Friday-Today

Friday:
We woke up early to visit a restored wetland area that used to be a huge vegetable farm. The place, Panzner wetlands, was absolutely incredible. They have restored the wetlands to a Federally classified Class 3 wetlands (this is the highest grade a wetlands can receive) in only a decade or so after struggling for years to get permission to undergo the mitigation process from the government. They actually probably could have made a ton more money if they had simply sold the soil on the land, literally dug it up and sold the dirt, but they decided to do some good in the world (rather than puff up their wallet) and are now going to donate the land to the University of Akron for research and educational purposes. Its good to see that there are still some people in the world who care just as much about doing some good as they do about making some cash (which they have made quite a sum of cash from the land selling mitigation credits).

The rest of the day was pretty low key. Then we went out to the field station for dinner and to discuss the first chapter of our required reading, Topic: How to come up with a research question, and discuss our own ideas about how we came up with our questions and what our questions are.

Saturday:
Woke up at 4:30 am and left at 5:30am to go to Ottawa National Wildlife Reserve and Magee Marsh for a bird watching trip. Slept during most of the drive there. This was another pretty uneventful trip so here are some photos to tell the story (I'm getting pretty lazy with these posts, but I'm tired so I don't care).

Pretty cool view of the wetlands

Snapping turtle on her nest!

Bayoan, Greg, Debbie and Mollika

Gross, dead snapping turtle

Bayoan and Mollika

Bayoan, Greg (Dr. Smith aka my advisor), and Mollika

Debbie, Bayoan and Alysha

Shore of Lake Erie

So many Water Lilies!

Alysha and Bayoan

This gray catbird just sat still in the tree it was in even though we were only a couple feet away from it; it apparently couldn't have cared less about us.

Sunday:
The power was off in the dorm all day (7am-7:30pm) today so I didn't bother waking up until noon. Mollika and I went out to a cookout the RAs for the dorm did for us around 2pm and hung out and ate food until like 4. We met this guy who is a student here, and is in his 30s at least, and some lady that was with him; he was kinda weird but gave us the heads up on the computer lab and free printing in the dorm that we didn't know about before.

Monday:
Happy Memorial Day! Had the day off so just did some research/reading and hung out with Bayoan and Mollika.

Tuesday:
Met with my advisor, Greg, in the morning and discussed some preliminary work that I could do and any paperwork that I needed to didn't end up needing to fill out for my research. Tara and I went out to the field station and took a walk through the grassland in the nature preserve looking for evidence of nesting birds. I think there are definitely some bobolinks, song sparrows and red-wing blackbirds nesting out there so eventually we'll go out and find their nests so we can start monitoring them. Afterwards, Tara and I stopped by Glendale on the way home to look for skinks (for her research) and ended up finding nothing but a garter snake, which I caught to take a picture of but neither of us had our cameras. Then Bayoan and I made sandwiches for dinner and Mollika and Tara came by to hang out for a while.

Today:
Not much to really talk about today. Got lunch with Bayoan, Tara, Alysha, Dr. Mitchell and Debbie at Robertson on campus then went to the library to study for a little bit. Dinner with Tara and Alysha at some place in town that really wasn't that great; listening to the Flyers on radio now and doing a little more work.

And now I'm caught up! Posts will be more normal from here on out. And I will update on what exactly my research will be this summer.

Welcome to Akron!!! (Sunday and Monday)

I've been at University of Akron for over a week now. For those that don't know, I accepted a research internship here for the summer and I will be here until August 1. With that being said, I thought I would use this blog to catalog my experience here; this is mostly for myself but I suppose my family and maybe some of my friends would be interested in it too. That was a bit tangential, back to what I was saying. I've been here since last Sunday. This is going to be an EXTENSIVE update.

Last Sunday I finished moving out of my apartment at JMU and hit the road, Akron or bust, at 6am. The drive was pretty uneventful to say the least but it wore me out so when I got to Akron I was relieved that I could just take a break and relax for a bit.... so I thought. I arrived at U of Akron at 1pm, an hour later than I had expected to (thank you Pennsylvania, for the endless construction on your turnpike!). When I got checked in, I was able to drop off some of my stuff in my room before the REU group started pining for lunch (myself included). We went to Subway (all but one of us) and got a chance to meet and bond. Our group consists of 6 people, 2 men and 4 women: Me, Bayoan, Tara, Alysha, Mollika, & Alexandria. Overall I think that we're a great group; we clicked pretty immediately and have gotten along well ever since. That night we had a cookout out the field station and got to continue getting to know each other as well as meet some of the mentors for the program; my mentor is Dr. Greg Smith, by my choice and his. I think by the end of that night the REU group, the students, really clicked and were comfortable with each other which was awesome. Returned to the dorm (apartment style, ftw) for some shut eye that evening; I don't know what it is but the first night sleeping in a new place is always so eerie for me, but I got through it.

Bright and early on Monday:

Debbie (our grad student/grad assistant person) brought us bagels from Einstein Bros. (nice!) and we trekked off to campus to get our student IDs (Zip cards), parking passes, lunch, etc; it was a pretty uneventful outing aside from Tara losing her driver's license (you'll soon see that this is going to be a common trend...). In the late afternoon, however, we went out to the field station/Bath Nature Preserve for another cookout (free food is always a good time) and an "orienteering event" (If you don't know what orienteering is don't feel bad, neither did I. Here you go.) Anyway, it turned into a more informal nature hike and we were really more concerned, as a group, with finding cool critters than finding the orienteering flag, marker things. We ended up finding a spotted salamander, painted turtle (that peed all over the place and on Alysha), a frog, and a garter snake (I caught this one) and also saw a couple different kinds of birds.

This is a good shot of the group, taken by Mollika so she's not pictured. I'm wearing the cowboy hat.

Here I am looking for the snake that I eventually caught (thanks to Tara spotting it)

Overall, it was a great time and these group outings have really done a lot to bring us together as a group and help us bond, which has been great because we've had a ton of fun.


Thats all for Sunday and Monday, I would go into more detail but this post is already sort of unmanageable. Keep an eye out for Tuesday-this past weekend.