This week was BUSY! On Monday we had PALS which is a summer camp experience for inner-city kids in West Lafayette. We went to Celery Bog with our extension project and taught kids all about soundscape ecology! They were not very interested. It's hard to take such an abstract concept and make it interesting and fun. We had a few kids who thought it was cool but for the most part they just wanted to run around and they were all bummed that we didn’t have any candy for them. It was a good experience though because it forced us to adapt our project on the fly to better engage them. By then end we had created a race game and they were much more engaged and having a lot of fun.

Tuesday I went with the Streams group to help them pull fyke nets. In 2 of the 3 nets we had snapping turtles which was quite the experience. It was a lot of fun though and I'm glad I finally got to go out with them. This week we also pulled all of our camera traps and audio recorders and are starting to go through the data. I am now a DigiKam master and its nice to be able to stay inside when its so hot outside.

This Saturday we had RiverFest where we took our extension project to the public! Very quickly we had to adapt our project because its difficult to have people guess sounds when your tent is right across from the instrument testing booth. So instead of talking about soundscape ecology I just talked about bat conservation and white nosed syndrome. I hope that I changed a lot of people’s perception of our batty friends!

Research pun: What do you call a bat that lives in a properly managed forest? A Cheeruptera!