Bronx River Ecomedia Blog

The children shrieked when Brandon Ballengee held up the two-foot eel he had captured in the Bronx River, but when it slipped out of his hands back into a plastic box they wanted him to get it out and show it to them again.

The slippery eel, however, squirmed vigorously, refusing to be gripped once again by human hands. Brandon explained that the mucous covering that makes an eel slippery is a protective coating. If he handled it too much, the mucous would be rubbed off and the eel would die when returned to the river. He also said he was surprised to find an eel that size at Drew Gardens, because they usually kept to the ocean as adults.

Brandon, an environmental educator, had captured the eel in a long, brown net that he and an assistant stretched across the river during one of the series of workshops being sponsored by the Bronx River Art Center. This workshop, conducted Oct. 21 in Drew Gardens, featured studying creatures that live in the Bronx River.

The children learned that the long net Brendon used to capture the eel is called a seine, named after a river in France where it was first used. When he asked what the name of that river could be, he praised the child who guessed correctly that the river in question was the river Seine. Some college students he’d taught didn’t get that answer, he told them.

Earlier, some children had themselves caught baby eels along the river’s edge in small nets. They also scooped up scuds, tiny shrimp-like creatures, and small mollusks. In addition to using nets, children had an opportunity to cast for fish using fishing rods with reels. The rods were baited with worms the children had dug up in the compost heap and in garden beds.

I attended with workshop with my friend Sally, who was visiting me from Buffalo, N.Y. She grew up along a river in Illinois called the Fox River and was digging worms and wading in the river’s shallows from an early age. She enjoyed seeing the delight the children had in working with soil and water, especially how surprised and excited they were to find the worms. Some children had never had the opportunity to hold a worm in their hands before.

A teacher all her life, Sally was impressed with the hands-on educational process of the workshop illustrated by the worm-digging. “By having the children dig for worms in the composted matter, they could see how the compost gets broken down,” she said.

Sally called Brandon “a wonderful educator.” For instance, she was impressed with the careful and respectful way he handled the eel, and the way he explained “mucous” by comparing it to the mucous we all have in our noses and eyes. She liked the way he integrated new vocabulary into his talks, asking the children if they knew the words “predator,” “cannibal” and “carnivore.”

“During the day, I kept seeing what the Bronx must have been when it was farmland. I thought about the work it must have taken to reclaim Drew Gardens from an industrial junkyard to the beautiful little haven it is today. It lifted my heart that Bronx children got a chance to do things that I loved when I was growing up,” she said.

The concluding activity of the day was to have the children document the creatures of the river by drawing pictures of the eel and other creatures they had found. These will be kept at the art center as a basis for comparison the next time students explore the river to find out who is living there.

–Peggy Ray

Some intruders are troubling the waters of the Bronx River and the lands around it, and restoration workers are devoted to cleaning them out. The intruders are invasive plants that are not native to this area. The workers travel the river on foot and by canoe, digging the plants out root and branch wherever they find them.

In a workshop held on Oct.16, Jennifer Plewka, the environmental educator for Phipps Community Development Corporation, explained how the invasive plants got here and showed students how they could help the workers clear some of them out of Drew Gardens. Ten-year-old Scott Mitchell helped her out by showing students how to use special tool she called a “root grabber” and he called a “picker.”

The first step was learning to identify the offending plants:

Japanese knotweed, a nice-looking plant that originally was brought to Europe from Asia to ornament gardens. Then it traveled here where it has become a pest. It establishes its dominance when dead leaves and stems around it spread a chemical in the soil that prevents other plants from growing.

Bindweed also came from Europe and Asia, probably arriving along with farm and garden seeds. It might also have been brought in as an ornament because of its pretty purplish white flowers and climbing vine. First noticed growing wild in California, it quickly became notorious as the worst weed in the western states.

The white mulberry tree was brought to this country from Asia in colonial times as a food source for silkworms. It became a threat when it started mixing with the native red mulberry tree, transmitting a root disease.

Purple loosestrife was growing densely along the river bank at Drew Gardens. This “beautiful killer,” which has lovely purple flowers in the summer, likes wet places and once it gets started crowds out all the local vegetation that wildlife depend on. It’s especially hard to get rid of because it can regenerate from any tiny piece of root left in the soil.

All the offending plants usually get started in polluted areas or places that have been disturbed by urban development, road-building and such. They can travel by air, in the water, or in soil that is moved from place to place.

After the students, who came from Bronx River Art Center after school programs, collected some specimens of the plants, Jennifer showed them how to preserve the specimens by layering them in sheets of newspaper and corrugated cardboard.