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.

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....