Placement

The word of my summer is placement.

The program I am a part of for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service places their Pathways Career employees at a refuge to work at after they finish the education they are pursuing.  It use to be a guaranteed full time job in the discipline you have been pursuing, but currently they are giving Pathways students a one year position and after that one year is over they send you somewhere else or they convert you to a full time employee.  

The fun part is that I signed a mobility statement back in 2011 saying that I will go wherever they need me (that's how I ended up in Southeast Missouri).  Below is a map of Region 3 (the region that I signed up with).  There are 8 states that contain 55 National Wildlife Refuges.  The current plan is that one of them will be my place of employment for 2015.

I graduate on December 20, 2014.  The Fish and Wildlife Service has 120 days to place me after that.  The intern coordinator has already talked to me and my supervisor about how they have started talking about my placement up in the regional office.  I will be going to the regional office the last week of July for an intern workshop and I have a feeling that my placement will be talked about while I am up there.

I have a peace about what will happen and I am trusting that God has his hand in directing me to where I need to be.  I have been praying over this map since 2011 and I am now asking you to do the same.

Thesis Stuff

The Distribution and Abundance of Feral Hogs (Sus scrofa) on Mingo National Wildlife Refuge

Within the past two years, there has been an explosion of feral hog activity at Mingo National Wildlife Refuge.  Getting a baseline of data and understanding the seasonal changes and habitat use of the feral hog is important for maximizing management efforts.  In order to monitor the hogs across the refuge, thirty points were selected with certain criteria as locations for cameras. There are three different sets of variables for the thirty cameras.  The first variable is sign versus control.  Fifteen cameras are “sign” cameras, which were placed in areas where hogs were thought to be present due to rooting, wallowing, and scat.  The other fifteen cameras are labeled as control or random cameras and were placed on a transect line made by ArcGIS.  The second variable is bait versus no bait.  Out of these thirty cameras, using a random number generator, 15 cameras were chosen to have bait.  Seven of those cameras are “sign” cameras and eight are “random/control.”  The third variable is low versus high elevation.  It is thought that during the wet months there would be more pictures on cameras at high elevation than at low elevation. The trail cameras have been in the field since November 2012 and will be collected December 2013.  As of September, 63,125 images have been collected.  Out of the thirty cameras, twelve have had pictures of hogs.  The images are currently being sorted by camera, month, and species.  

*This is a small peak into what has consumed my time as of late.   This weekend my adviser is taking 4 SEMO graduate students to the Central Plains Society of Mammalogists meeting.  I am presenting a poster (above) and another student is giving a 15 minute presentation.  The paragraph is an abstract about my thesis topic.   

www.nomorevoices.com

Biologist

Humidity hair

Sweat soaked shirt

Rubber boots on

Muddy pants

Dirt under fingernails

Callused hands

Smelling like bugspray and sweat

Water is a necessity

A GPS at my side

This is my life

Church

Church

A political place

Filled with fakes

Who gather in the same place

Every Sunday morning

And listen to sermons

While thinking

This is for the sinner next to me

Where prayers are used

To keep the service flowing

Getting people on and off stage

Where there is never enough people

For child care and children’s church

At the same time

The younger generation of Christ followers

Is slowing dying off

This is the American Church…

Won’t you join us?

Pens and Pencils

Dear God,

I’ve given you the pen

To write my love story

It was easy giving it to you

Because I don’t like pens

Pens are too permanent

I prefer pencils

While you have been holding the pen

I have been holding onto my pencils

And I’ve found myself dreaming

Doodling and erasing 

Thinking, no damage has been done

Nothings permanent, it will erase

But I see now

That’s not the point

It’s not my life

But yours

It’s about waiting and trust

Not wanting and lust

So I will give you my pencils

With my doodles and dreams

And trust that you

Will write my love story

*Found this today. written 5/2/2011

Thoughts from Mingo

"I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve.  But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland on night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way."

That is one of my favorite quotes from Donald Miller's book Blue Like Jazz.
____________________________________________________________

This is how it relates to my life.  

"I never liked waterfowl, because I didn't know the species and I had never seen them fill the sky.  But I was at Mingo National Wildlife Refuge one afternoon when I saw the sky filled with geese. I just stood there and I watched them.

After that I liked waterfowl.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way."  

This is one of the things that I have learned from my one year of being able to be at Mingo NWR.  I didn't know about Cyprus swamps and I didn't really care about duck/goose habitat and migrations.  Now I do.