As the school year winds down, students everywhere are rushing to finish assignments, prepare for exams, and wrap up final projects. For Earth Team interns, it also means completing restoration work and celebrating the culmination of months of environmental service.
On Saturday, May 10th, interns from Arroyo, Castro Valley, San Leandro, and San Lorenzo High Schools met up once more at Oyster Bay Regional shoreline. Interns returned to the beautiful butterfly garden and, even though it was only two months since our last visit, a lot had changed. The path through the garden has begun sprouting weeds that needed pulling and the mulch around the perimeter of the garden needed a good refresh. Lucky for the butterflies, Earth Team interns were on the job.
Since this is a familiar location for our interns by now, we were able to get right to work on weeding the garden. Just like our last two visits to the park, interns were asked to remove invasive plants from in and around the garden as well as clearing the pathway through the middle of the area. While there were not as many weeds as our prior visits, the weeds were smaller and spread all over the garden, leaving a lot of crawling and crouching for our interns. Some students split off with ecologists Jaclyn and Brenda to also remove weeds down the pathway by the disc golf course.
Oyster Bay is home to an extensive, 18 hole disc golf course commonly used by the Oyster Bay Disc Golf Club. Lucky for us, the amazing members of the club were generous enough to host a disc golf clinic for the interns. Interns learned disc golf etiquette and practiced both driving (long distance throws) and putting (short distance throws). After taking turns learning each of the throws and practicing with different types of discs, interns split up and played a few rounds of disc golf together.
After a full morning of habitat restoration and an afternoon learning a new sport, interns had worked up an appetite. The OB Disc Golf Club and East Bay Regional Parks District worked together to treat interns to a barbeque lunch to end the day. Interns spent the remainder of the afternoon enjoying hotdogs and each other’s company.
Earth Team is incredibly grateful to the staff at the East Bay Regional Parks District and the Oyster Bay Disc Golf Club for all their hard work and support for our students. We would also like to thank the Fish and Wildlife Commission for funding this project.
