Hello to all,
This post marks the very first CLM blog post of my internship and the end of my first 2 weeks. Finally getting to start my internship with SOS East and the NCBG team has been so great. I’ve spent the past 2 months counting the weeks down to when I’d start and these first two weeks just flew by.
Week one had me getting to know my new teammates, ordering our new gear, and even making one or two excursions to the field. Everyone seems really great and I think we’ll all get long well. It was so much fun going shopping with them and lunching together. I’m mostly used to working solo or with one or two other people, but this has been a nice change of pace.
On the field trips we made we came across a crawdad graveyard, a tiny toad migration, and a great blue heron. My favorite spot was a recently acquired parcel of land which was just beautiful and was where we saw the heron fly by. All the fun wasn’t just in the field though, because we were able to spend a lot of time touring the botanical garden, getting acquainted with some of the plants we’d be collecting, meeting the rest of the garden staff, and meeting some of the animal visitors to the garden, including rabbits, birds, toads, and one box turtle. I wooooould share some pics, but it appears the site can’t handle this many megabytes of awesome.
Week two had us in a 3-day training session with the rest of SOS east down at the garden. We all ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, and listened to speakers including but not limited to the man, the legend, and author of Weakley’s Flora, Alan Weakley! *Cheers* On the last day of training we all went down to Mason Farm and made an official SOS collection of Glyceria striata. This little adventure had me squelching my way around this soggy wetland area in my muck boots, surrounded by an ocean of Glyceria just waiting to be collected. Turns out we actually collected about 10 times as much as we needed, but I guess it’s easier to do that when you have 14 interns all collecting a single species.
Anyway, that’s all I have for this week but stay tuned! The NCBG team will be making its first multi-day trip to the coast this week, so I’m sure I’ll have lots more to share in my next post.
Until then, good luck and happy plant hunting!
Rose A.