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Local students awarded for insect initiative

Getting rid of insects is always a noble cause with two Ponoka students finding fun ways to do that.

Getting rid of insects is always a noble cause.

And, for a pair of students from St. Augustine Catholic School, looking at ways to do that has earned them some local recognition.

Grade 9 students Mina Shin and Brooklyn Green were presented with the 2015 OutsTanding In Stewardship (OTIS) youth award from the Battle River Watershed Alliance (BRWA) on Tuesday, March 22 during the group’s World Water Day event at the Ponoka Legion.

Nathalie Olson, the BRWA’s education and outreach coordinator, handed the two girls each a wonderful framed photo of the pair for their project to help take care of insects in a natural fashion at the Ponoka Community Golf Club.

Last spring, while Shin and Green were in Grade 8, the pair came up with an idea to build bird houses and place them at various points at the golf course to help reduce the amount of insects golfers including themselves would encounter during the season. They were inspired by the Caring for our Watershed program the BRWA presents to Grades 7 to 12 at various schools throughout central Alberta.

“The pair built and installed 75 bird houses last fall as a way to have the golf course use less pesticides to control insects,” said Olson in presenting the award.

“Both girls are golfers and chose do something close to what they enjoy. They took a look at the chart showing how much of a concern runoff is to the water quality of the Battle River and found on the Internet a way to help reduce those pesticides from entering the river.”

The bird houses were installed very late in the fall, so the girls haven’t yet been able to figure out if the project will be a success.

“We are going to go back this golf season and look forward to seeing the results. (The bird houses) are hidden the forested areas around the course so the birds don’t get scared away,” said Shin.

Green added, “We talked to a bird expert to see what kind of bird we needed to attract. So we built them for smaller birds like finches.”

The OTIS awards presented to youth, business and individuals was inspired in 2012 by a St. Augustine student writing an essay as part of the Caring for our Watershed program that proposed a children’s book called Mystery of the Missing Water, which was then published, to help educate people on how to improve the watershed.