Well, the final week of my internship has come and gone.
A few of us went down to Bon Secour National Wildlife Reserve to try and catch a sea turtle hatching at one of their beach sites. To my dismay, they sensed I was coming to the area and waited to hatch until the day after I’d left. The fact I even got to go down there and see how Gulf Shores and an NWR interact, though, is cool.
These 10 weeks have been challenging and rewarding, and I am grateful to SCA, CDIP, and USFWS for this experience that’s helped me grow as a person and become substantially less likely to freak out every time I see a snake slithering through the water.
I mean I’ve wrestled snakes, learned the hard way that I’m not allergic to poison ivy, pretty much lost the feeling in my elbows from being bitten by so many mosquitoes, horseflies, pretty much any insect with, um, teeth…
I’ve conquered my fears of amphiumas, bats, not frogs, and actually had a chance to visit the state of Mississippi. I even learned a good bit of history, and it wasn’t even all bad.
But the biggest thing I got out of this summer was the growth of my character. Through adversity, I stuck to the values and morals my parents bestowed upon me. And there was a good feeling when supervisors from my previous year congratulated me on keeping up the good work. It sometimes hardly seems like work because I’m having fun over half the time.
One last thank you for this summer’s experience to the people who made it possible for me to use the internet to blabber on about my life to everyone in the world.
That’s all! So… Buh-bye.
