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.

Monday didn't amount to much - did junk around the office in the morning, and then veg monitoring again in the afternoon. Poor biologist tripped in some animal burrow at the very first plot we went to, so he was in poor shape the entire time. I felt bad for him, but we managed to amuse ourselves enough so he wasn't in too much pain. I hope?

Today was much more interesting! Yesterday, the fire guy asked me if I had accomplished everything I had aimed to do this summer, to which I half-jokingly replied that I wanted to ride the Marsh Master, which is basically a tank-like machine designed to go in...well...marshes. Cattails and the like, shallow water. To my surprise, today he set it up so that he could take us (me, another intern, and the YCC gang) all out for a spin while he did "recon" - gathering info about future burn sites. So that is how I started off my morning...and it was a blast, to say the least. The cattails we were going through were a good 10-15 feet high, which easily was taller than the machine, so finally we decided to stand on the little platforms that extend out over the...tread thingies (I don't know the proper name, sorry gang!) to get a better view. We had to cling on for dear life to avoid falling, but it was worth it! Since the platforms were only about a foot wide, when I looked down, I could see the water right beneath me, it felt like a glass-bottom boat!

We had to cut the ride short, though, since apparently the biologist told him (the fire guy) that I needed to be back ASAP! So I get back to the office, where we (biologist and I) ate an early lunch - over which he told me stories of his brand new puppy dog, that he got this weekend - and then we took out the trusty ATV. We had a pretty good time! The vegetation was pretty tall, the area had marshy spots, and it was hard to see too far ahead of us, so we had many instances of '[thunk]...that was a rock' or suddenly finding ourselves driving into water...the reverse gear was heavily used this afternoon, to say the least.

Probably the highlight of my day, though, happened midafternoon. We were writing down some information, when suddenly I hear mooing. I point it out to the biologist, who informs me that i am going crazy, because there aren't any cows in that area of the refuge. I insist that I'm not crazy (not in this case, at least!), and there are definitely cows. We turn around, and lo and behold, there are 11 cows that had broken loose, wandering probably about 25 m from the ATV! Not only was I vindicated, but...come on. COWS ON THE RUN! I actually did see them run, when the owner came by later with his SUV and was herding them by blaring the horn.

That's about it for this time!

Yesterday, the biologist and I did a vegetation monitoring survey. Basically, we got to drive around in an ATV all day, and then we'd look at random points (generated by a GPS tool) to determine the kind of vegetation that grew in 25 meter transects: native or exotic? Grass or forb? (forbs being plants like wildflowers, shrubs, and basically everything that wasn't grass). The day went by pretty smoothly, except for one point - I will forever loathe #4! Transect 4 was down a ravine (or "cleuch," I think the call it here? I couldn't tell...), which, if you aren't familiar with the term ravine, means a small valley-ish thing, with VERY STEEP sides, and a stream at the bottom. As such, the vegetation there was of a marshy type, mainly thistles, cattails, and Reed-Canary grass, which grows taller than me! We spent literally over an HOUR trying to locate the point, because the GPS unit couldn't find the spot. We had it narrowed to probably a 50 square meter area, considering we had a map and such, but needed much more precision to accurately measure the spot. Finally, after walking around in circles for what felt like forever, the GPS finally cooperated and gave us the location, where we promptly spent about 30 seconds walking the transect, as it was was almost entirely Reed-Canary grass, anyway.

The rest of the day went without much trouble, so I suppose one bad point out of 23 can't be too bad. Although, apparently I'm "crooked as a jaybird," as it was pointed out on numerous occasions that I can't walk a straight line, but I feel it was his fault, as "aim for that set of bushes" over there isn't very descriptive, when you are in an entire field of bushes! We sorted things out, though, so all's well that ends well.

Today was another day of hanging around the office, not too much to report. Only one week left...

Nice mishmash of different things today.

Today started off working around the office. Entered in some cactus data, helped organize the new filing system, carried in a bunch of drills that we'll be needing for saturday (needed to charge the batteries!), things like that. The biologist and I drove around for a while, meeting up with the tree contractors (basically watching them RIP SMASH TEAR, pretty entertaining), filling out a paperwork survey for one of the wetland pools (asking about the percent cover of invasive species, the depth of water, amount of foliage, etc; this is to determine how suitable it is as a habitat for breeding birds), and various odds and ends.

For the afternoon, we went out for our LAST BIT OF CACTUS WORK (hooray!). Although it was left last because he didn't know where the stake was, time constraints, etc, I think unofficially it was saving the best for last. This outcrop was basically a really tall hill, and once we (finally) got to the top, we could see a ridiculously large portion of the refuge. It was absolutely breathtaking, I wish I had my camera with me! The area was a little bit wetter than most of the other outcrops, so it had a relatively high biodiversity, since it was still dry enough in areas for most of the regular outcrop inhabitants, but wet enough to support different forms of life. I saw a little brown skink, he was so cute!

When we were finally done, we drove around a bit more, then headed back to the office, where I finished entering in all the data(!) - we ended up with roughly 1600 cacti, phew!

Tomorrow I head out bright and early to drive out to The Cities, where I'll be sitting through a 3 day workshop; therefore, I don't know when I'll be posting next!

Sunday afternoon, I decided to go to the refuge and try and gather up some decent pictures for you all. Apparently the critters thought it'd be wonderful to hide since I finally had a camera for me, so I don't have much aside from plenty of flowers...of course, they've been added to the album!

Yesterday morning, the biologist was in a meeting for a while so we didn't start on cacti right away. Instead, I continued my efforts to try and brainstorm a reasonable craft for the festival we're helping out at next weekend (result: no craft is good enough!) for the kids to do, helped the office manager do errands around the office, that sort of thing. After lunch, though, we got to go out again and do more cacti! It was really depressing this time around, because as the day wore on, it became more and more apparent that a lot of the missing cacti have simply been stolen by greedy guests, as the outcrops are open to the public. It was extremely upsetting to see it; this morning I was uploading the data and on one site there were more missing cacti than found. Not only is it ecologically uncool (the cacti are really rare here, they only grow on certain rocks on the refuge - we have the only population in the state), but extremely frustrating for us - we had to search around the expected area for a few minutes, scrambling around in vain before determining that the gaping hole was, indeed, the absence of cactus.

Today started off in a disappointing way - it was threatening to rain, so we (biologist and I) messed around on our computers for 2 hours trying to wait it out, since the site we had to start with is hard to access and it would be lame to have to wait in the truck, or come back to HQ. Finally, though, enough was enough and we went out to brave the rain, and drove out to the site. Barely 10 minutes into our operation, though, the instrument we needed thought it would be a great time to break! We had to drive into town to buy a new one, and by that point it was nearly time for lunch.

We spent the afternoon with the YCC kids hacking down trees that were growing on the outcrops - they're not welcome here! It was exhausting work, to say the least. After a few hours we were taking a break, and got, er, distracted by the wild raspberry patches that were running rampant throughout our site. Our break got fairly extended, and we spent the last hour or so of the afternoon snacking on berries and chatting. The weather had somehow gotten beautiful and sunny...what a perfect way to end the day.

tomorrow: more cacti!

As promised in my last post, I (along with the YCC kids and another summer temp guy) was with the man in charge of the Fire crew, and we had a little workshop. We first started off with a 2 hour powerpoint/presentation, which was very interesting! Although I was already somewhat familiar with what they do, he taught me so much more than I was aware of. We talked mostly about prescribed burns, since that's what their main job is; he taught us really cool things about how beneficial they were, and what happens when they don't get to good burn. He also talked about some wildfires they've had to deal with, the kind of training they go through, and that sort of thing. Then he took us out to their portion of the garages, where he introduced us to all the equipment they use - since they often have to deal with soft ground that isn't ideal for regular fire trucks, they instead use ATVs, pickup trucks, and even a machine called the Marsh Master, which is basically a small tank.

My favorite part was unfortunately also the shortest. He finished the workshop by taking us out to a field to show us examples of burns; there was a path dividing two of the parcels of land, and one side had just been burned in the past few months, while the other hadn't been burned in 2 or 3 years (they can only do these burns every few years, because the wildlife needs a place to say, and burning too much can end up causing more harm than good). The difference was phenomenal! The one that hadn't been treated in a few years was covered almost entirely with Smooth Brome, an invasive species of grass that is the bane of all who know what it is. The sparse scattering of native plants were definitely smaller and generally a poorer quality than normal. The side that had been recently burned, though, had an amazing variety of flora on it! I snagged a few pictures (in the album!), but honestly, I can't do them justice. Some of the species we found were:
-Lead Plant, one of the photos: the leaves are a pretty silvery-green, and the flowers are a bright purple with orange bits
-a type of wild pea that I can never remember the name of: the other photo, these leaves are an even brighter white-silver color
-Purple Prairie Coneflower: ever heard of that echinacea stuff, the medicine that was hyped up a few years ago? Comes from the genus that this flower is part of. If you eat the roots of this plant, your gums will go numb!
-Evening Primrose: a cute little yellow flower
-Big Bluestem: a type of native grass, the tips turn this really pretty reddish purple after a while
-Alfalfa: not just for salads! It has a very gorgeous, dark purple flower - I didn't recognize it at all!
-Prairie Rose: a low wildflower, with pretty pink roses on them
-Blue Vervain: another purple wildflower, really cool looking

amongst others that I can't recall at the moment, my brain is swimming with so many names I can't keep them straight! I really recommend googling some of these flowers if you have a minute, they're absolutely gorgeous! The best part was that the Fire guy was kind of quizzing us to see if anyone recognized them, and after working with the Biologist so much, I actually knew quite a few. I didn't know it, but the Fire guy also has a biology degree, and knew lots of interesting things, which was a nice surprise.

Guys...seriously, this stuff is so amazing, I wish I could properly convey this. When we go out in the field, my heart sometimes actually starts racing because it's all so exciting. There's so much to learn, and it's just unbelievable all the factoids I'm gathering. I wish I could do that kind of fieldwork all the time.

After we got back to the office, there were only a few hours of the workday left. I spent it playing desk jockey, doing the Biologist a favor by organizing a little booklet of the wildflowers that are seen on the refuge; the intent is that these booklets will go in all their trucks as a reference guide while people are out in the field.

Today, after talking about it for WEEKS, the Biologist and I finally got to start the cactus survey. Man...even he said he wasn't a fan of it, to say the least. From 9am to 2pm, we only got 2 of the 13 sites done! Basically what happens is that we have to walk around on the granite outcrops (which are normally very awesome!) and look for these little ball cacti. The last time he did this survey was back in 2004, so we had to use a compass and measuring tape to locate the old clusters, which surprisingly most of them were still left! Some of them were gone, though, and some it took us a few good minutes to find, so that got frustrating pretty quick. The worst part was that we had to somehow count all the cacti in the clusters and measure the diameter of each, even though there could easily be nearly 40 in a cluster the size of a paperback book. They kind of grew around and on top of each other, so it was really hard trying to keep them all straight, and most of them were less than 2cm in diameter, so try to measure that accurately!

I know that's a lot of complaining, but it wasn't so bad, mostly just repetitive and exhausting after a while. There was one cacti that was completely uprooted - like, I picked it up and carried it over to him to show him uprooted - and yet it was still completely green and healthy, which was basically amazing. I learned later that it was uprooted back in '04, and had managed to survive the past 5 years! It's stuff like that that makes the annoying bits completely worth it.

We saw a duck's nest on the way back to the truck, at which point I learned that ducks nest in open fields, NOT by the water - who knew?

Also, we saw a BADGER waddling across the road while making our way back to HQ. A BADGER. Even he said he hadn't seen one on the refgue all his time working here!

From what it looks like, the next few workdays will be out finishing this cactus thing. Wish me luck!

Grass!

The weekend went fairly uneventfully, I mostly did my last bit of homework for my physics class, and studied for my final. Did some laundry, and other chore-y like things. Tried to go to the grocery store Sunday evening, but they close at 5!

Yesterday, I did my ATV "road" training. It was a little intimidating at first, but pretty fun after a while! I felt like a little kid, though, I was afraid of letting it go too much, so I kept easing off the little gas lever, so my ride was kind of jerky. I smoothed out as I got more confident, though, so hopefully next time I go out it won't be so bad.

Today was fairly interesting, I hung out with the biologist again, this time learning about "vegetation surveys." We - along with another intern/biologist duo from a close by refuge - drove about an hour away for what basically amounted to a workshop on grass identification. Some of the people there were way too enthusiastic about, y'know, grass, which was kind of funny. Part of it was weird because there are a couple different surveys/methods going on, so there was the "South Dakota" group, and the "Minnesota" group, aka, the 4 of us that rode together. Apparently, being just a mile from the border results in the fact that we have extremely different prairie types, too, so not only did the methods not apply to us, but we didn't have to worry/learn about the same types of plants. As a result, my biologist would often pull me aside (or we'd kind of meander away), and he'd point out more interesting/relevant things. I learned more from just chillin' with him than I did from the workshop!

Of course, as soon as we got to work in the morning, at the top of a big hill, it started to thunderstorm out! We got fairly soaked, needless to say, as we made our way back to the field classroom. I just felt bad for the kid who had to carry 4ft long iron stakes...! We saw some amazing lightning, though, absolutely huge!

Learned a few interesting things, though...like that a type of milkweed we were looking at is toxic to everything but butterflies! And that the spikes on a rose (we were looking at prairie roses) are soft until the plant is fully grown, and are either "thorns" or "prickles," depending on which part of the plant they grow on!

Well that's all for now, but I'm sure the next entry will be much more eventful - I'll be working on trying to band Canada Geese for the next few days!

Buggy Bugs

Yesterday (Thursday 6/18) started off pretty crazy - we were listening to a lecture on first aid, when one of the YCC (high school volunteers) kids starts having a mini seizure! He was OK, though, fortunately; they think it was due to a combination of low blood sugar and being squeamish about the lecture. After that, though, things quickly became pretty boring. They didn't really have anything for me to do, so I basically filled in the shoes of the kid that had to leave early, and did hard labor with them. Ugh. We had to clean out an old fly and mouse-infested trailer, and other stuff. I don't envy them, having to do it all summer.

Today was more interesting, since the biologist was back. In the morning, we had to work with spurge beetles. They are itty bitty beetles, probably about the size of this letter "o," that ONLY eat a certain type of spurge plant. Problem is, they can wipe out an entire thicket of the plants, and apparently can't figure out how to move on to a better source of food, therefore killing the entire poplulation. To remedy this, another team went out a few days ago to collect about 30,000 of these critters; today, it was our duty to search around the refuge for other unclaimed patches of these plants and chuck the beetles on them. We drove around all morning (aka 8-12), and we found some pretty cool things, including some wild prarie rose, a mink, and a type of butterfly that even the BIOLOGIST didn't recognize! Crazy, huh? I hope he figures it out! It was small (the wingspan was probably about 2 inches), and was black with white blotches on it.

Then this afternoon we had to pin up gypsy moth traps - even though the refuge/area doesn't get them (fortunately!), i guess they're still required to do the sampling. The biologist had to leave early, after we finished this, so the last 2 hours of the day i just kind of hung around my friend, the office manager/administrative lady (not my boss, she's more of a secretary deal...but does a lot more than your normal secretary!).

Anyway, I'm glad for the weekend! A chance to catch up on sleep!

And so it begins...

(Don't forget - click here for some photos to illustrate this post!)

Well, I've already been up here for nearly two weeks, and so much has happened!

The drive here alone was crazy - my dad came with me, and it took us nearly 2 days of driving (in the pouring rain, might I add!) We spent the rest of the weekend together, checking out my apartment, the (very small) downtown area, and we drove around the refuge for a little to see where I would be working. Our time together was way too short, and I was soon on my own.

I started working the very next day, Monday, June 8th. The term "work" is applied fairly loosely in this instance; I spent my entire 8 hour day doing training exercises on a computer! Half the day was learning computer/internet security, and the other half was devoted to driving an ATV - the "road" portion will be coming up next week, I hear. Just my luck, I was in such a rush that morning so I wouldn't be late on my first day, that I forgot to pack a lunch! My new co-workers were very nice, though, and pitched in so I wouldn't starve.

Tuesday went in a similar fashion, but that day I learned all about defensive driving, woohoo. Just my luck, I accidentally locked my keys in the car! I called AAA to get help, and the nearest person was three hours away! Fortunately the maintenance guy was able to bust into my car and help me get them back.

Wednesday started off the same, learning, learning, and more learning. But later in the morning, another new guy and I got to go into "town" and buy steel-toed boots, oh my! They're still awkward to walk in...! Once we got back, the refuge manager took the rest of the afternoon to drive us around the refuge, show us what we're working for and such. We saw so many amazing creatures, like cormorants, a river otter, huge flocks of pelicans, deer, pheasants, and more. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me, so no pictures of these critters.

Thursday was the first real day of actual work, and work it was! I worked with three guys to help gather up a riverbank full of logs, which had been deposited there from the flood they had this spring. It was pretty exhausting, I'm not gonna lie, but it was pretty fun, too!

Friday passed much the same, we finished up cleaning the flood debris. The maintenance guy used a giant excavator (construction machine with a scoop, that had a "thumb" to pinch things) to pick up our log piles, and flung them in a dump truck. That machine picked up mountains of wood like they were toothpicks!

This weekend, I mostly hung around my apartment, as I didn't have much elsewhere to go. I drove around for two hours trying to find a store to buy jeans, but there was nothing but farms! I am definitely in the boonies, but it's so gorgeous so I can't complain.

This past monday, I finally got cable for my apartment, which was a huge relief - the only wifi source was the library, which wasn't open much beyond my own working hours. I got to come in late (after the hookup), which was pretty cool. I spent most of the day listening to a CD of bird calls, to prepare me for a bird survey I was going to help with. It got pretty repetitive after a while, so needless to say I was pretty excited when the biologist I was working with (we share an office!) agreed that it was time to get outside. We drove around the refuge as he inspected a few sites, and it was cool hearing all the different things that were going on at the refuge. At one point we went to the area where I was cleaning up logs, and we stopped at a bridge/dam to check out the carp. These fishes, if you've never seen one, are pretty huge, about the size of my arm! The poor lady fishes were trying to get upstream (aka jump the dam) so they could lay their eggs, but many of them couldn't make it up and kept flopping back into the lower part of the system! I helped the biologist remove these huge steel beams, which resulted in a shorter waterfall and some happy fish.

Yesterday, not very much happened - it was rainy out, so we were stuck inside doing busywork.

Today, I had to get up at 4am to do the bird survey! The biologist, a professional birder, and myself met up at 5, and we drove around for five hours counting and observing the birds. It was a pain to have to get up that early, but seeing all the birds was amazing. There were so many cool ones to check out, like egrets, owls, even a bald eagle! Mostly they were either waterfowl, like ducks and geese, or tiny little sparrows. So cute! Starting so early, I obviously got to leave early, too. Time to veg out!

See you all next time!