7/21:2024:

Stream Name: Referred to as "Hurricane Creek," but I don't know if that's its official name or if it has one at all

Stream Location: comes downhill out of the forest and empties into the north branch of the Winooski, across the river from the north branch nature center, Montpelier VT.  (see maps below)

Watershed: North Branch Winooski River, HUC-12. (see charts below) citation: Model My Watershed, modelmywatershed.org/analyze . Accessed 22 July 2024.

Stream description: not very wide, being on average 2.29 meters in width, but manages to provide plenty of habitats, with lots of large rocks and many different depth and velocity combinations. there are no signs of human activity anywhere nearby, and most of the stream is shaded by the canopy, however a section of it roughly 17 meters in length shifted position by about 2 meters to the right  before returning to its usual stream bed, leaving a sizeable area of gravel.

Journal entry: Sunday, July 21

Measured temperature, pH, conductivity, and turbidity, although I realized later that it wasn't on the data chart, so I had to draw a few more boxes to add it. the recent rainfall has drastically increased the turbidity, although to a lesser extent than the north branch, so I have decided to record it daily in addition to the other factors being measured. E.coli sample has been collected, and was later placed in the room with the water heater, the air temperature of which is about 26 degrees Celsius. I also forgot that I wasn't collecting water samples until day 3, so I collected both today. animal sightings included a heron (which flew away before a picture could be taken), a garter snake (Fig. 2), a picture of which is included on the "pictures" page, as well as several water striders, which may indicate that the stream has been recolonized by macroinvertibrates since the recent flooding, however, due to their mobility, they likely recolonize before anything else does. an area of exposed sediment was found near the site, and several animal footprints were found. most appear to be deer tracks, but one set appeared to be some sort of large canine, and the footprints were about 3 inches across. (Fig. 1)

Journal entry: Monday, July 22

Did usual measurements, then macroinvertibrate collection. 4 "dips" were made, but only 30 macroinvertibrates were found in total, which was not enough to be used as official data. this may have been due to the lack of a large flat surface to evenly spread the contents of each "dip" on, but I likely would have seen more than I did if there was, in fact, a total of over 200 creatures in the 4 "dips." however, after the official collection, I did some unofficial collection (visually searching for larger macroinvertibrates near the banks) and quickly found a few large dragonfly larvae and crayfish (Fig. 3,) and one juvenile salamander. this leads me to believe that the lack of significant numbers of macroinvertibrates is due to the recent flooding. most likely, most macroinvertibrates in the stream were mostly washed down into the north branch with the exception of any that were closer to the banks. those ones would be able to hold onto something more secure than the medium-sized rocks in the middle, which were likely moved around a bit during the flood. given sufficient time, I expect a much higher number of macroinvertibrates. 

Journal entry: Tuesday, July 23

not much to report today, as water samples were collected on Monday. soil samples were collected (site locations in the raw data page,) and a few overdue sketches were drawn. E. Coli sample was checked, and had only either 3 or 4 colonies (see raw data page) but 1 (or 2) was/were very large. Overall, today's field work was relatively uneventful, with the exception of when I found evidence of some medium-sized creature, possibly a mole, tunneling around near the site (figure 4)