Volunteers make it happen

NSEA’s Stream Stewards Program provides opportunities for our communities to get outside and improve salmon habitat. This fall, 581 volunteers spent over 1,700 hours doing just that! Between October and December, we hosted 15 events along 8 different creeks in Whatcom County that are home to salmon, including coho, chum, and endangered Steelhead and Chinook. By removing over 63 cubic yards of invasive vegetation and planting 1,093 native trees and shrubs, these volunteers improved 1.65 miles of streamside habitat. 

Notable events this season included Orca Recovery Day where volunteers supported regional efforts to protect our Southern Resident Killer Whales which are critically endangered due to a lack of their main food source, salmon, by improving habitat along California Creek in Drayton Harbor. This event was only possible with the fantastic partnership between us, the Whatcom Conservation District, and the Whatcom Land Trust. We also joined the City of Bellingham for Make a Difference Day again this year in Whatcom Falls Park to support improved water quality in Whatcom Creek. Lastly, with leadership from the City of Bellingham, we hosted a work party in honor of Dave Taylor, a dedicated steward of Squalicum Creek and friend to NSEA, who passed away last year. We continued work along Squalicum Creek with the help of friends, family, and neighbors, and we even got to see the fruits of our labors as a female chum salmon hovered around for most of the event.  

Every event we get to host is special thanks to the amazing community that continues to support our work. Our Stewardship Appreciation Program (SAP) says thank you to anyone that joins us for 3 or more work parties in a calendar year. With so many different opportunities throughout this year, we ended with fall season with 61 SAPs! We are continually impressed and inspired by the people that join us throughout the year and are looking forward to a full, rewarding 2023. Join us for the first event of the new year in honor of Martin Luther King Junior on Saturday, January 14. We will be joining the City of Bellingham at the Little Squalicum Estuary Project. This will be a wonderful way to give back and have a hand in building up this beautiful park and estuary habitat. Space is very limited, so check out www.cob.org/mlk2023 for more information. 

NSEA and WWU Partner to Update SFS Curriculum

Annually, NSEA’s Students for Salmon (SFS) Program serves over 1,000 fourth graders throughout Whatcom County. Students and their teachers meet NSEA staff in their classrooms and along salmon-bearing creeks to become “stream scientists” and participate in a stewardship project where they leave a positive impact on their local waterway. Partnered with these components of SFS is NSEA’s Students for Salmon Curriculum.  

This suite of curriculum can be utilized by teachers in their classrooms to extend the learning beyond the NSEA-led components and bring the program full circle, leaving their students with a deeper knowledge of salmon, the threats they face in our region, and actions they can take to help salmon in their local watersheds. Recently, this curriculum was updated, thanks to a partnership through Western Washington University (WWU) with Dr. Debi Hanuscin and her pre-service teachers. Dr. Hanuscin and her students took NSEA’s existing SFS curriculum and revised it to ensure that it is locally relevant, includes Indigenous Ways of Knowing, builds in climate science, and integrates the power of youth voice.

We are excited to see how this updated curriculum can further connect students to their watersheds and salmon. NSEA and WWU recently presented at the Washington Science Teachers Association (WSTA) Conference and further broadened our impact by showcasing this curriculum to teachers and professionals from around the state. We will be hosting teacher professional development workshops over the next two school years to train teachers on utilizing this curriculum, setting them up for success and ensuring the curriculum will be used for years to come. These trainings were made possible because of funding from NOAA BWET, which will allow us to maximize this partnership with WWU and reach fourth grade teachers across Whatcom County.

The SFS curriculum wraps up with an activity where each class gets to choose a project to work on to share more broadly what they learned while participating in SFS and take action for the benefit of salmon.  This culmination of each classroom’s SFS experience further supports NSEA’s value of the importance of hope in education and how this can empower students to take action in their lives to help salmon, which are so essential to the environment, culture, and economy of our region.

 For more information about NSEA’s Education programs, please contact Nathan Zabel at nzabel@n-sea.org or call 360-715-0283.