Always One Step Behind

Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge, Virginia, USA Summer, 2000

Loggerhead Sea Turtle Monitoring Internship

Fresh out of college, and my first time doing real field work away from home. My first real time away from home, as well. This was 1 of the 3 U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service - National Wildlife Refuges that I interned at.

The pay was nothing, and there weren't that many nesting sea turtles that season, but I loved getting paid to drive a 4-wheeler up and down the beach.

My primary job was to look for nests in the morning or nesting sea turtles at night. The coast of Virginia is the northernmost area of the Atlantic Coast where sea turtles nest (specifically Loggerheads). Once nests were located, we built predator exclusion cages around them (or dug them up if we were unable to do that in certain areas... to be incubated at a local marine science center and later released). We got to satellite tag one mother turtle that year, and it was an amazing experience.

The refuge staff gave us all projects to work on, as well, besides sea turtles. I got to help with bird point counts, osprey nest monitoring (and banding - pictured here), prothonotary nestbox surveys, and insect surveys.

some sleepy [REDACTED]

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It's a yellow bittern! They are very creechur.