Today was the first day that the Students Discover group was able to go to our externship sites and start working.  We are all working at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. I will be working on the eMammal project in the biodiversity lab with Kelsie and David and our mentors Dr. Stephanie Schuttler (@StephSchuttler) and Dr. Roland Kays (@RolandKays).

Our first item (of many) was visiting the Prairie Ridge Ecostation.  Who knew this was in the middle of Raleigh?? If you haven’t been you must go! I wish that we saw more of it while we were there (I think we’ll be going again when we do some small mammal trapping). While we were there we discussed our hopes, fears and expectations from this experience.  It was comforting to see that many of us had the same fears but by the end of the day; I think many of them were alleviated.  Later we then learned about a few dragon fly species and got a chance to run through one of the citizen science programs and collect data.

Before we left the ecostation we had an awesome lunch from Neomonde.

Later that afternoon we heard from Dr. Rob Dunn (@RobRDunn). It was very inspiring!

We then toured the Nature Research Center and the Museum.  I guess a good way to distinguish the two different buildings would be the Museum showcases what we know and the Nature Research Center showcases how we know it.  Our labs are in the Nature Research Center. At the end of the day we were able to tour the Research Collections (not open to the public).

So as you can see, we had an extremely busy day packed with awesome experiences.  Tomorrow we’re going to be heading back out into the field to download data from the camera traps …

Stay tuned.