Sample in a Jar

On a hot August day this past summer, poking along the edges of the upper Childs River, I spotted a dark cloud, shifting, and floating along the muddy river bottom. With the throwing of a pebble, it scattered and then reformed. A school of tiny fish! But what kind?

A quick trip home through the woods to get the kids and the dip nets, and back we went to collect our sample in a [mason] jar. We spent the next hour watching and studying our new neighbors – juvenile brown bullhead catfish (Ameiurus nebulosus). I taught the kids about the venomous spines on their fins, and about their hardy nature. And most significantly, we talked about how cool it was to see a brown bullhead this far up the river valley in a stretch of river that had been cranberry bogs only a year earlier. Native fish were returning to the upper Childs River!

After a little while we returned the fish to the river, and as I poured the contents of the jar back into the pool, I wondered – if there are juveniles, where were the adults? A month or so later I spied an eight inch adult bullhead creeping through some submerged tree branches in the very same pool where I’d seen the school of juveniles.

It was an important reminder that sometimes the small, and seemingly inconsequential, can often be signs of something larger. In this case, a jarful of small fish shared with kids on a hot summer day – a sample – signified that the river was returning to itself. And perhaps, so too was I …