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Fascinating Internship

Here I sit with more biological knowledge than ever before, and I have to give all the credit to Michael Kieffer and his fascinating internship.

On the first day of the week Michael was unfortunately not there but he left me a note telling me to hike the preserve assessing storm damage (since the few previous days had been very stormy). Needless to say I found a lot of storm damage. Because I love to hike, before I knew it, I had been hiking for close to seven hours. I reported the storm damage that I came across (which included a downed tree on almost every trail) and that was the end of day one. Day two was a bit more exciting. Michael, a few other biologists, and I went on the mountain and conducted four ecological surveys. Each survey had the same steps but in four different locations. The steps for each survey are as follows: we first took three soil samples while the other biologists were recording tree height and setting up the GPS. The next step was to record all of the shrub species; everyone did this together. Next, we went to every tree and measured its trunk diameter at breast height. For this we used either a tape measure (for the larger trees) or a special type of yardstick to measure the smaller trees. Each plot zone was about 400 square meters with dimensions of 25x16 or 20x20. Four of these quickly filled up the day and that was the end of day two. The third day, another student and I took some supplies up to Catlett's Branch and did macro-invertebrate testing. Unfortunately, besides a few crayfish, we did not find much more than a bunch of mayflies and caddisflies. We saved some of the interesting specimens that we found and headed back to the building. We still had some time on our hands, so we went for a pretty long hike. Day four is when I learned the most. Michael had me hike the preserve with a book titled Naturalist's Guide to the Piedmont. Using the book I identified and collected five leaf specimens from mesic, and xeric forests. I correctly identified the leaves from the xeric forest, but had trouble distinguishing mesic forest related trees. The fifth day Michael had me weed the butterfly garden in front of the building like he usually has his interns do at one time or another.

Those were the main events of each of the five days, but I learned so much more including the identification of ferns, clubmosses, wildflowers, bird song, and that white pine needles are a good source of vitamin C. It would take a week to explain it all, but in conclusion, this internship was very interesting and I was satisfied with the extensive amount of knowledge I came out with.