Watercress Creek Stream Assessment Narrative

On Saturday, October 30, 2010, I met three fellow certified Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy citizen scientists to conduct a benthic macroinvertebrate assessment of Watercress Creek located in the Banshee Reeks Nature Preserve.  For three of the four of us, it was the first time we had worked on an assessment for this location.

    The weather that day was gorgeous, sunny and breezy and in the mid 50’s.  It had rained a few days prior, but not enough to impact the assessment.

We gathered our equipment and loaded up the preserve’s golf cart and headed to the monitoring site.  Reaching the site, we set the equipment up stream side under a grove of Paw Paw trees.  Once the equipment was ready, we assessed the creek for acceptable riffle areas.  Watercress Creek is a stream unlike any I had monitored before; very shallow with slow moving water and few riffles.  I didn’t exactly have high hopes for our first netting sample.   That thought was quickly squelched as our first two nettings produced more than 200 macroinvertebrates.

October 2010 – score      9    Acceptable ecological conditions