Nola Shi’15 has sent an update on her postgrad research adventures in Oregon!
Nola after butterfly surveys up on Steens mountain.
“We finished up our woody riparian and wet meadow point counts. We basically trudged 6-8 miles through marshland (nothing like water and cow poop sloshing around in your hiking boots for several hours!) and through fields with grasses taller than I am at 4 AM, and there are 99999 mosquitos here.
Intern covered in mosquitoes!
The point counts were really cool — tons of white faced ibises, black necked stilts, avocets, black terns, double crested corms, curlews and phalaropes. We’re also just about done with our impoundment brood surveys — one of the lakes here has around 3000-5000 birds on it, so it takes hours to count them all! Someone took a sandhill crane colt from near its nest and brought it to refuge headquarters. So we had to drive 10 hrs to a rehab center in Portland and the poor thing is probably going to be put into a zoo.” 
Nola also reported on a trip to the coast where she was able to check nests of snowy plovers with other biologists. 
Looking forward to more updates!