To Road Trip or not to Road Trip: That is the question.

Posted on August 6, 2013 by Catherine Courtier

There are few things in this life more enjoyable than driving down Highway 101, taking in the stunning coastal views, and sipping on a delicious coffee! Last week I had the chance to get out of the office for a few days to visit the towns of Port Orford, Gold Beach, and Brookings. The purpose of this trip was to go over the asset list that I have amassed for each town, but more importantly to actually see all the attractions I’ve thus far only seen on a computer screen! Coffee in hand I departed Bandon early Monday morning and headed South where I met with the following: Jodi Fritts (City Administrator) and Sandy Vieira (Executive Director of the Chamber of Commerce) of Gold Beach, Annette Klinefelter (assistant principal at Kalmiopsis Elementary School) of Brookings, Tyson Rasor (Coastal Tourism Liaison), and Jim and Karen Auburn (the Mayor and his wife) of Port Orford.

Surprisingly the sentiments in each town towards coastal tourism were shockingly similar. They all understood that changes would need to be made, and were more than willing to do what it takes to improve the South Coast! But as eager as each city was, they were also cognizant of the possible push back from some community members towards an increase in tourism. Since I’m here specifically to increase tourism, I was baffled as to why anyone wouldn’t be for it, especially if it meant their town would be more prosperous. After discussing the problem at length I believe that I have a better understanding of where the locals are coming from. One of their worries is that by better advertising the town’s “secret and local gems” (things such as the best swimming hole, or a really great campsite) the number of visitors will increase and they will lose ownership of their local treasure. The second common concern I heard voiced was that people don’t want to add traditional tourist attractions that would change the character of their town (things such as a boardwalk with games and rides, or souvenir shops.) Furthermore there are those who think their town is fine the way it is, and they don’t think tourism is useful. The difficult question remains: how do you create more opportunities for tourism without changing the town? Presently the main problem is that droves of people pass through these four towns on their way up or down the 101. They will probably stop to get gas, use the restroom, buy a snack, and maybe even walk around for a while; but how do you get them to stay? Like an onion this question has many layers and on a couple occasions has made my eyes water in my attempt to find an answer to this big picture problem!

After determining that increasing ecotourism (something that the community members were interested in and something I feel is very tangible) would probably be the best way to increase coastal tourism, I was naturally faced with another slew of questions and drawbacks that were seriously messing up my plans! Sadly that is the reality behind this whole project. It is one thing to come up with ideas, research them, and find support, but it is another thing entirely to actually make it happen. For example: I’ve heard that the coast of Oregon has some of the best kayaking around, however, in my research I found that there is only one place that will take you out on trips and nowhere on the South Coast can you rent a sea kayak! Naturally my first thought was simply “Well, let’s put kayak rental stands out by the beach!” Problem solved. Case closed. Sadly this was easier said than done as I realized that the reason why no one rents sea kayaks is that the insurance is too high and because of the coast’s characteristic howling winds, much too dangerous for many to take kayaks out on their own. I ran into similar problems as I investigated similar ecotourism rental opportunities such as SCUBA, surfing, and snorkel gear rentals. The end product of this has been that I simply have no idea what to do, and after being highly annoyed with this fact for a number of weeks, I’m becoming more accepting of it.

The reality is that I am only on the South Coast for ten weeks, which is not nearly enough time to even scratch the surface of the tourism issue. So in my remaining weeks here my projects and goals (or as I like to call them, recommendations to the future me) are thus: 1). Look into the pros and cons of ecotourism as well as new activities to promote, 2). Work to develop “Quest” projects in the area (free-choice learning adventures that use clues and hints to encourage participants to discover the natural, cultural, and historical treasures of each place and its community.), 3). Look into the development and implementation of marine and terrestrial education programs that increase the understanding of issues and resources that are pertinent to each community, and 4). Finish my ecological “summit to seastacks” summary for the area that will be covered by the upcoming scenic bike pathway in Port Orford.

This past weekend I was visited by a couple of my friends from UC Santa Cruz! With all the hiking, exploring, s’more eating, and wine tasting, it was truly a wonderful weekend on the South Coast!

Week 6: Windy Work in Willapa

Posted on July 31, 2013 by Sarah Heidmann

I’m a bit behind on my blogging, but I intend to catch up in this post, as well as make up for the lack of pictures in my last two posts!
This week I was lucky enough to take a trip up to Willapa Bay in Long Beach, Washington, to finally do some serious fieldwork. I went with the Daniel Sund, the Masters student I’ve been working with, and Lee McCoy, our lab’s tech and general awesome go-to guy. We were out in the field for about 12 hours each day for a week, which was hard, but the work wasn’t too involved, and tons of fun!

Me on our little but sturdy boat

While we were up there, we deployed our cameras using the mounts we made, leaving them out for four hours at a time in four different habitats: oyster, Zostera marina (the native seagrass), Zostera japonica (the invasive seagrass), and clam. My lab has done this before, but they used to leave them out for three days at a time, while our GoPros are limited by their four-hour battery life, despite the battery pac accessory we bought for them. The video is meant to record the fish and crabs that wander through the field of view. It had to be video, rather than time lapse, because often fish spend only a second or two in the frame, and you usually need to look at their behavior to determine the species. We are going to look at the number, species, size, and time that each organism appears in the video.

The mount with a GoPro on the end when we went to pick it up- there was often a lot of seagrass caught on them

We put them out around high tide, which meant we had to go by boat. Since our trips were four hours apart, there was a lot of waiting around in which we often tried various restaurants, as well as a lot of time on the boat, since some of them were pretty far apart. Because of this, even when I was walking on dry land I still felt like I was swaying on the waves. It was pretty disorienting sometimes, but went away in a couple days. Deploying the cameras was pretty difficult sometimes, because of the wind and the waves. It was harder than we expected to slide our camera mount over the poles we placed in the mud, slide a bolt through holes we drilled in the poles, and screw on a wingnut, all from a boat that is moving up and down and drifting away.

In addition to putting out cameras, we also put out traps to catch fish, which we could use to compare the number and species of what we found in the traps to what we found in the video. We did this at low tide when we put out the poles the mounts would go on. We also wanted to look at juvenile Dungeness crab predation, so we (bear with me here) superglued small fishing hooks tied with fishing line attached to their carapaces. We tied them to a stake out in the same four habitats as the cameras, and left them out for a day. The hooks are supposed to catch whatever fish may try to eat the small crabs, and the fishing line keeps the crabs in one place so we can find them again the next day.

One of our juvenile Dungeness, all ready to go!

I thought we were tying up the crabs and leaving them to their deaths, but most of them survived the whole day! The hooks also came off pretty easily at the end, and we let the crabs go. We never caught any fish, and always found the crabs burrowed in the sediment, well hidden.

By the end, we had a little army of attack crabs on leashes

We had to go collect the crabs ourselves, so we went and sampled bags of oyster shells (which I have mentioned in previous posts), to try to find some for our tethering experiment. Most of them were across the bay, in deep mud, so because of my toe still being sensitive, I often supervised from the boat while the other two did all the work. However, I did try my first raw oyster while we were out there. Lee shucked it for me with a screwdriver, and it was probably still alive when I ate it (gross!), but I am proud to say I kept it down. Now that I have tried it, I never have to again.

Some cool colonial tunicates we found on the boat when we pulled it out of the water at the end of the week

One day during our free time in the afternoon, we went up to the lighthouse at the top of the point on the Washington side of the mouth of the Columbia. It was a great view, and I never realized how large the mouth is! It was a beautiful view. Also, at the end of the trip we stopped in Astoria for lunch, and got to drive across the bridge and see a bit of the city.

Overall, it was a week of trying new things and spending a lot of time outside. In addition to the oyster, I also tried thimbleberries, pickleweed, raw cockle, elk, and probably several other things I can’t remember. I’m so glad I had the opportunity to go on the trip, and am looking forward to see what kind of fish show up in our video!

Previously on Bandon by the Sea…

Posted on July 29, 2013 by Catherine Courtier

Greetings readers! I must admit that I have fallen a bit behind in my blog posts, but never fear because I have many new stories to tell, as well as some new adventures in my future! A couple weeks ago I was fortunate enough to sit in on a call between my two mentors and some of the people who work in NOAA’s fisheries management department; the hot topic of discussion, Coho Salmon restoration on the South coast of Oregon. More specifically the call was a discussion of how to go about creating a “universal salmon calculator” that would detail the benefits of restoration as well as identifying the permanent economic benefits such as number of jobs created. While most of the conversation went over my head, I managed to understand the key points as well as the bottom line. In order to get people to donate money to the cause, there has to be a way to determine the salmon’s value when populations return that is universal across all areas. Currently there are many different ways to calculate this, each more confusing than the other. One proposed idea was to look at the return in terms of its landscape value; i.e. how many total acres of salmon habitat have been restored or how many miles of stream have opened up.

In addition to the calculator conundrum is the lack of money to fund post-restoration monitoring. This is very unfortunate since examining any kind of project after the fact is the most important step in conservation and restoration! Without any kind of follow up there is no way to know if what you have done is sustainable, if it actually did what it was supposed to do, and if it is worth continuing. Furthermore, this post restoration analysis makes it possible to create a metric of success that will interest funders. Since money seems to be the issue, I think it would be a great idea to train community member volunteers to gather this post-restoration data. Not only would this be relatively free of charge (besides the time it would take to train people), but I believe it would also be a great chance to educate local residents on a conservation issue that’s right in their backyard and create pride and enthusiasm for protecting their environment. When dealing with any kind of conservation/restoration issue, the two main questions that I feel are most important are: 1. What are the benefits associated with restoration and 2. What are the values lost when harm comes to the environment?

As has been the case with other aspects of my internship, this phone call really exemplified the point that there needs to be better communication between the scientific and non-scientific community. Issues and topics need to be presented in a way that makes them seem approachable and like something that the general public could take part in.

In other news, I have finished my research for Travel Oregon! For the past four weeks I have been doing an online footprint analysis of each city’s webpages as well as collecting information on lodging, shops, food, places to go, things to do, and events and festivals. Eventually this will all be fed into Travel Oregon’s orb so it can populate the site and beef up the information on the South Coast (since it is currently lacking basically all areas of information). My next step will be to meet with people involved in the communities who are on our “Rural Tourism Steering Committee” to run all the information by them, and just get a general feel for each town as well as the possible pros and cons of increasing tourism in the area. My hope is that the end product of this project will be two-fold: 1. A community calendar will be uploaded to the Travel Oregon site so that local events can be better publicized and visitors can plan trips around them. 2. That an interactive map will be available for each town’s asset such that when you search for something, a map with its location as well as the locations of things to do around it pops up.

My internship has reached the halfway mark! This was celebrated at the Da Vinci Days festival in Corvallis where I got a chance to catch up with all the other interns and hear updates on their projects, work Sea Grant’s both at the festival, and explore Corvallis further. Although the morning started off slowly, by the time noon came around (and the awesome all bike parade!) the festival was bustling and the Sea Grant booth had more visitors than we could handle. While the occasional passerby was interested in our summer projects, the majority were fixated with the green turtle shell display and Bubbles our live and invasive red-eared slider. As much as I would have loved to talk about my project (and believe me I could go on for hours…) I was more excited that there were so many people who were curious about marine biology and were actually asking questions. Yay for the future generations of marine biologists! Another highlight of this wonderful weekend was getting the chance to hear the awe-inspiring Jane Lubchenco speak. To be in the presence of such a strong woman who has not only been an integral part in bridging the gap between the scientific and public communities, but is the first woman to serve as a NOAA administrator, gave me such hope for the future (not to mention many goose bumps)! I was however saddened to see that with the exception of my fellow scholars, there was basically no one else around our age in attendance. Just more proof that strengthening communication and involvement in science in paramount!

One trip down, one to go! This next week I will be leaving Bandon and venturing down to coast to the towns of Port Orford, Gold Beach, and Brookings! I’m so excited to get to visit the places that up till now have only researched on the Internet. Curry County here I come!

Week 5: Some Important Lessons

Posted on July 22, 2013 by Sarah Heidmann

This week was marked mostly by preparations for the trip I am currently on in Willapa Bay, Washington, just north of Astoria. We made and triple-checked lists of supplies, wrote out exactly what we were going to do each day at what times (which matters a lot because of the tides!), researching methods for a study we are going to do about predation on juvenile Dungeness, and finished making the mounts for the GoPro cameras we are putting out in different habitats.

While doing these preparations (I wrote out the protocol myself), I was asked at multiple stages to send my work to various people so they could look over it. Originally I thought that I would be the only one looking at some of it, so I had little notes to myself inserted in various places, and sentences that made perfect sense to me, but wouldn’t to anyone else. I also left out crucial details like exactly how to turn on the cameras and how to know whether they are recording or not. Not only would it be difficult for my coworkers to follow it, but if anyone wanted to copy the methods in the future, it would be very difficult for them to replicate. I learned quickly that you need to always keep your work extremely organized and readable by anyone who may want to see it, even if you don’t think anyone else will see it. At the very least, if you ever want to look back at your past work, details will help you remember much better.

Another lesson I’ve learned through this amazing opportunity is how to talk to people who are much older and more experienced than I am. Previously I have had difficulty with this, as I thought they would not be interested in what I have to say. However, as I talk to more people about a wider variety of subjects, I am quickly learning that is far from true. I am treated as an equal, and asked with real interest about my research. I have also been able to receive tons of good advice about biology research, graduate school, career options, and life in general. I have so many questions about it all, and everyone I’ve talked to has been so friendly and helpful! I am really grateful for the opportunity to be around so many people who are tackling important biological research.

I’m going to save talking about the trip until the end of this week, but I’m having a blast!

Week 4: Self-Directed Accomplishment

Posted on July 14, 2013 by Sarah Heidmann

This week I was supposed to be on a trip with my lab in Willapa Bay, Washington, doing field work. My foot is not healed enough that I was comfortable to go, so I had to sit this one out. I was able to go to the doctor and get an x-ray and my pinky toe is definitely fractured. This means another month of healing, which is basically my whole summer. The silver lining of the situation is that my injury lined up nicely with my move to a new house, allowing me to take it easy while still getting things done, like unpacking and getting settled. My injury means that I had to miss out on the fun and the other people in the lab have to do a lot more work to do, but we’re trying to make the best of it. I should be able to go on the next one though, which leaves this upcoming Friday!

Although I can’t go in the field, I have still been useful doing computer and lab work, which I had a lot of this week. My mentor wanted to give me something hands-on to do, so instead of processing some samples in the field like they normally would do, they brought them back in Ziploc bags so I could process them in the lab. These samples were from the mud and eelgrass areas near some bags of oyster shells that were put out a couple months ago, when Dungeness crabs were recruiting (metamorphosing from larvae into juveniles). The oyster shells create three-dimensional habitat at low tide, attracting crabs seeking shelter and providing suitable habitat for . We periodically sample the bags and some of the sediment underneath, as well as areas nearby with no bags, to look at the number and size of any crabs we find, which are mainly Dungeness (Metacarcinus magister) and shore crabs (Hemigrapsus spp.). This data helps my mentor look at the recruitment and growth of juvenile Dungeness, as well as their preferred habitats. In the lab, I sorted bags of eelgrass, measuring crabs I found and weighing the eelgrass both wet and after drying in an oven.

Because everyone was gone this week, I was responsible for my own success in getting things done, but I think I did a very good job. It helps that I am so used to being in school, where you set your own schedule. I’ve learned a lot of time management, and it’s good to know that this helps in the real world too!

I’m not sure what this next week has in store for me, but I’m definitely looking forward to going to Washington on Friday!

Red, White, and Bandon!

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Catherine Courtier

Greetings readers!

I hope everyone’s 4th of July weekend was as amazing as mine! As I said before, I have been a California girl my entire life and as such have been somewhat hesitant about opening my heart and mind to a different state. However, after spending the holiday weekend exploring Corvallis, Seaside, and Cannon Beach I have replaced my skepticism towards the Oregon coast with what I can only assume will progress into a budding romance. I started off my four-day weekend by visiting some friends in the quirky college town of Corvallis where I discovered some amazing bakeries, got the chance to stroll through the bustling farmer’s market, and went on a short but beautiful hike up to Bald Hill.

Later we set off on a short road trip to Seaside to enjoy some 4th of July festivities and well deserved beach time. The second I set foot in downtown Seaside I immediately realized that I wasn’t in Bandon anymore… Whereas Bandon (or as its residents affectionately refer to it as, “Bandon by the Sea”) is a small fairly quiet beach town whose citizens pride themselves on their charming old downtown and specialty stores, Seaside (whose motto is “More than just a day at beach”) is roughly twice the size of Bandon and definitely has more mainstream tourist attractions. Later we traveled down the coast a bit to Cannon beach and spent the day exploring local art galleries, all of which drew their subject matter from the surrounding coastal environment.

So far this project has been very different from ones that I’ve previously taken part in. Up until this moment, most of the work I’ve done has been on a fairly small scale, but now gone are the days of sitting at a lab bench and observing organisms under a dissecting scope! I have been tasked with determining what the “brand” is of South Coast Oregon. With four towns, roughly 12, 803 people, and thousands of miles of land and coast you can imagine this is no easy task. I have also discovered that there is no easy answer of how to promote and spread coastal tourism. My trip to the North coast this past weekend exemplified that, and taught me that the while the more traditional modes of attracting tourists (such as bright neon signs, gift shops, arcades, etc.), may be lucrative, they are not necessarily what’s best for an individual community, let alone something its residents would be fine with. I saw this in the charismatic town of Seaside Oregon; a town that most likely attracts passersby because of its beautiful beaches and charming houses, but causes them to stay and return with the help of new aesthetically pleasing apartments and hotels right on the beach, an arcade full of games and rides, and numerous shops where you can purchase apparel and food to remind you of your stay.

While I do not claim to be an expert on Oregon’s coastal towns, anyone could see that Seaside is virtually the polar opposite of Bandon (not to mention double the size!) I have come to the conclusion that a lot of it basically comes down to personal preference. And using my experience thus far as an indicator, I believe that it is near impossible to brand the entire South Coast simply because each town has something special to promote (ie. Old Downtown Bandon, art galleries in Cannon Beach, arcades and souvenir shops in Seaside). While this can be seen as a major pain (especially since I have been asked to in fact, brand the south coast) it also reminds me that the beauty in it is that each town is in fact different, so theoretically there is a coastal town in Oregon for each and every person!

While Oregon’s coastal towns may be different, there is one thing that they all have in common: the beauty of their natural resources. Bandon, Brookings, Gold Beach, and Port Orford all provide access to the coastal activities such as SCUBA, fishing, and kayaking, lush forests where you can camp, hike, and bike, and freshwater where you can swim, fish, windsurf, or just boat around. In my remaining time with the WRCA I hope to help each town capitalize on their breath-taking environments to not only help stimulate their economies, but to educate the residents and tourists on conservation issues that are right in their back yard. This is a crucial step, one which is often overlooked, because the fate of these natural resources will directly affect many local businesses such as fishing and farming.

This past week I was fortunate enough to sit in on the second meeting of WRCA’s steering committee and meet a variety of people working with organizations such as the Freshwater Trust and the Port Orford Ocean Resource Team, as they discussed their individual projects as well as organizations that WRCA has funded or will fund in the future. It was amazing to learn how many organizations WRCA has helped and about all the amazing projects they plan to fund in the future (such as a sustainable greenhouse where teens can volunteer and learn about local plant species). Next week I’ll be taking a field trip down to visit Brookings, Port Orford, and Gold Beach to meet with community leaders to discuss the work I have done on mapping out what each town’s assets are. I think this will be an awesome chance to get to know these towns a bit better as well as start a conversation about how each town wants to work towards creating more sustainable tourism!

Stay tuned for more adventures!

Week 3: Happy Fourth of July

Posted on July 8, 2013 by Sarah Heidmann

This week of my internship turned out to be quite short. Because of an unfortunate accident over the previous weekend, my foot might be broken, (a week later, it is feeling much better and I can almost walk normally but I am still not able to do field work), so I missed Monday to go to the doctor and rest up. The Fourth of July and the following EPA furlough day gave me a four-day weekend. I guess it was great timing, because I was able to rest up plenty and relax but still have fun. My friends hosted a BBQ at their house, and we all biked down to the Willamette River in Corvallis where there was a fireworks show, as well as hundreds of people lighting off their own in the street. The Fourth is one of my favorite holidays, and although I was not in tip-top shape, it was still a wonderful time.

Before I hurt my foot, I was able to go tidepooling in Boiler Bay, just north of Newport. I spent three hours there (and consequently got a little sunburned, it was a beautiful day), and had a great time taking pictures, touching things, and trying to catch fish. The Oregon Coast has an amazing diversity of marine life, and I’m so glad I get to experience it!

To respond to a question from my last post, “testing” the GoPro cameras involved taking pictures and videos, trying to figure out the battery life, size of the SD card, and the size of the field of view at various heights off the ground. I put testing in quotes because it felt more like playing with the cameras. We came up with a design for the mount of the camera and built and deployed it last week to get some test video. It worked surprisingly well the first time, and I learned how to use a drill press. We just bought materials for the rest of the camera mounts, and will be building them soon.
In the meantime, I am continuing my video analysis from previous years so we will have historic data to compare to. I am also sorting through samples of seagrass, measuring any crabs I find and weighing the plant matter, as part of another ongoing project looking at the crabs that live in Yaquina Bay. We are trying to determine where they are most abundant (in the native seagrass, the invasive seagrass, or bare mud), and if the ages of the crabs is different between them.
Hopefully my foot will be better soon so I can get back to field work!

Field Work Frenzy!

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Sam Thiede

Hello all!
I’m so excited to update you on my week! This past week was all about field work, which is my favorite part of any job. Monday we kicked off the week heading down to Indian Point where Jim, my officemate and colleague, and Scott, my mentor, had previously placed two crab pots filled with pit tagged cockles. Our goal was to dig up the crab pots (no easy feat in such coarse sand!) and retrieve the cockles to measure their growth over the previous two weeks. Unfortunately, many of the cockles had died but we could still collect all the growth data we needed from them, such as shell length, height, fatness, and clam weight.

A typical day at the ODFW in Charleston, OR

Wednesday I had the opportunity to venture outside of shellfish biology and got to ride along and seine with the marine fish department. Our target species was Chinook salmon but we also found many other species of fish such as greenlings, sand lances, English soles, staghorn sculpins, and smelts. We also found hundreds of small Dungeness crabs and comb jellies. A few people held one end of the seine on the beach and the boat was driven around in an arch until the boat reached the other end of the beach. We then pulled the seine up to the shore and then sifted through the bag for fish.
We sampled 4 sites along a seven mile stretch of water, from Charleston to North Bend. We measured lengths and weights of our target species in order to later be able to calculate a condition factor (K) which is used to estimate the condition (health) of fish. We also identified which salmon were hatchery salmon by checking to see if the adipose fin was clipped. Clipped fins indicated hatchery spawned salmon.

Thursday’s field site in Port Orford

Thursday was by far my favorite field work day of the week. Jim and I drove out to Woodruff Creek near Port Orford. After scaling down a sharp cliff-face in waders to get to our sampling site my adrenaline was definitely pumping. We sampled eight, random, 1m^2 quadrats. Our target species was littleneck clams. Digging through all the tide pools was amazing and we found some cool intertidal species; my favorite find was a clown nudibranch (sea slug). The tide pools were teaming with diverse fauna: several species of crabs, gunnels, peanut worms, sea stars, sculpins, the list goes on and on! Though we were out sampling in the warm sun for three or so hours I enjoyed every minute of lifting cobble and boulders and digging through sand to find littleneck clams. When you love what you do, it never seems like work!

A clown nudibranch (sea slug) I found in one of our quadrats in Port Orford

And what’s work without a little play? I have made some good friends at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology (OIMB) where I am being housed. All the students are friendly and always ready for adventures. After dinner, rain or shine, we’ll get together to play volleyball or Frisbee or go hang out on the beach. Thursday was particularly fun, as I swam in the Pacific Ocean for the first time. It took a few minutes to get used to the cold water but soon we were having the time of our lives swimming through the breakers.

A typical night at OIMB

This weekend, a few friends and I drove over to Sunset Bay where we spent our day climbing through the cliff sides where we found some pretty stellar tide pools. As the tide began to roll in, so did the fog. The fog is a unique part of the Oregon coast that I have come to love. In Indiana, fog is something you wake up to and it appears as a boring, thick sheet. Here in Oregon, fog comes in at random times throughout the day and it rolls in looking like thick cumulus clouds gliding across the ground and pouring like falls over cliff sides. It’s a beautiful event that I’ve fallen in love with and there is something very relaxing about the whole occurrence. On our way back to OIMB we stopped at an overlook of the cove and ended up sighting some sea lions and even a whale, which was the cherry on top of a good day. I can’t wait to see what adventures this week holds!

Off to a Great Start!

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Catherine Courtier

My first full week in Bandon began with a surprise visit from my beloved school’s mascot! After setting eyes on this gorgeous gastropod, I knew it was going to be a good week…

After a full week in the office I think I’m starting to get a better handle on what it is I will be helping Wild Rivers Coast Alliance with in the next ten weeks. For the past week and a half my main priority has been to create a master database that details what activities, lodging, restaurants, shops, and places to visit, are available to tourists in each of the four cities that WRCA works with (Bandon, Brookings, Gold Beach, and Port Orford.) Thus far what I have learned from my research is that while each city advertises many places to stay and eat, most of the four towns are seriously lacking when it comes down to detailing what there is to do (i.e. such as whale watching, hiking, and kayaking). In the end, all the information I have been collecting will eventually be input into Travel Oregon’s website. To me this is particularly exciting because I want to reinforce the knowledge out there that one of the main reasons people should visit Oregon is to take advantage of the astounding environment! My hope is that by strengthening the information that’s out there about activities to do in nature, each city will be able to not only increase their sustainable ecotourism, but educate locals and tourists alike about each particular habitat, species, and conservation issue relevant to the coast.

In the coming week I believe I will be meeting with some city officials from the representative four cities to fine tune the information I have collected, as well as determine what the best way is to implement any desired changes. I also plan on continuing my research on what South Coast Oregon’s presence is in facebook, twitter, and smartphone applications; because we live in a society that is so driven by technology and instant access to information I believe this is a great chance to captivate and educate!

This past weekend we had, without doubt, the best weather since I’ve been here! So with warm weather, sunny skies, and some visiting friends I set out again to explore Oregon’s charismatic South Coast. Since my position as a coastal tourism intern requires me to research what the towns of Bandon, Brookings, Port Orford, and Gold Beach have to offer (such as various activities, restaurants, etc.) I have decided that I should probably experience them myself; after all, why should I expect other people to be interested in all these places if I myself haven’t even been to them?

My day began at the Bandon Baking Company and Deli, which had cinnamon rolls that looked so appetizing I think I actually started to drool… The Baking Company is a cute place that’s the perfect stop for some morning coffee and a delicious homemade pastry. After breakfast my friend and I traveled a short distance down the 101 to the West Coast Game Safari Park, an awesome place for people of all ages to not only have close encounters with exotic animals that they would otherwise probably only see in pictures, but to learn about them as well. We spent the afternoon petting and learning about animals such as the lynx and white tiger, and wishing that we had our own pet Wallaby.

After we had our fill of cute furry animals and loud annoying peacocks, we headed back to Bandon for some smoothies from the Bandon Cofe Cafe which has quite an impressive menu including sandwiches, a variety of coffee drinks, and homemade pie (not to mention free WiFi!). While it’s fun exploring, on a hot summer day there really isn’t anything better than relaxing on the beach and exploring the intertidal. We weren’t the only ones taking advantage of the lovely weather, and saw both locals and visitors surfing, beach-combing, tide-pooling, and birdwatching. We ended our tough day of exploring with some delicious seafood at Tony’s Crab Shack! This is an awesome place to sit outside, enjoy the beautiful weather and view, and enjoy some fresh seafood.

This week will be a short one since the 4th of July in on Thursday. While I will not be spending it in Bandon, my weekend will still be spent exploring Oregon’s coastline, but this time I’ll be in Seaside. Stay tuned for more updates on my adventures and progress with Wild Rivers Coast Alliance!

Week 2: First Day in the Field!

Posted on June 28, 2013 by Sarah Heidmann

My work this week has been defined by many miscellaneous tasks I have done for various members of my mentor’s lab, almost none of which are related to my project, but I had a lot of fun with them. I have done analysis of videos taken in an estuary in Washington, measured tiny mud shrimp recruits (juveniles) after sorting through mud to find them, and measured, sexed, and examined adult mud shrimp to look for parasites and infection. I also “tested” the GoPro cameras we will be deploying in July to record the fish and crabs found in the invasive species of eelgrass.

A picture of the video I’m analyzing. You can see a full-sized Dungeness crab.

Mud samples on a tray that I sorted through looking for small mud shrimp recruits (juveniles)

Today was the first day I went out in the field to do sampling, on the mudflats near Hatfield Marine Science Center. Thank goodness it was a beautiful day today, so we didn’t have to wear heavy rain gear. We got very muddy, and I wish I had pictures but I don’t have a camera I wouldn’t mind getting dirty. We were looking for mud shrimp to measure and look for parasites. We used what is called a bucket core, which looks like a giant stainless steel bucket without a bottom and is about three feet tall. We pushed it all the way down into the mud, and shoveled the mud out into sieves, sorting through them and pulling out the shrimp as we found them. It was hard work, but the most fun I’ve had so far, and a great excuse to get outside and play in the mud!

Overall, it was a great week. I also bought a new camera, so hopefully I’ll have some higher quality pictures from now on. Next week I’m looking forward to building the mounts for our cameras and testing them in the field, and the Fourth of July, of course!

Sea Grant Scholars

Learning through experience, for the future of our oceans

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