Week Three- How to... 6/4/17 - 6/10/17
This whole week was full of learning "how to do" different tasks. Living in the suburbs of Ohio, I never learned how to properly run a riding lawn mower, hitch a trailer, mix herbicides, or re-string a weed whacker. By learning all of these little maintenance tasks, I could use them for trail maintenance and invasive species control. The invasive species that the other intern, Kirby Peters, and I tackled this week was spraying herbicide on Musk Thistle. This spiny invasive is near roadsides and can come in huge patches that can be up to 6ft tall. Another thing I learned "how to " do this week was plant trees by hand. Kirby and I planted over 100 trees in one day on the refuge. We planted four species which included white oak, black oak, black cherry, and persimmon. Towards the end of the week, Kirby and I accompanied our boss, Heath, into the river bottoms in search of unplugged oil wells that needed to be plugged up asap. While looking for the wells and marking safe paths for heavy machinery to come through to plug the wells up, Kirby and I got to tromp around in the mud and see a different side of the refuge. This was probably one of my favorite days on the refuge so far because I learned so much in a short amount of time just by being immersed in a much different habitat then I am use to.
Week Four
Week Four- Getting Batty 6/11/17 - 6/17/17
Fact: Only six percent of bats actually carry the rabies virus in the U.S. Mist netting for bats was one of the many adventures that I got to be apart of while living in Indiana this summer. This involves setting up large, super thin netting that safely captures the bats in order for researchers to identify, sex, and measure the arm length of the different bat species. For this specific trip, the researchers we were looking for the Indiana bat so they could put a transmitter on it and look for its roosting tree during the day. Many species of cave bats are dying out due to the white-nose fungus that wakes the bats up during hibernation in the winter which causes them to starve to death. This was only one night out of our week, but we learned so much about bats and many other species that live in the marshlands. The other parts of the week involved Kirby and I spreading wood chips for our education center, looking for black eyed susan/mountain mint, and continuing the musk thistle spraying.