Hello all!

It seems like ages since my last post on this blog. I see everyone is still very busy in their internships, those of us who haven’t already completed theirs anyway. Things are still rolling fairly smoothly here in Buffalo, WY as well. Our field monitoring season has ended some time ago, and now we are in a different sort of work entirely. I miss our old task of driving to the middle of nowhere to lay down a transect and collect some hard data, but our new tasks are every bit as interesting, if not more so.

A little while ago, we got to help out with a high school biology field trip by teaching the kids about various topics in ecology. It was a whirlwind of activity, but it was a lot of fun! My station involved drawing a tree stump using materials found in the forest, and then writing a poem about the stump to share with the group. There were lots of groans (“Poetry?! Ugh!”), but I think the kids secretly enjoyed their little creative task. We have also been involved in some burn pile monitoring, which involved wandering around the forest to locate isolated piles of slash and marking it with a GPS point so that it gets burned. That was a great couple of days, and we even found some unexpected scenery to enjoy! Perhaps my favorite task recently was to help re-blaze a BLM trail in the Bighorn Mountains called Poison Creek. The trail was beautiful, and it felt good to be helping with a public service to make the trail more enjoyable for everyone. This internship keeps getting better, and I sorta wish it would never end! Alas, it will be over soon, but that is for a later blog. Until then.

Daniel