Leaning over the embankment of Sligo Creek in Silver Spring, dozens of children squealed with excitement as Montgomery Parks staff armed with fishing nets show off squirming eels, small fish and other aquatic life found in the muddy water.
“I see a fish! I see a fish!” a young girl yelled as the parks staff moved through the creek water during the demonstration of “electrofishing” at Saturday’s inaugural Sligo Creek Fest, the parks department’s four-hour event designed to highlight the joys of open parkways.
Using an electrical device that temporarily stunned the animals, Principal Natural Resources Specialist Doug Stephens and his colleagues scooped up fish and eels, some measuring more than 1 foot in length, to show the children the wide variety of life below the surface of the creek.
“It just stuns them temporarily,” Stephens said of the device used to help capture the fish and eels, which the staff delivered to tables under a tent where families could observe them swimming in containers.
The demonstration was one of many activities offered at the four-hour festival staged along a closed section of Sligo Creek Parkway from Dennis Avenue to University Boulevard. Despite intermittent showers, hundreds of people, many with young children in tow, turned out to walk along the parkway, listening to live music and visiting booths offering information and activities about county parks and organizations dedicated to protecting them.
County officials, including County Council President Andrew Friedson and members Evan Glass, Kate Stewart and Natali Fani-Gonzalez, visited the event, which also included two performance stages and outdoors games for kids set up in the tennis courts. Inside the fenced in courts, families waited to throw soft “darts” at a large, inflatable dart board. Nearby, hula hoops of all sizes lay on the parkway for visitors to use.
At Nature on Wheels, Montgomery Parks’ mobile science field station, visitors learned about the programs offered at the nature centers run by the parks department throughout the county.
The mobile station was developed during the pandemic to allow the parks department to offer programs outdoors for children in local parks, according to Angela Yau, the nature program facility manager at the Locust Grove Nature Center in Bethesda. Now the vehicle is used to travel to “equity-focused” areas of the county, delivering nature center programs to “places where families might not be able to get to a nature center,” Yau said.
Standing behind a table covered with large, stuffed animals in the shape of frogs, she said Nature on Wheels came to the event to raise awareness about its programs and to promote its spring theme focusing on the amphibians.
The staff hopes to help people “understand how frogs are fragile indicators of an ecosystem’s health,” Yau said. “Everything that we do in our daily actions impacts them because they’re able to absorb everything through their skin.”
Other booths offered information on efforts to preserve and restore parkland, including the Weed Warrior Volunteer Program, which recruits volunteers to help the parks department manage non-native, invasive plants growing on parklands.
At a station for “Remarkable Montgomery, Untold Stories,” visitors dropped wooden beads into containers on a pegboard display to mark how they would like to learn about county stories, such as through audio tours, public art and pop-up exhibitions.
The goal of the program, a joint venture between the parks department and the historic preservation office within Montgomery Planning, is “to bring visibility to stories people may not have heard about before, often featuring underrepresented groups and histories,” said Elena Guarinello, the Untold Stories program manager for Montgomery Parks.
“What we’re doing here at Sligo Creek is not only just getting the word out about the program but also as people are here experiencing Sligo Fest, we’re using the opportunity to find out how people like to learn,” Guarinello said. “As we plan the programs, spending our own time and money, we want to make sure it’s for something people really like to do.”
Those stopping by the station also filled out small colored cards to share their “Sligo story,” such as their connection to Sligo Creek or memories of experiences in the park.
“Even if you may not have met the person in one of these stories, you read their connection to Sligo Creek and start to see your neighbors and fellow residents in another way,” Guarinello said.