The birds and the bats

Anyway, something cool I’ve been able to do during my internship is step outside the bounds of my ‘regular’ job assignments and join the park’s Resource Management team (who has two interns of their own) on some of their surveys!

Okay, here’s a quick breakdown for some key concepts that may not be familiar to some (like they weren’t for me) but are relevant to this blog…

Resource Management: A department within the park system. Almost every park has one. They are responsible for preserving and protecting both the park’s cultural (ie. artifacts, oral histories, documents, etc.) and natural (ie. plant and animal species) resources.

Survey: An assessment gathering data about a given natural resource to determine its current state. This can include both quantitative and qualitative data and is often acquired manually. Most of our surveys are done by local universities but some are done solely by park staff.

Macroinvertebrates: Insects in their nymph and larval stages, snails, worms, crayfish, and clams that spend at least part of their lives in water. (lol that one came from google). Basically, insect or insect-like creatures that live in the water. Very tiny (usually) - but visible to the human eye.

Freshwater Sponges: Basically what they sound like… a sponge (living organism) that lives in freshwater lakes and rivers. They grow on sturdy, submerged objects and are easily mistaken for algae.

Since starting my internship, I’ve gotten to tag along on 4 different surveys - Birds, Bats, Macroinvertebrates, and Freshwater Sponges. This blog post will tell you a little bit about how each of them went :)

1. Birds - My first survey involved waking up at 4am and bushwhacking through forested areas of the park to listen/look for birds… talk about that for a welcome. It was important to get an early start for this survey because we wanted to listen for the bird calls/songs when they’re most active. Essentially, for this survey, the resource management interns and I joined a local grad student, traversing to various pre-determined coordinated across the park where we would stay for 10 minutes, identifying and listing any bird calls we heard during that time frame. (We’d also list any birds we saw but admittedly, we weren’t able to see that many.) So really, what this looked like was the three of us interns going ‘I heard a bird. Which one was that?’ or ‘Did you hear that?’ or ‘What about that one?’ as the researcher proceeded to identify all of them for us. While my time playing Wingspan has made me decent at identifying birds visually… my playing the game with the sound off definitely showed, lol. The most memorable moment of the day, however (other than getting to hike while the sun was rising… that was pretty cool I guess) was falling in the creek. Yup, you read that right - I fell into the creek. I’d say we were about 80-90% done with our survey sites and because we weren’t getting to these sites via trails, we never really knew exactly what to expect making our way to each coordinate. Well, for this one, we had to cross the creek and after watching everyone else make their way across the rocks jutting out of the water… I was not so successful. I knew the slick yet unsuspecting surface of the rocks would be my downfall (literally lol) but by the time I was sitting in the water, I still couldn’t believe it had actually happened. We all had a good laugh about it (It was a really telling moment for me where I got to show myself how I really am learning to laugh at myself. Years ago this certainly would’ve made me have a breakdown.) and I made my way to our final site just a little bit soggier. (Ranking: #4)

2. Bats - I’ll come clean - I spent an evening with the Batman… sorry, I mean bat man. Actually, bat *men* if I’m being more accurate. Joining two grad students from [a school I forget], one of the Resource Management interns, Madison, and I spent the evening in the woods hoping to see some bats. This survey was definitely more my speed, taking place from 8pm to 2am and involving a lot of sitting in camping chairs and talking. We learned that bats tend to follow linear paths of travel (often following naturally-occurring straight paths) so we set up next to Quantico Creek and waited. But we didn’t just wait… prior to our arrival, the researchers had set up 5 mist nets (super super fine mesh nets that can be up to 12 ft tall) at various points along the creek and nearby trails. The way it works is that the bats, following the river or trail, will head straight for the net and despite their excellent navigation skills, the net would be too high to fly over last-minute, and they’d be [gently] trapped in the net. Every 20 minutes or so we’d split up, armed with our headlamps, and check each of the nets. If we happened to catch a bat, the researcher (with gloved hands) would remove the bat from the net and place it in a paper bag to transport it back to where we’d been waiting. Among other things, they’d check the bat’s weight, sex, maturity, species and, maybe most importantly, they’d check for signs of white nose syndrome - a fungal disease that can kill hibernating bats. To check for white nose syndrome, the bats’ wings are stretched out over a bright light to look for spotting on their wings. After making a note of each bat, we’d simply release them and they’d carry on about their business - thank you for your service furry friends. It was one of those moments where I had to remind myself what a bat actually looks like. Like, everyone knows what a bat looks like, but when I finally saw one up close I had to be like… oh yeah, they do look like that. We found around 5 bats that evening (not all that many) and in that, there was one Eastern Red Bat (pictured here) and the rest were Big Brown Bats - a very creative species name, clearly. It was a slow evening spent chatting about our favorite desserts, next steps in our careers and how we found ourselves in Virginia - the only thing that would’ve made it better was a nice campfire to sit around. (Ranking: #2)

3. Macroinvertebrates - I’ll admit it, I think the macroinvertebrate survey was my favorite. This one was done only with park staff - it was our natural resource specialist, her two interns, and me. We found ourselves in the creek that runs through the park and we took samples at 3 or 4 different points along the creek, working our way upstream. Essentially, at each site someone would take a measurement of the water (truthfully, I wasn’t involved in this part so I don’t know what they were testing for) and then we’d look for macroinvertebrates(!) To do this, we’d place a fine net vertically in the water supported by someone holding two poles on either of its sides. Ideally, you want the bottom of the net laying flush with the ground but sometimes the current made this difficult so we’d weigh it down with rocks. Equipped with waders, someone would stand just upstream of the net, kicking with all of their might; the goal was to kick up all of the sediment and small rocks so that any critters living amongst them would be pushed into the net by the current. After one minute of this, it was time for the fun part - we’d lay the net out on a big rock and spend the next 15 minutes playing I-Spy with the macroinvertebrates. Anything we found was picked up with forceps and put into a smaller pan of water so we could identify them later. (For any of my MILA peeps, this was essentially what we did with Dr. Iyengar in the stream.) I really enjoyed just getting to hunt for all of the little guys on the net and it was really rewarding whenever you found one - it was almost a little competitive (more against ourselves than anyone else) but everyone got excited whenever one of us found something. 10/10 would do again. (Ranking: #1)

4. Freshwater Sponges - Most recently, I tagged along with a researcher from William & Mary and one of his undergrad students for a morning of their summer research. Their survey is two-fold: one part consists of using “Frank” - a $12,000 backpack - to collect eDNA (environmental DNA) samples from the creek. Essentially, the backpack has 2 tubes that connect to either side of it - one sucks in the water from upstream, the water gets filtered through the backpack, and then is released downstream through the opposite tube. During this process, the water passes through a filter that collects any larger particles. Don’t ask me anything else bout how the backpack works but between the water running through the machine and the filters that are also taken back to the lab, they are able to assess what DNA is in the water. The other part of the survey involves manually looking for sponges (often meaning lifting/looking under rocks) in the creek, then taking a physical sample of them and photographing each specimen next to a label. All of which is done, mind you, while wading in the water. While I was helping, his undergraduate student and I were responsible for collecting the eDNA samples while James (the researcher) looked for sponges. I took a page out of James’ book and ditched the waders for my trusty Tevas instead. Luckily, my water-inclined trajectory did not do me in yet again, and I stayed dry from the knees up this time. I joined them again a few days later, this time to film for the video I’m producing for the park… again, with thousands of dollars worth of equipment in my hands… talk about that for stressful. (Ranking: #3)

Can’t wait to see what the rest of my time here has in store!