New Conservation Research Intern: Lara

Hi all! My name is Lara Jones and I am from northern New Jersey. I just graduated from Wellesley College in June with a degree in Biological Sciences and a concentration in ecology and conservation. I’ve been passionate about wildlife for as long as I can remember, and my drive to understand as much as I can about the outdoors while simultaneously striving to protect it has led me to pursue the long and winding path of becoming a field research ecologist. 

In particular, I am fascinated by behavioral ecology. Observing animals interacting with their natural environment is an incredible way to learn more about the natural world, and almost always leads to a myriad of questions and hypotheses. What I love most about behavioral ecology is the element of the unknown – when you’re watching an animal, there are so many different ways that it might choose to behave, and so even if you feel that you understand a species completely and can predict their every last move, there is always the exciting chance that one day you’ll be left completely and utterly baffled and with a million new questions.

As an undergraduate, I wanted to be as involved in ecological research as I possibly could be while enrolled in a small, liberal arts college. During my first couple of years I helped my professor transcribe the nesting behaviors of a pair of ravens who had decided to build their nest on top of the campus’s science center using video footage taken by a camera set up at the ravens’ nest. I then joined a different lab that focuses on ecosystems ecology for my last year of undergraduate, and I studied something totally different – the interactions between types of mycorrhizal fungi, soil texture, and tree root length.

While my research experiences during the academic year were critical for shaping my relationships with professors and honing my critical thinking and data analysis skills, it was really my summer research excursions that threw me head-first into the world of field ecology and made me realize what I did and did not like. After my second year of college, I traveled to Manitoba, Canada to be a volunteer field research assistant on a wolf movement ecology project.

I was really excited to work on this project because I have loved wolves since I was young, and I (erroneously) equated loving an animal to loving researching that animal. Although I enjoyed my time as a field tech, hiking through the prairie and boggy wilderness that is much of Manitoba, most of the work consisted of searching for and collecting samples of ungulate carcasses and wolf scat. I never got to actually observe wildlife in action, and after that summer I realized that I wanted to participate in field research which would allow me to more tangibly study animals.

This aspiration came true big time during my third year of undergraduate, when I studied abroad for a semester in South Africa through the Organization for Tropical Studies’ Ecology and Conservation program. Those three months were some of the best of my life, and are impossible to summarize accurately in just a few sentences. While traveling around different beautiful areas of the country, I assisted in ecological research projects on African wildlife, learned about conservation practices in national parks, and had a few close encounters with amazing animals such as leopards and African elephants.

All of these vastly different research experiences have contributed enormously to my field skills and understanding of what it means to be an ecologist. However, the work I did over the last two summers truly kick-started and began to shape my newfound and intense interest in… birds! Over the past two summers I worked as an avian field intern at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. My first summer there, I designed and conducted a study to assess how birds are foraging in White ash trees in the forest in order to understand how avian communities will be impacted by the impending arrival of the invasive Emerald Ash Borer beetle, which has been killing ash trees as it spreads throughout North America.

I returned to Hubbard Brook this past summer as an intern with the Smithsonian to collect field data for a long-term study on the breeding population of Black-throated blue warblers that nest in the forest. While it isn’t particularly easy to find softball-sized nests in an expanse of trees with a dense understory, I absolutely loved this job because it involved using my knowledge of avian behavior to locate nests and then closely monitor their progress.

Through these internships, I’ve come to learn that birds are great subjects to use in studying behavioral ecology because, well, they’re everywhere, and they are also relatively easy to observe.

I’m thrilled to be working at Corkscrew this fall and winter, and am especially looking forward to getting to know all the different bird species and herpetofauna down here in the western everglades. Outside of field work, I really enjoy hiking, birding (duh), and reading fantasy/sci-fi books. I anticipate that working at CSS will bring me new and exciting skills and experiences – I’ve only been here for a little over one week now and have already seen so many new things! My hope is that this internship will assist me on my path to attaining a graduate degree and a career in wildlife ecology and conservation, and I’m really looking forward to documenting my experience along the way.

~Lara