On the last day of my LHIP internship at Dinosaur National Monument, I want to share some of the results of my work on monarch butterflies. First, in my field work this summer and fall, I saw around 300 adult monarchs. These high numbers have...
Throughout my internship experience researching monarch butterflies, I have been trying to encourage people to become monarch butterfly citizen scientists. A citizen scientist is someone who isn’t a professional scientists but can still contribute to important research. In the case of monarch research, citizens can...
During my internship, Dinosaur has caught and tagged 150 monarch butterflies. (Pictured is a mosaic of pictures of most of our tagged monarchs). Out of those 150 catches, some stick in my memory as particularly special. Without further ado, here’s the list of the five...
I recently administered a monarch butterfly school field trip at Dinosaur for middle school students from nearby Vernal, Utah. On the day of the field trip, I arrived with colleagues to the Josie’s Cabin area a little before 7:30. On this early morning, the goal...
While rafting on the Green River last week, I continued the tasks I have been working on all summer: surveying for monarch butterfly habitat and tagging adult butterflies. Surveying for habitat meant recording the presence and approximate number of milkweed plants along each river mile....
Last week, I was lucky enough to be a participant on a big horn sheep and monarch butterfly biological survey trip on the Green River. Since the stunning and dramatic canyons of the Green are hardly accessible on day trips or by car, we needed...
Over Labor Day weekend, I helped out and attended events at “Dark Skies over Dinosaur,” a multi-day stargazing/astronomy/night sky festival celebrating Dinosaur’s recent designation as an International Dark Sky Park. To earn recognition as a Dark Sky Park, Dinosaur has had to prove that it...
Along with tagging monarch butterflies to study their migration paths, in my internship I am also conducting field surveys for milkweed, monarch butterfly eggs, and monarch caterpillars. I send my data to both the Southwest Monarch Study and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. USFWS...
As much as butterflies need flowers and their nectar for food, flowers also need butterflies and other animals for pollination. I’ve caught monarchs off of flowers and seen their bodies covered with a thin dust that’s ready to be deposited on another flower. It’s cool...
Now that I have a few weeks of butterfly field work experience under my belt, I am beginning to spread my wings (butterfly pun sincerely intended) to conduct field work in areas outside of my main field site in Dinosaur National Monument. Since little is...
Since there were no preschool programs to focus on Thursday and Friday, I got to spend some time catching up on blogs, cleaning up the ParkEd materials and exploring Salem Maritime NHS. Marianna, an Education Ranger, and I walked down the Derby Wharf and went...
These past few weeks in DC have been fun and full of achievements. The internship has come to an end, so today I will be sharing an overview of my experience with HABS(Historic American Buildings Survey) and LHIP(Latino Heritage Internship Program) in DC. This summer the team that...
I recently had the chance to join Dinosaur National Monument staff in welcoming the Preserve America Youth Summit program to the Monument. The participants in the Youth Summit were middle and high school students from the Denver area who traveled to Dinosaur for two days...
Sadly, I couldn’t attend the LHIP conference in Washington, but I still had a blast at the 31st Salem Maritime Festival this weekend! There was live music, arts and crafts, demonstrations, and there were two visiting vessels: Kalmar Nyckel and Polaris. On both days I...
The last week of July, we had no preschool programs at Salem or Saugus and instead the Education Rangers, Marianna and Tim and I got to spend the whole week at the Park for Every Classroom workshop. Although education isn’t something, I see myself pursuing...
On August 10, I helped with the Monarch Butterfly Habitat Hike and Tagging Workshop at Josie’s Cabin in Dinosaur National Monument. This event was intended to teach participants about monarch ecology and conservation, show people how we do monarch research, and gather lots of data....
The time to say goodbye has come. I purposively decided to write this blog at the end of my internship. I must admit, I am sad that this experience is ending. When it first started, I wanted time to pass me by, but now I...
What is going on everyone?! There are only two weeks left of my internship. I am extremely sad that it is coming to an end. The people have been amazing. The scenery has been amazing. The work has been amazing. Part of my park experience...
Within the past seven days, I have had the great opportunity to visit the three parks that make up the High Plains Group. This group, within the Intermountain Region, consists of Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site in La Junta, CO, Capulin Volcano National Monument...
Hello everyone, It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve posted a blog, so I thought it would be a good idea to post some updates about what I’ve been up to this past month Along with finishing the scripts for the 3 videos, I...