27 June

Back at the brew with an iced honey latte, uploading my weekly photos and the blog. This week we started doing adult observations! I'm really excited for this part of the job because I have no experience with adult dragonflies so everything I do I'm learning. I can now tell the 5 families apart pretty well and can pick out certain species from 20 m away (like the 12 spot). Next week we're going to do practice observations, which means 8-12 we stand and talk into a recorder about every dragonfly we see and certain characteristics of them.

Ash and I are getting along amazingly and spend all our time together even when we don't have. I'm super happy to have such an awesome roommate! Also Jesse is back at this field station, so we've been having tons of fun! We watched the USA/Algeria game on Wednesday (yay!) but I napped through the USA/Ghana game yesterday (probably for the best...). Right now I'm winning the lab bracket, but It's too early to get that excited haha

On Thursday night we went looking for swarming dragonflies, but a storm started to come in so we went to cave point. It's this really cool state park where the cliffs go right into the Lake and when the wind is just right it makes amazing waves!


I tried to get the perfect wave picture, but never quite got it right. All the pictures I took are on facebook though. I even got a picture of Jess and Ash because Mom said I don't have any pictures of people.

Yesterday we participated in this really cool event called Bio Blitz. It's where a bunch of scientists get together and organize any public volunteers to do a huge day long survey of an area. There are 3 planned around the great lakes area of WI this summer, the one we did yesterday was on Europe Lake. I was there to help with the herpetological survey and aquatic invertebrates. Our group put in about 5 hours and found some American Toads, Spring Peepers, 2 treefrog tadpoles, a red backed salamander and eggs, and some pretty damselflies. I also got some really cool pictures while we were hiking, including this awesome orange fungus.


Afterwards Adam (the masters student in our lab) invited some of the people back to our cabin and we had a bonfire, which was really sweet. We got to meet Jenna, who is an Americorps volunteer working for "wisconvservation". She is one of the people who helped coordinate the bio blitz. We also met Jason who is part of the "green living project". He drives around the country making a documentary on sustainable living and green projects. He's like a modern day anthropologist documenting a cool part of American culture. On Tuesday he is driving over to Minneapolis and doing a large event working with Kashi.

All in all it was a cool/exciting week. Time to buckle down and spend the rest of the day doing work.

:0)