Young Environmentalists to Study the Rouge River

Students from Birmingham's West Maple Elementary will collect water samples for testing as part of the spring monitoring event.

  Anyone that sees elementary-aged students frolicking in and around Booth Park today during school hours Wednesday should not be alarmed, or assume they're skipping class to take advantage of the warm weather expected today. The classroom for many fifth graders at West Maple Elementary School will be outdoors today and Thursday as students participate in the annual Rouge River Spring Monitoring Day. The students will conducting water quality testing, physical testing and collect classifying benthic macro invertebrates, according to Michelle Romig of the Birmingham Public Schools. The students will be outdoors in separate groups from 9:15 a.m. to noon, and from 12:15 p.m. to 3:15 p.m. Last year, students from Birmingham Covington School …

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Friends of the Rouge River Need Volunteers for Spring Bug Hunt

The deadline to register is April 5.

Volunteers Still Needed for Rouge River Frog Survey

There will be a training workshop this Wednesday at the E.L. Johnson Nature Center in Bloomfield Hills.

Are There Beavers Living in Booth Park?

A reader sent in this picture, asking: is this a collection of sticks and mud in Birmingham's Booth Park a beaver dam?

Could there be a beavers living along the Rouge River in Birmingham? One reader was wondering that very thing, tweeting a picture of what appears to be a beaver dam along the wood chip trail in Birmingham's Booth Park. According to the photographer, resident Mary Ellen Johnson, the photo was snapped this weekend during a walk along the trail. Her dog, she said, even used the collection of sticks, leaves and mud to cross the Rouge River as it runs through that section of Booth Park. Beavers in the Rouge River have been top of mind for many area naturalists recently. In the spring newsletter for the University of Michigan-Dearborn's Environmental Interpretative Center (EIC), the EIC's Rich Simek writes that he snapped a picture of a beaver …

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Beavers Sighted in the Rouge River: What Does It Mean?

Why a sighting of this dam-building creature is good news for the river.

On July 15, 2012, Rick Simek of the University of Michigan-Dearborn's Environmental Interpretive Center snapped a photo of a beaver in the Rouge River in Dearborn. Big deal, right? But what might seem like a normal occurrence could actually be a sign of the increasing water and habitat quality of the Rouge watershed. According to a piece written by Simek in the EIC's spring newsletter, beaver trapping led to the local extinction of the species in Metro Detroit in the 1830s, with "no traces of the species left by 1877." Though several other reports of beaver sightings and markings had been reported in recent years in the Rouge and other nearby rivers, Simek's photo is proof of the beaver's return to the Rouge River — which runs through …

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Friends of the Rouge: Spring Survey Shows Health Improvement in River

One area of the Rouge River that showed improvement in the 2012 Spring Bug Hunt Report was the Main Branch, which runs through Birmingham.

Things are looking up for the Rouge River, according to the Metro Detroit nonprofit Friends of the Rouge (FOTR). FOTR’s 2012 Spring Bug Hunt Report, released this month, shows that two branches of the Rouge River — the Middle Branch and the Main Branch — are showing an upward trend in health. The Spring Bug Hunt is an annual event part of a program to collect data on certain types of bugs that live in the streambed. The type and abundance of mayfly, dragonfly and stonefly and other larvae can be translated into a “score” for a site, telling biologists whether a site is good, fair, poor or excellent. The two branches that showed improvement were the Middle Branch that includes Johnson Creek and the Walled Lake Drainage and follows Hines …

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Give Back to the Rouge With Gardening Event Saturday

Birmingham will host a gardening event at Quarton Lake Saturday.

Wondering what to do with yourself this weekend? Don't dismay: check out today's Weekend Spotlight: Our pick for today: Rouge River planting Come back to Birmingham Patch on Tuesday for more weekend things to do in our Weekend Spotlight, or visit our events calendar.

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