Recently while talking to friends and family everyone asks me how my new life in the city is going. I’m a pretty honest person, so I tell them how it is – I adore my internship (Hiking around to scout and collect seeds all day? Best gig ever!) and my coworkers and I are all already really close friends… But for someone who just spent most of the last four years in the nature lover’s paradise that is Vermont, the city is just about the worst. It’s loud, there are always trash bags everywhere, trying to get anywhere is insane, stores try to charge you $6 for a box of cereal, and in general it is terribly inconvenient. Thankfully I took this position knowing that I’d be travelling outside the city a lot for work and this past month the MARSB team finally got to go on some scouting and collecting trips!

For our first trip we spent three days scouting state parks and learning our collection list species on Long Island. While the traffic was still awful and most places were either fancy residential areas or a giant tourist trap, I was surprised that the conserved land on this built up island still appeared to have healthy ecosystems. Many of the beaches were even gorgeous to boot! We focused primarily on dune and beach species there, most of which I was already familiar with from growing up on the coast. Our mentor Clara also taught us about how to tell when certain seeds are ripe. Below is her sharing some very unripe beach pea seeds (Lathyrus japonicus).

We also went back to some areas closer to the city on Long Island for two day trips at the end of the week. Probably the most exciting moment for me on the trip was getting to see one of these beauties (below). They’re called Grass Pink (Calogpogon tuberosus) and are an orchid which grows in bogs and other wet areas. A small colony of them were growing in a boggy swale between dunes with other (in my opinion) exciting species such as two sundews (Drosera spp.). We were intent on covering ground though, and I regret not being able to key them out, although they were probably the typical roundleaf sundew (Drosera rotundifolia) and threadleaf sundew (Drosera filiformis). I’m not sure where the guys on the team had run off to at the time, but my female coworkers, Clara, and myself had quite the laugh after what we thought was a frustrating mystery orchid we had found growing along a clearing edge. After many attempts to key the plant out Clara finally pulls it out of the back of her mind that the plant was actually a strange, showy-flowered plantain (Plantago patagonica) and we had managed to be looking at a specimen with poorly developed leaves the whole time!