Science After School!

The ERC has been holding its after-school program, Science After School, for many years. It has been one of my favorite programs to be a part of and we just finished up the best one yet! Over the past six weeks, we have been going to the Alturas Elementary school every Tuesday for our SAS program. During this particular Science After School, we focused on all things related to snow and winter! The students were given a project to determine how to aid in the creation of a new and sustainable ski lodge behind their school. They went snowshoeing to see what wildlife lives in the hills and discussed ways to keep those animals safe and they came up with ideas to improve sustainability including solar powered lifts, buildings, and transportation, and sourcing building materials locally to reduce transportation and emissions! They also learned about the water cycle and suggested ski runs be only on the north side of the mountain to lessen the amount of fake snow needed! These kids were so smart and excited to learn, it was such a great experience working with them!

Winter Birding

The ERC hosted another winter birding tour this weekend with the incredible Poo Wright-Pulliam (who recently had her artwork selected for the national exhibit “Flora of the National Parks” in the U.S. Botanical Garden in Washington D.C.!) We finally had a beautiful clear day and saw a bunch of neat species!

Since my last birding post was all about the Silver Creek Preserve, this time I will keep it short with a list of the species we saw and some photos! If you are interested in learning more about all of these species (and others), visit the Audubon Societies guide to North American birds!  Or to learn more about the Silver Creek Preserve and check out photos from last months birding tour, revisit my Silver Creek blog post.

1. Mountain chickadee
2. Black-capped chickadee
3. Brown creeper
4. Great horned owl
5. Pied-billed grebe
6. Bald eagle
7. Golden eagle
8. Red-tailed hawk
9. Rough-legged hawk
10. Black-billed magpie
11. American robin
12. Common raven
13. Northern harrier
14. Trumpeter swan
15. Common goldeneye
16. Barrow’s goldeneye
17. American coot
18. Mallard
19. Clark’s nutcracker
20. Great blue heron
21. Ring-necked duck
22. Bufflehead
23. Canada goose
24. Dark-eyed Junco
25. House sparrow
26. Brewer’s blackbird
27. Long-eared owl

Stories in the Snow

This past Saturday, the ERC hosted its final Winter Tracking Workshop of the season. I have missed all of the workshops up until now so I was excited to finally make it to one. Luckily, it was one of the most exciting workshops of the year! Though we hadn’t had fresh snow in awhile and the tracks were old and misshaped from the crystals growing, we were still able to identify several different animals!

• Snowshoe hare
• Red squirrel
• Fox
• Pine martin

We were also lucky enough to see mountain lion scat riddled with fur, elk fur in a huge pile on the snow, and a piece of an elk leg!

For all of my friends unable to attend.. here are a few fun facts that are good to know when it comes to tracking…

• Plantigrade animals walk on their whole foot. This category includes
  • Bears, shrews, and racoons
• Digitigrade animals walk on their pads and ‘digits’ or toes.
  • Dogs, cats, rabbits, and hares
• Unguligrade animals walk on just their toenails. Digits #3 and #4 make primary contact with the ground.
  • Deer, pronghorn, and bison
• There are four primary motions: walking, bounding, hopping, and waddling.
• When tracking, if you see a left/right pattern (like ours), that comes from a walker.
• A bounder jumps off of its front feet and its back feet follow, landing (most often) in the tracks of its front feet.
• A jumpers back feet spring past its front feet, leaving two distinct prints for the back and front feet.
• Waddlers, like the bear, move both their front and back feet on one side of the body at the same time.

Next time you are out make sure you look down and read the stories written in the snow!

Winter Science

In my last post I talked about the phenomenon of El Niño- Southern Oscillation and how this El Niño year is favoring us here in the Wood River Valley. But what good is an unusually snowy winter if you aren’t outside taking advantage of it? 

Well we, here at the Environmental Resource Center, are definitely taking advantage of all this snow! We have held several programs about tracking animals in the snow, snow pack and climate change, snow formation and the water cycle, snow water equivalent, and the layers of snow pack. We have dug snow pits, made snow forts, and gone snowshoeing. Its been a lot of fun exploring winter science with these students and I have even been learning a ton myself! As I said before in my ENSO blog post, I am so lucky to be here for this wonderfully snowy season!

Thank you ENSO for this exciting winter!

I know just how lucky I am to get to call Sun Valley my home this winter. This is definitely the most snow I have ever seen in my life and it’s the most snow this valley has seen in awhile! There is a blanket of snow everywhere and it’s actually deceiving how deep it is until you try to step in it and sink several feet.

Most people here are saying we have El Niño to thank, but what does that mean?

Well to explain El Niño, first let me introduce you to ENSO. El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an extremely influential climate phenomenon that impacts temperature and precipitation across the globe. ENSO is referred to as a coupled climate phenomenon because it requires changes in both the ocean and the atmosphere. We observe different effects depending on the year because there are actually 3 phases that can occur.

1. El Niño: The El Niño phase is the warming of the ocean surface in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. It also consists of the surface winds, which normally blow from east to west along the equator, weakening or, occasionally, blowing in the other direction.
2. La Niña: The La Niña phase is the cooling of the ocean surface in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. It also consists of the easterly surface winds blowing stronger than usual.
3. Neutral: The neutral state is represented with average sea surface temperatures. Occasionally, the ocean surface will warm or cool (as in El Niño or La Niña) but the atmospheric conditions do not change (or the other way around). As I mentioned before, ENSO is a coupled climate phenomenon and we must see changes in both the ocean and the atmosphere to observe El Niño or La Niña effects.

Currently, we are in the El Niño phase. Typically during an El Niño year we see warmer and drier weather in the north and wetter weather in the south. However, El Niños are less predictable than the other two phases and weather patterns could really go either way. For Idaho, about 50% of the previous strong El Niño years saw cooler and wetter than average weather and the other 50% saw the opposite.

Luckily, this year’s El Niño has favored the Wood River Valley and I am lucky to get to experience (probably) the snowiest winter I will ever know… Cheers to you ENSO!