TIMES RECORD • August 3, 2021
I’m perched on the grassy bank of Mere Brook in Brunswick where it parses the high forest as it nears head of tide. A foot of water covers my feet and a gray, plastic bucket is wedged between them. In the bucket, which has a fine mesh bottom that lets only the water out, is a DEP rock-bag just retrieved from a 4-week immersion in the brook. Back in mid-July we bore twelve of these bags, each weighing 15 – 20 pounds to 4 brook-sites. We’re back now to find out what and who may have taken up residence in these bags. In a healthy stream, I’ve been told and read, such rock-bags become macroinvertabrate condos, teeming with little lives; in a stressed, degraded stream those lives are fewer. Or, sometimes, absent altogether. The point then will be to save and then later count the diversity and density of the bags’ condo-dwellers. ~ Sandy Stott