Tag: Blog Series: 12 Days of CWS
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Day 12 – California Water: The Gift that Keeps on Giving
By Karrigan Börk and Jay Lund . . . California is full of gifts that keep on giving. California water provides for a bounty of social, environmental, economic, and cultural benefits. Water is the lifeblood of California farms, which have created one of the world’s great agricultural economies. Water carves our state’s beautiful landscapes and…
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Day 11 – The Gift of Students
By Karrigan Börk . . . You might think that teaching the same thing again every year would get old, or that taking field trips to the same location year after year would be repetitive. And, sure, gearing up to teach landlord-tenant law for the nth time can be a bit daunting. But I’ve found…
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Day 10 – One lucky penny
By Christine A. Parisek . . . Imagine a time you were standing at the edge of a creek – perhaps small pebbles and cobblestone were stacked along the shallow water edge, aquatic vegetation pushed its way in between, and a light breeze rustled the trees around you as the water swirled and lapped playfully…
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Day 9 – A Visit From S.T. Nicholas
By Kimberly Evans . . . ‘Twas a morning of field work, when all through our vanNot a researcher was sleeping, and to Suisun Marsh we ran;Our waders and boots folded, all tucked in with care,In hopes that bountiful fish, in our seines, would be there; The researchers were nestled all snug on our boat…
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Day 8 – Haikus
We invited haiku submissions from CWS members and friends to be a part of the 8th day of our California WaterBlog series, “12 Days of CWS“. A haiku is a traditional Japanese three-line poem (5-7-5 syllables) that focuses on capturing a moment, feeling, or image. We hope you enjoy… and leave us your own haiku in the…
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Day 7 – Pickles and Hidden Gems: The UC Davis Fish Collection
By Rachel Alsheikh . . . On the UC Davis campus, past the Watershed Sciences Building, past the cows and the Arboretum, there’s a nondescript building with a locked room. It’s a secret treasure trove: shelves upon shelves stacked with more than 8,000 jars of fish specimens preserved in ethanol. At over 30,000 fishes, it’s…
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Day 6 – Recharging Resilience: Balancing climate grief with curiosity and purpose
By Kira Zalis Waldman . . . Teaching hydrology means teaching in a world where climate awareness, and inherently climate grief, often walk into the classroom before I do. Our lectures revisit now familiar concerns: shrinking snowpack, overdrafted aquifers, and the uneven and unjust burdens so many California communities carry. The weight of that knowledge…
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Day 5 – A Day in the Life of an Indoor Ecologist
By Jonathan Walter . . . Many ecologists spend substantial time conducting research in the field – but for some of us, our skillsets (e.g., statistics, mathematical models, data science) lend themselves to a different, more indoor career. Here’s what a typical workday might look like: 6:00 AM: Start the day with coffee on the…
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Day 4 – The Ghost of Carp-mas Past!
By Kim Luke . . . Back in 2019, I began a project called the Carp Dependent Ecosystem Urgent Management (Carp-DEUM) Project. I started this project as an undergraduate and continued it as a junior specialist and graduate student until 2022. The project was focused on the common carp (Cyprinus carpio) population in the UC…
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Day 3 – An Ode to Gulls
By Lynette Williams Duman . . . There is no better cure for the winter blues than looking at birds, and there is no better group of birds to look at in the winter than gulls. In California, winter is the time of massive gull flocks that will commute between landfills, beaches, rice fields, reservoirs,…
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Day 2 – Fish Eye View
By Miranda Bell-Tilcock . . . That’s no moon. That is the lens of a fish eye. While it looms large in the photo, this lens is tiny, approximately 3-5mm in diameter, similar to a small bead on a friendship bracelet. How did we even capture such a zoomed in photo of a small lens?…
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Day 1 – Introducing “12 Days of CWS”
By Christine A. Parisek and Miranda Bell-Tilcock . . . The California WaterBlog celebrates its 15th anniversary this January 2026, and so we thought we’d try out something a little special and festive this month. This December, we’re piloting a new short-post format series that will open up a small window into a day in…