Hi All – Tim here.
We’ve adopted the beach down the road from White Sky Woods though the Alliance for the Great Lakes Adopt-a-Beach program. We’ve been doing it for about two summers and enjoy it quite a bit. I get to be a bit of a citizen scientist! It’s also a great family activity… even Flora helps and she’s only two.
We visit about every three weeks or so and do a variety of things. We measure the air and water temperatures, wind speed, wave intensity, and other things. We also do a bacteria test that gets sent to us in the mail. I have to go out into the cold water which is sometimes a little fun if the waves are big.
We also take data on beach activities like the number of people on the beach, on boats, or swimming. Our beach is pretty remote, so there are generally not too many people there. We count different types of birds and take note if we find any dead animals or fish (no dead animals yet, but a few dead fish).
Another aspect of the visit is the always fun beach clean-up. We’ve collected everything from soda cans, to balloons, to rope and even parts of a Weber grill. All of the types of debris and the beach data is entered on-line and compiled with all the other adopted beaches. You can see the data on our last few visits here: www.greatlakesadopt.org/Home/HistoricalData. Just type in “State Beach” for the Beach Name and it will come up.
Many of the beach clean-ups are open to the general public and the beaches are in eight states now. You can see if there is a beach clean-up near you here http://www.greatlakesadopt.org/ Just put in the city and state and you will likely find many opportunities.
Here are some pictures of “our” beach. Enjoy!
