Alyssa's Recap - Week 6

For this week, we had presented our extension projects at PALS and Riverfest. It was a really interesting experience. I have had experience working with little kids before but I had never tried to teach them something about science. I found out that it can be quite difficult to do so. I think not a lot of kids may be interested in science or maybe they find science to be intimidating. However, by the end of our activities we were able to have the kids define what a habitat is and get a grasp for how habitats may support different bird species. At Riverfest, we had a lot of people come up to our booth to tell us that our taxidermy of the coyote looked scary and a lot of kids were quite puzzled by it. It was a good way to lure in some people. The extension portion of this internship taught me a lot about communicating with others in order to get our point across. From practicing elevator speeches to creating our very own activity, it was all a great learning experience that I will carry on with me throughout my career in the science field.

Aside from our extension projects, Garret and I had also got back into our research project. We worked super hard this week (as we do every week). We completed our second round of bird surveys, dug up and collected all pitfall traps in Martell, identified all our collected soil invertebrates, and made great progress with vegetation survey. Time is ticking faster than we imagined. As we now begin our second to last week, I hope we continue to work hard and make great progress towards our project.

Here is a not-so-great pun for your enjoyment:

What do you call a sad bird?

A bluebird.

Here is an Eastern box turtle we found around Martell: