Highlights for the week ending September 24th

Water Quality Monitoring Program with Volunteers (WQMPV):

For the week of September 19th to September 22nd we visited the 24 monitoring stations around the San Juan Bay Estuary Watershed. A total of 10 volunteers joined our Water Quality Monitoring Coordinator, Harold Manrique, and collected data from eight different parameters during a 4-day period. Each trip our volunteers also collected water samples to measure colonies of fecal bacteria. The analyses were performed in our own facilities in Old San Juan. 

Bird Census in Old San Juan:

On September 20th, our Visitor Center was the starting point for six (6) volunteers who conducted a bird census, led by our AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer, Laura Fidalgo, MSc, who showed them strategies to locate and identify bird species in the area. More than a dozen different birds were identified.

We want to share this particular photograph taken this week by our AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer, historian Laura Horta. It’s a bird’s nest made with garbage, seen in the estuarine area of Alto del Cabro, close to the Condado Lagoon Estuarine Reserve. This image serves as an alert to the damage that trash can do to our environment.

This week several of our activities were canceled or rescheduled by the blackout suffered by the island between September 22 and September 23.