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Shrimp Savers Become Bird Watchers

When kids, enviros and a rancher teamed up to save a tiny pink shrimp from the hoofs and habits of a farm full of portly cows in 1993, they had little inkling that so many others would follow their lead, nor that they'd gain a few feathered friends.

Fourth-graders at San Anselmo's Brookside Elementary School began working with dairy farmer Paul Martin in 1993 to restore habitat for the endangered California freshwater shrimp and to help control erosion and other damage from grazing. When other ranchers saw the results, they expressed interest in working with the students too, and the project quickly grew from a few classes of elementary school children and a couple of ranchers to over 50 elementary and high school classes working at a dozen ranches and a dozen suburban sites this year.

The STRAW project (Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed) is now a collaborative effort of schools, restoration experts, ranchers, The Bay Institute, the Center for Ecoliteracy and others. STRAW's newest interest is in birds, inspired in part by Martin's desire to see quail return to his ranch and in part by The Bay Institute's realization that riparian restoration creates nice bird habitat. "We also realized that this was a tangible way to help people connect their watersheds to the Bay," says the Institute's Grant Davis. To help develop the bird theme, the Institute asked Point Reyes Bird Observatory (PRBO) to become a partner.

Since then, the Institute, PRBO, Prunuske Chatham, Americorps and the Marin and Southern Sonoma Resource Conservation Districts have been working hands-on with students, revegetating streams with willows and other riparian species. PRBO, meanwhile, has been taking teachers into the field to help them identify birds by sight and song and providing them with checklists and natural history information for the birds in their area. "We really try to stress the science behind the project," explains PRBO's Melissa Pitkin. She says the most exciting part is that all of STRAW's efforts are clearly paying off: "We found 22 species of birds in one restored area compared to only eight in a non-restored site."

Contact: Laurette Rogers (415) 721-7680 or Melissa Pitkin (415) 868-1221, ext. 33

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