Selasphorus platycercus (Broad-tailed Hummingbird)

Escalante, Utah continues to impress. My personal botany field journal is growing too fast for me to keep up with (a good thing), especially with having to study birds and bats and anything else we end up working with. It’s good my friends and girlfriend aren’t here to distract me, there’s no way I could get so much work done (off hours) if they were here.

Additional bonus: Our boss told my coworker and me that the two of us can work with anyone else in the BLM/Forest Service as long as we initiate it (and as long as we’re keeping up with our collections). And we’ve taken full advantage of that. We’ve been banding hummingbirds and catching bats in mist-nets weekly. On top of that we’ve been invited by local paleontologist, Alan Titus, to come long on a dig with him for a couple days this week (always nice to go camping for the job). It’s extra exciting because he’s recently been in the news for having a new species of dinosaur named after him, Nasutoceratops titusi (I’m legitimately star struck). Another great opportunity has been volunteering with the Forest Service, this includes more hummingbird banding, Goshawk surveys, and HIKING IN A FOREST! Reminds me of home (NY), great stuff. At the end of September my coworker and I get to camp out for 7 days straight on a Russian Olive removal project.

This internship has been far more extensive that I thought it could have been. I’m excited at all the opportunities we don’t even know about yet. Almost exactly 3 months left, pretty excited to find out what’s in store.