Bronx River Ecomedia Blog

 Wildman Steve Brill visited Drew Gardens recently and introduced students to hunting for wild foods. They didn’t have to hunt far as it turned out because there were plenty growing along the Bronx River.Here are some student comments on the experience:

WILDMAN STEVE BRILL UNLEASHED! by Rei WalkerLast Monday Wildman Steve Brill came and taught us about all the plants in the garden that we can pick off the ground and eat. While we were still inside the BRAC center I saw a crazy looking guy ask where the bathroom was, and I just knew it had to be “wildman Steve Brill”. Once we got into the garden he introduced himself and he went crazy in the garden picking up plants and eating them. He insisted on everyone trying the plants but all I could think about was what animal used it as a toilet.

This is poison ivy, Steve says not to eat it or else you’ll end up like the German lady in his story.

These are Mulberries, they taste very good… or so they say. I wouldn’t eat it…

WILDMAN STEVE BRILL… AND THE FOREST by Michael Medina

Last week the class had a work shop where we went to the bronx river watershed. when we got there we met a guy who looked like a mountain climber named wildman steve. he was kinda funny looking but after he told us about himself we realized this was gunna be interesting….. he stopped first only 10 feet away from the point where we started and showed us what looked like a clover. he said it was edible and that it tasted pretty good. i was a little skeptical at first but when i saw everyone else trying it i wondered how bad it could be. i went with the crowd and tried it. to my surprise it wasn’t so bad. it had this strange taste to it which was like a mix between grapes and lemonade…. soon after eating it i realized something had to have peed on it by now!!! after that i vowed never to eat plants like that again. soon after explaining how it wasn’t a clover we left to the little forest that was nearby. sadly i noticed a naruto symbol on three of the rocks at the entrance. i was wondering ‘what would drive somebody crazy enough to do that?!’it was awkward. i guess there are some pretty loyal fans out there. as we continued through the path and i watched out for the poison ivy. i carefully followed close by the wild man as he explained the different types of plants that are visible there.

Hello by Hannah Matte

Last Week we had a workshop. The workshop was fun. There was a man who talked to us about plants. We walked around the garden while he told us what plants we could eat, what plants were poisonous, and what plants could help us with bug bites and fevers.

Armies of youngsters were making a traditional spring trip to the zoo when I visited one day last week, but around 250 of them were high school students bent on serious scientific investigation. They were there to study macroinvertebrates in an event sponsored by the Bronx River Alliance.

Scientists study macroinvertebrates in streams – insect larvae, aquatic worms, little crustaceans and such — because they provide food for fish and because the type of macroinvertebrates found in a particular river or stream indicates how healthy the water is.

I learned a little about them and got a preview of the event, Macroinvertebrate Day, when I dropped in on a meeting of a Bronx River Alliance Education Team a few weeks ago. There I found teachers delicately probing around in bundles of decaying leaves that had been marinating in a stream upstate. The leaves had been placed in the stream because macroinvertebrates like to eat decomposing matter and would be lured inside the leaf packs.

The teachers gently teased wormlike crane fly larvae and tiny stone fly larvae out of the leaves with little brushes and carefully spooned them into plastic petri dishes where the larvae could wiggle around in some water. One teacher excitedly located a leech. For Macroinvertebrate Day, bundles of leaves would be placed in the Bronx River so the students could follow the same procedure to find out which of the little critters are living in the Bronx.

The number and type of macroinvertebrates in a river are indicators of water quality. When the teachers found crane fly larvae in the leaf pack from the upstate stream it was a good sign because crane flies can’t survive in polluted water. In polluted water, only more resistant species can survive. At the teachers’ meeting I wondered: Will the students find crane flies in leaf packs from the Bronx River?

At Macroinvertebrates Day there were several activities introducing the students to the lives and habits of invertebrates. In a food web activity, students made an actual web by tossing a ball of yarn from student to student. Some of the students represented decaying leaves, some represented crane flies, may flies, stone flies, caddis flies and other macroinvertebrates, some represented fish or birds. Through the web thus created, the facilitating teacher taught about a food chain where plants (decaying leaves) furnish food for small animals (macroinvertebrates) that in turn are eaten by larger ones (fish and birds).

In another activity, students got a picture of how macroinvertebrates indicate water quality. Where there is pollution or loss of habitat, an animal has only three options: It can move, adapt or die (MAD). The activity demonstrated that since macroinvertebrates cannot move out of polluted waters or quickly adapt to them, pollution will kill them off. It led to the conclusion that if macroinvertebrates die off because of pollution, so will all the other creatures that depend on them for food.

After these and other introductory activities, the students were seated at tables where they were given leaf packs where they could hunt for living macroinvertebrates. I was eager to find out which ones the students would find in the leaf packs that had been soaking in the Bronx River. In the dishes I examined, they did not find any crane flies or stone flies or leeches. They found tiny shrimp-like creatures called scuds. Finding scuds indicates that the Bronx River is not the sewer it was for many years, but, though greatly improved, it’s still not in the condition of the cleaner upstate waters.

Later in the day, the students walked along an interpretive trail in the zoo. There they were to keep an eye out for a beaver that has recently been spotted swimming in the Bronx River. Beavers are also a biological indicator because they can’t survive in severely polluted water. I later learned that two groups actually did spot the beaver, near the “twin dams” area. I missed it on Macroinvertebrate Day, but maybe I’ll get back to the zoo another time to take a look.

This documentary is the final project of a course which explored a range of professional broadcast journalism production and post-production techniques. Students learned how to make a documentary video from conception and script development to field shooting, editing and completion. The course focused on instilling hands-on field production experience, including hand-held camera work, interview preparation and sound recording with professional microphones. Students utilized their newly acquired documentary filmmaking skills to create, as a group, to edit a short broadcast piece with Final Cut Pro on the ecological makeup of the Bronx River, its treatment and its relationship to the members of the local Bronx Community. In addition to capturing documentation of the ecological workshop, and conducting interviews with select ecological educators, students also wrote a script and did a re-enactment teaching viewers about good and bad habits, which affect the environment.

Instructor: Marianna Ellenberg

Students: Ester Ford, Stuart Gardiner, Luz Polo, Adam Rodriguez

When he was a child, Professor Joe Rachlin fished for carp in the Bronx River with his friends, then ran to a nearby fish market where he sold them for 25 cents apiece. He believes fishing taught him to love the river and the creatures that live in it, and he wants you to go fishing, too – after snipping the barb off your hook so you can easily remove it from the fish’s mouth and return it to its home. In 2006, the idea is to enjoy being outdoors and fishing, but to conserve, rather than serve up, the fish.

On Nov. 18, Professor Rachlin, who nowadays teaches at Lehman College, gave a workshop on fish in the river as part of the Bronx River Art Center fall program. He explained to the children and adults present how to identify fish by the number and shape of their fins and talked about the importance of the river, which contains both fresh and saltwater fish. Since the lower part is a tidal estuary, it is a nursery for many fish that live in the ocean but come here to lay their eggs for a new generation. Just think: Considering recent reports that the oceans will be fished out in coming decades if present rates continue, keeping our Bronx River nursery healthy could help to restore the health of the entire western Atlantic coastal zone!

Professor Rachlin provided a key for identifying around 20 fish that can be found in the river and about 30 invertebrates like the scuds and mollusks that children collected in their nets at last month’s workshop on creatures that live in the river. He mentioned that the American eel, a fish that was also captured last month, has a history unlike most other fish that spend time in the ocean. It spawns in the Atlantic, in the Sargasso Sea, and the newborn young migrate back to coastal river systems, including the Bronx River, to grow up. It arrives as a small, transparent glass eel, grows into a brownish elver, then lives happily in the river for 12 years before returning to the Sargasso Sea to spawn.

Right now, after many years of work by Bronx River restoration groups, the river is pretty healthy and stable, he said. The Clean Water Act of the 1970s made a big difference, and people don’t dump so much junk into it any more, although some garbage, especially soda bottles, finds its way there. Automobile oil washed off the streets is also a problem, along with raw sewage washed into it after a heavy rain.

Nevertheless, a study Professor Rachlin has been conducting comparing surveys of fish that were found in the river as far back as 1936 with fish found there today shows that only two species are missing.

A student in a Bronx River Art Center class on documentary-making, 13-year-old Adam Rodriguez, interviewed Professor Rachlin after his presentation. You can see part of the interview by clicking on YouTube above.

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.

Why should I care whether the Bronx River is healthy or not? I don’t need to drink out of it (a good thing!). I don’t need to eat the fish that live in it. But I do feel peaceful whenever I get a chance to walk along it in, say, the New York Botanical Garden, where it is lined by trees and the water sparkles. I’d like the whole river to be clean and beautiful, all the way from Westchester to the South Bronx.

That’s why I went to a demonstration on monitoring water quality that was offered Sept. 30 by the Bronx River Art Center (BRAC) and why I was excited to learn that the river has guardian angels, volunteers who check the water every week.

Donna Piluso, a long-time guardian of the waters, gave the demonstration at Drew Gardens.along with her 8-year-old daughter Oshiana. Other child-parent teams were there to watch. Some were taking BRAC classes on how to use digital cameras and some on how to use audio equipment.

After putting on neoprene wet suits and rubber boots, Donna and Oshiana waded into the river to check the water temperature with a special thermometer and to fill two bottles with water from the river. After they had collected the water, Donna showed us some of the chemicals monitors add to the water to check for such things as the amount of dissolved oxygen, salinity, level of nitrogen/nitrates, and turbidity.

Water monitors also make note of the water level in the river and look for signs of algae blooms that cloud the water so sunlight can’t get through to plants that need it. They try to get rid of invasive plants like Japanese knotweed that have blown in from far away and are spreading along the shoreline, crowding out the native plants.

Along with the demonstration, Donna gave us a lot of information about the river. Among other things, I learned that the water in the river at Drew Gardens (in the West Farms neighborhood) is “brackish.” I always thought brackish water was unclear or murky. But no. Brackish water is a mixture of fresh and salt water. Ocean tides run up the Bronx River as far as West Farms, making the water there slightly salty.

There are a number of things people can do to help keep the river clean.

·We can dispose of trash properly. Small pieces of litter from the streets wash into the river where fish eat them thinking they are getting food. Not good for fish digestion.

·If we see or smell raw sewage or other pollutants in the river, we can report it to the city’s Dept. of Environmental Protection either by calling the Bronx River Alliance if it’s a weekday (718-430-4665) or calling 311 any time.

·If we witness someone dumping trash in the river, we can call 911 right away. Dumping is against the law.

·To prevent nitrogen from running off our lawns and gardens into the river, we can fertilize with natural compost. This is frequently offered free of charge by the New York City Dept. of Sanitation. For information, see www.nyccompost.org.

·If we want to volunteer to monitor the water ourselves, we can get information by calling the Bronx River Alliance or e-mailing teresa.crimmens@parks.nyc.gov.

–Peggy Ray

Today’s environmental workshop about the Bronx River took place in Drew Gardens, a pretty place across the street from the Bronx River Art Center. Because of all the recent rain the river was unusually wide and full. The trees and undergrowth along it were still thick and green. Crossing busy Tremont Avenue and going into the garden seemed like making a quick trip to the country.

Children and teen-agers who are taking classes at the art center took part in the workshop which was taught by Anne Marie Rufola of the Bronx River Alliance. We learned that we live in the Bronx River watershed. The river runs through low-lying land and when it rains water flows from the high ground around it into the river. The definition of a watershed is “an area of land that drains into a body of water.”

During heavy rains water cannot soak into the city’s brick and concrete as it would into soil and so flooding occurs carrying garbage, gasoline and other pollutants into the river. Sewers also overflow into the river during heavy rains. When it’s hot the rain heats up from the streets. The warm rain entering the river dissolves oxygen from the water and then fish die off.

We learned that we could help clean up the Bronx River by joining restoration projects. There will be restoration work going on behind the art center.

–Peggy