Week 5:
Audobon Center at Francis Beidler Forest

June 18, 2014

Come one, come all to Francis Beidler Forest’s “Get Swamped: Science!” Summer camp! Mr. Matt and Mr. Nono will lead your kids through a week of adventure and fun in the swamp. Everything from catching dragonflies and fish to creating their own upcycled creations… this camp has got everything to suit your kid’s outdoorsman fancies.

I like to go by Nono or some variation of that when I am being a teacher. For summer tennis camps I have taught in the past, all the kids knew me as Coach Nono and now as a camp director for Audubon’s swamp camp I am known as Mr. Nono, sidekick to the all-knowing Mr. Matt. Nono is easier for the kids to remember and it seems to tickle them into liking and respecting me a little quicker.

This week, as you have probably already figured out, I have been helping Matt lead the kid’s summer camp. We had 9 fantastic kids sign up this week and they were a lot of fun. Difficult at times as all kids can be, but fun none-the-less. It has also actually been a really cool way for me to experience what they do here. All the activities we do are designed to intrigue the campers and teach them about the science that Audubon employees do here every day. Among the week’s worth of many activities, we demonstrated benthic sampling and let the kiddos dig through the dirt to find worms and crayfish (which they call crawdads in the South apparently), lent them all a pair of binoculars to go birding, and lead them through a series of adventures through the forest and swamp. Everything had me peaking over all the little ones’ heads to see what they found as well. Who doesn’t enjoy catching and identifying bugs and fish!? After catching things we would always ID it and talk to the kids about that animal’s or bug’s importance in the swamp ecosystem, and then release it of course.

I continued to monitor the boardwalk and collect Prothonotary Warbler sightings in the morning before camp started every day. For some reason the birds have not been as spunky this week. I don’t know if the heavy rain every night had anything to do with it but I haven’t collected as many data points as I have in past weeks. Their breeding season is supposed to be coming to a close so it could make sense that they are not singing as much. A Master Naturalist group is coming to see a Prothonotary Warbler banding demonstration and because I have been monitoring them, I am who Matt and Mark are turning to for the locations of unbanded birds to target. I am enjoying that goal driven responsibility. I also began mapping the boardwalk and the numbered points along it with a GPS and a program called GIS (Geographic Information Systems). Mark has helped me a lot this week with that and I feel good about it. Hopefully by the end of this internship I will have the data necessary to make a comprehensive map of this site’s Prothonotary territories.

From my tennis coaching jobs, I have a good amount of experience with customer service/interpersonal relations, but this is a new experience with parents and campers from which I believe I am gaining extraordinary experience. Teaching biology in a wildlife field course setting, even and maybe especially to children, has already forced me to reach out for further knowledge about this environment and the wildlife that resides in it. I try to be as spongy as possible when Matt is giving a nature talk to the kids or anyone else because he really is a wealth of information.

A second group of campers comes next week and I am excited to meet all the new faces and have some fun with this group of kids as well. Matt and I think we have removed all the kinks from week 1 of camp so I’ll let you know how it goes!