To make up for the last post, here is the one with lots of pictures!

The past few weeks have been really crazy. As mentioned, I went through ATV training, which was a lot of fun! I've driven them a few times before, but it was good to have a refresher for this summer.  Other than that, I've generally been working with our plovers and oystercatchers. The first chicks are finally beginning to hatch!

here is the first American oystercatcher chick!

The plovers are a little late, but we're expecting chicks any day now, too.

A \piping plover nest

An exclosure, the fence we set up to keep out predators and people

 On the weekends, I've been volunteering to help a gentleman that bands birds - we capture them in mist nets (a special net with a very fine mesh designed to not hurt the birds), take them to our little station, put a band on the leg, and record information like species, wing and tail length, weight, sex, etc. Then we let them go! It's very fun.

Holding a yellow warbler

Carolina chickadee!

female orchard oriole (this was a tricky one to identify!)

female white-eyed vireo, looking pretty angry...

this is a yellow-shafted flicker, a type of woodpecker. Here's the man showing off the yellow!

here's a diamondback terrapin we found on the beach

his pretty shell :)

It's pretty great working here. Even though half of us interns work on the beach all day, every day, now that the weather is nicer we've been going to the beach in our spare time, too!

Hello everyone!

I'm sorry I didn't wrap up last summer with a neat post...oops. Anyway, it's a new year, and thus, a new summer. I've been at my position for a month now, and settling in nicely. This year I am working in a biological position again, specifically monitoring the productivity of breeding shorebirds. Specifically, we monitor Piping Plovers (Charadrius melodus) and American Oystercatchers (Haematopus palliatus).

The majority of my days here are spent walking along the beaches, looking for plover and oystercatcher nests. We check every day to see how many eggs they have, and to make sure the parents are incubating the eggs. We have to worry about predators and people, so for vulnerable nests, we put up special fences called exclosures to protect the nests.

However, the life of a biologist is never predictable, and we've had plenty of other things thrown our way. So far I helped work crowd control for a NASA rocket launch (the refuge is just across the bay from the launchpad, so we got to watch!), taken care of stranded marine mammals and sea turtles, surveyed for other shorebirds, surveyed for pine bark beetle damage, and plenty of other things. My training has even included driving a boat, to get to some of the islands, and we'll be doing ATV training later this week!

On top of all that, I've had plenty of fun on my free time hanging out with my fellow interns. We've been exploring the town, and the rest of the refuge - it was very exciting to see the famous ponies :)

I don't have many photos yet, but I'll be sure to share them when I get some good ones.