03/19/2025
In collaboration with LA County Parks and organized by our very own Olivia Miseroy, we visited Alpine Butte Wildlife Sanctuary (next to Lake Los Angeles) to remove trash and look for invertebrates! This neat sanctuary has huge Joshua Trees, cool invert species, and unfortunately more trash than it needs...
The squad, from left to right: Jessiah, Alexis Chamberlain, Meagan Gramatikov, Victoria (LA County Parks), Olivia Miseroy, and Ingrid (LA County Parks).
The weather was beautiful, and over the course of two hours we eliminated two illegal dumping piles and numerous pockets of blow trash with the help of good grabbers and gloves.
The two most interesting pieces of trash I saw were...
A typewriter and...
A cup that was clearly unhappy to be outside.
Between the six of us we picked up 10 big bags of trash, 2 pallets, and an artificial Christmas tree, which all together I estimate to have weighed around 200 pounds.
Olivia lording over the trash.
After a beautiful sunset, we set out to find some bugs! Though it was quite cold, we still managed to find some smaller beetles, spiders, and an interesting hymenopteran. Find photos of some of what I found on iNaturalist here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?on=2025-03-15&project_id=the-invertebrate-club-of-southern-california&subview=map&user_id=arthroverts&verifiable=any
After fording our way through and then back across several washes full of tumbleweeds (no exaggeration), we left Alpine Butte Wildlife Sanctuary, cold and a bit hungry, but happy to have helped protect the desert and all its incredible lifeforms.
A big thank-you to everyone who came out, and especially to Olivia for setting this up! Hopefully this is the first of many more clean-ups to come.
Thanks,
Jessiah
#2025
