Tuesday & Wednesday

That last post was a bit hefty so I've decided to make this one brief...ish.

Tuesday:
Woke up early to drive out to Cuyahoga Valley National Park. We met with Lisa Petit who gave us a driving/walking tour of the park and told us about the invasive species management work they're doing, showed us the former site of the Coliseum where the Cavaliers played (now a grassland that I may be doing research at). She also told us about the sustainable agriculture practices taking place inside the park, which are really cool to me but probably doesn't matter to anyone else. We had lunch at a local restaurant, Fisher's, in Peninsula, OH. Then had the afternoon free so Tara, Alysha and I went grocery shopping and hung out. Forgot my camera this day, so no pictures.

Wednesday:
Fairly low key day, spent the morning doing research in the Library and had lunch with the group and my mentor at the Student Union. Got a campus tour, checked out the gym on campus (can't wait to go, probably tomorrow) and then met with Greg (mentor) afterwards. We discussed my options for research this summer and finally settled on an idea. Originally I was going to do a study of forest bird diversity as it depends on the surrounding landscape matrix (basically, what type of landscape surrounds a forest fragment) and fragment size. However I decided to do a study of the effect of grassland-forest edges on grassland nesting bird nesting success; I was inspired by the restored grassland that we saw Tuesday in CVNP.
That afternoon Tara, Alysha, Bayoan, and I went to Glendsdale park and Glensdale cemetery looking for 5 lined skinks for Tara's research project. After about 2 hours of on and off looking I finally spotted one just as we were about to leave. We looked a little longer and called it a day and went back to campus for dinner. Everything was closed on campus, and Tara lost her ZipCard (student ID; also, notice the trend), so we got Dominos and went back to the dorm to call it a day and hang out.


The quality of these posts will eventually pick up, but since I'm writing about this well after the fact I feel it necessary to sort of summarize to get everything in succinctly. More to come....