a week visited last year, McDonald says.
Last year’s bean-bag toss proved pretty popular, McDonald says, so she’s brought it back as a “pollutant knock-out challenge” where kids can bean targets of polluting factories for points. Weeks on bugs, birds, trees, animals and green living have also returned.
The centre will be open for an extra week this year for a new unit on coral reefs. Many visitors see reefs when they go on vacation, McDonald says, but might not realize their importance. Reefs cover about one per cent of the ocean but host about a quarter of its fish. “It’s amazingly diverse.”
But those same reefs are threatened by ocean acidification brought on by greenhouse gases. “A lot of scientists have theorized that in the next 20 to 30 years coral reefs might not even be around,” McDonald says.
The reef week is meant to get people thinking beyond their local environment, McDonald says. “You never know what might not be there tomorrow, so go learn it today.”
It’s encouraging to see so many visitors taking the centre’s lessons to heart, McDonald says. “It’s quite heart-warming to see a five-year-old say, ‘We shouldn’t use that; it’s too much garbage!’”
The centre, which is the log cabin next to the St. Albert Trail Bridge and the Sturgeon River, is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays until late August. For information, call 780-217-3983.
Need trees? A lot of trees?
Biologist and Morinville resident Louise Horstman is looking for county-dwellers interested in planting 1,000 or more trees on their property.
She and the Woodlot Association of Alberta hope to plant about 416,000 lodgepole pine and white spruce seedlings this summer. The initiative is backed by a grant from the Forest Resource Improvement Association of Alberta, Horstman says, and is meant to support local tree-growers and planters.
“Trees give us all kinds of environmental benefits,” she says, including water, air, and wildlife conservation. The program gives people a chance to have a forest planted on their property by professionals for just 25 cents a plant.
The trees are going fast, Horstman says, with about three-quarters of them already claimed. “We have one order for 100,000.”
Call the woodlot association at 780-489-9473 for details.
The age-old saga of the stickleback in St. Albert is over.
City staff finally removed the screens from the outfalls on the Riel stormwater pond on June 29 after years of delay.
The screens, installed during construction of Ray Gibbon Drive in 2005, were a temporary measure meant to stop invasive threespine stickleback from getting from the pond into the Sturgeon River. They were also a headache for staff, as they clogged continuously and needed frequent scrubbing.
When the city asked to remove the screens in 2007, the provincial and federal government said the screens had to stay until they were sure the stickleback were gone. As a result, the city used the pesticide Rotenone to kill all the fish in the pond this April.
The provincial and federal governments are now satisfied that the fish are gone, says city utilities manager Dan Rites, and have given permission to remove the screens. The pond is now draining properly. “It’s definitely going to be much easier to maintain.”
