Salutations, blog readers! This week has been an eventful one, so prepare yourself for a lengthy blog post (sorry). To begin, I want to flashback to the end of last week. I was leaving the dining hall, and as I was walking out of the door, Colleen, who was walking in front of me, mentioned that I had received mail. Of course, I was not expecting any, but as I walked back in, I saw that there was definitely a letter sitting in my mailbox. To my astonishment, it was a letter from my great aunt and uncle, who I love dearly. The letter was simply asking me about my time in Oregon so far and keeping me updated as to their recent happenings at their home down in Florida. It was absolutely exciting to read and receive the letter, and I hope to start an old-fashioned letter correspondence with her.
This weekend, Sebastian, Sherlyn, Victoria, Annika, and I visited the West Coast Game Park Safari in Bandon. At the start of the program, Victoria mentioned something about noticing a wildlife park on her drive in to OIMB, and ever since, we all have wanted to go and decided that this past weekend would be the perfect time. In case you are not familiar with the Oregon area, Bandon is approximately 45 minutes from Charleston, so it was a little bit of a drive to get to the safari park. Nevertheless, we had a great idea to make a playlist of our top ten favorite songs, and if you know me, then you also know that the task of narrowing my song choices down to only ten songs was extremely challenging because of my long-lived, deep appreciation of music (my playlist on Spotify amounts to about 21 hours of listening, just to put things into perspective). Anyways, sharing my music and listening to everyone else’s music during the drive was really nice, especially since I learned that some of Sherlyn’s favorite songs are also some of my favorites (such as Come and Get Your Love by Redbone). While we were at the park, we saw a myriad of animals, ranging from goats to bears to even fishing cats, and many of the animals at the park roam freely for you to feed and pet. Even though I have developed a profound respect for eelgrass, being able to reconnect with animals after so long was truly refreshing, and many new best friends were made during the course of the trip (refer to the attached photos). As the highlight of the whole experience, one of my lifelong dreams was realized: petting a capybara. I have been fascinated by capybaras since I was younger, and it was so surprising when one of the park’s capybaras walked right up to me and Annika and rolled over for some lovely scratches. Additionally, the weather in Bandon was really warm and sunny, which was a nice change of pace from the gloom and fog in Charleston earlier and later that day. For your movie night update, we watched White Chicks this weekend, which is undoubtedly one of my favorite movies of all time. In fact, I watch this movie every time I am sick because it always makes me laugh and feel better. Also, our usual movie night group expanded to include Gina and J’mie this weekend, which was awesome. Near the beginning of this week, Victoria surprised all of us and kindly gifted the REUs with a small Mason jar filled with shark-themed candy in honor of shark week, which I greatly appreciated. To celebrate shark week, Victoria, Colleen, and I watched a short documentary about sharks found in the deep sea, which was really interesting and kind of shocking, but we all enjoyed learning more about these fascinating elasmobranchs. Project work this week has consisted of some early mornings of fieldwork. After this series of spring low tides, there is only one more week of spring low tides before I finish the REU program, so my fieldwork and data collection is beginning to come to a close, which is somewhat dispiriting but also encouraging. Nevertheless, I will be collecting data until the week before the program ends, so making a mad dash to integrate the new data into my poster quickly will certainly be stressful. During fieldwork this week, we collected data from Fossil Point, Clam Island, Valino Island, and Collver Point. Out of all of these sites, Clam Island is probably my favorite. First of all, the site itself and the views from it are beautiful, but what I like most about it is the squirting clams. As indicated by the name, Clam Island features abundant clams that love to shoot water from their siphons, so when you look across the mudflat, you can always see numerous clams spouting water from their position in the sand, effectively putting on an interesting waterwork display. In fact, the last time that we visited Clam Island, a clam almost shot water right into my face while I was counting eelgrass shoots! On Wednesday of this week, South Slough held an intern celebration potluck at Sunset Bay State Park in which all of the SSNERR interns were honored and fed delicious food. I went to the potluck with Sebastian and Colleen, and I enjoyed seeing and talking to some of the other interns that are leaving soon. As an unexpected surprise, all of the interns and their respective mentors were called to the front, where the mentors shared a short blurb about their interns and presented their intern with a certificate of appreciation. I was absolutely honored by this recognition and the kind words that Ali had to say about me. I have recently received some compliments and words of support/encouragement from dear friends and family who have been keeping up with this blog. I would just like to emphasize that I am genuinely and sincerely grateful for everyone who has taken the time to read about my journey. Your heartfelt messages have meant the world to me, and some happy tears have certainly been shed.
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AuthorHi everyone! My name is Chloe Cummins, and I am from Loretto, Tennessee. I am a rising senior at the University of Tennessee Southern where I am pursuing a B.S. degree in Biology (with a concentration in Wildlife Biology and Ecology) and a minor in Sustainability. I’m super excited to be researching the reproductive ecology of eelgrass with my mentor Ali Helms at the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve during my time here at OIMB! Archives
August 2022
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