Citizen Science 4 Us

Dale and I took part in the Severn Rivers Trust volunteer workshop last week, where we were shown how to ID and sort indicator faunal species in the River Cain. During this session, we realized we had been saying the river's name incorrectly - Cain is pronounced 'Kine' in Welsh. (We asked about our town name too, and learned that we'd been saying it wrong. One of the knowledgeable volunteers has written many historical picture books about our town and was able to help us get it right. We'd been putting the emphasis in the wrong place too: Llanfyllin is pronounced more like LanVahlin.).

We were each given a tray in which to float the samples collected (all of which had been preserved in alcohol), a pair of tweezers, a microscope and a key to follow. We checked each invertebrate under the microscope and sorted it into the correct category to be counted.

There was also a presentation about more esoteric features to look for in identifying species.

The samples are only taken twice each year, so the commitment from the volunteers isn't a big burden.

Ooh, I had so much fun learning new things and meeting friendly, curious and knowledgeable people. Though the task became tedious after a few hours, we definitely look forward to returning for the fall counting session.