I am in the last week of my FWS fellowship and I’m sad to see this experience coming to a close. These last few weeks have been my busiest. Since my last post, I’ve had to create solid drafts of my deliverable documents which took up a lot of my work days. I also prepared a powerpoint presentation about the work I’ve done this summer and presented it to other fellows, biologists, higher management, and some members of the executive team. Leading up to the presentation I was very nervous but when the day came to it I was excited. My supervisor has been so supportive throughout my fellowship and was especially so during this period of nervousness before my presentation. She helped me edit my slides, figure out what I should share and say, and let me practice with her more times than I can remember and I’m so grateful for her. She also organized a small group in the office to practice with which was incredibly helpful since everyone gave me such good feedback. Something I have truly enjoyed about the Service is how collaborative the environment is. If you find yourself in an internship with the FWS, I highly recommend reaching out to other people for help, guidance, advice, ideas, or just for fun. In my experience, people were more than happy to help in every stage of the process.

After my big presentation, I was invited to join the Service’s pollinator conservation community of practice. Joining this group gave me and a few other “pollinator fellows” the opportunity to present a high level briefing to members of the National Pollinator Team.. I got to hear about all of the other cool pollinator projects that other fellows are working on and meet people in the Service that are doing great work to help pollinators.

In the last two weeks, I was able to escape my desk and get a few more field opportunities. I was invited to a Ridgway's Rail release at the Sweetwater Marsh. This opportunity was so much fun. The refuge manager led us on a tour of the marsh and let us see where they keep the birds before they’re released. I also got to see how they prep the birds for transport and put trackers on their backs. This was also an awesome day because I got to meet some other DFPs in person and hang out with a couple of biologists which added an element to my fellowship experience that I didn’t have before.

This morning I got to spend time in the field again. I met up with a few folks from USGS doing bird banding at the Tijuana River National Estuary which was so cool. I hadn’t interacted with USGS biologists before so it was really neat to learn about their current jobs and career paths. Even though I was there as an observer they let me do some hands-on stuff. I got to see their net setup and they walked me through their data collection process which was very organized and systematic. They also showed me some of their bird handling methods and taught me two different types of grips before letting me handle and release a few birds. Even though they said it was a slow day we saw and caught a lot of really interesting birds. These people were a truly impressive group of scientists and I’m grateful to have been able to learn from them today.

The feeling of gratitude has been a frequent one in the past weeks of my fellowship. This has been the best intern experience of my life and I feel truly lucky to have been a part of it. I’ve met amazing people along the way and I’m excited to be able to join this great community of conservationists when I graduate.

Agency: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Program: US Fish & Wildlife Service - DFP

Location: Sacramento Fish and Wildlife Office

Photo of a San Bruno Elfin larva on sedum from a site visit. Courtesy of Samantha M. Lantz.

I am at the halfway mark in my summer as a FWS fellow and the time seems to be going fast. These last few weeks I have spent learning about the San Bruno Elfin Butterfly and creating the first drafts of a monitoring protocol, core conceptual, and recovery implementation strategy. For the monitoring protocol, I’ve met with partners from each of the sites where the species is found to get their input on how the species should be monitored and what methods are realistic for them. One of the challenges with creating this document is that the sites vary in terrain so what might work at one site may not work for another. Hopefully at the end of this fellowship I will have produced a document that reflects what each of the site managers finds useful. For the recovery implementation strategy, I have done a crosswalk of the recovery plan with documents that describe the current status of the species. This crosswalk allows us to see the recovery criteria and see if the criteria has been met based on survey reports and the most recent 5-year review of the species. Where the criteria has not been met leaves opportunity for ideas on recovery actions that could be implemented to meet those criteria.

Along with working on my deliverables, I’ve also been trying to network as much as I can while I’m still working in the service. I live in the San Diego area so when my fellowship is completed I’d like to get hired with the Carlsbad field office or one of the local refuges. I’ve spoken to many people asking for advice on how to be hired in a specific geographic location. The advice I’ve received is to just reach out and find a reason to talk to people from the places I’d be interested in working. My project supervisor has been very supportive. She’s put me in contact with several biologists from the Carlsbad office, each of whom I’ve met over Teams and have all referred me to even more people I could get to know better.

I’ve also been able to get some field work experience even though my project is remote. This past week I was able to visit the San Diego National Wildlife Refuge to assist with the Hermes Copper Butterfly survey. While on the hike, I got to meet and spend time with the refuge manager and a refuge field biologist. Both were incredibly insightful and I learned a lot from them. We did not see any Hermes but we did see quite a few different species of other butterflies and I learned different techniques for finding and identifying them. At the end of the hike the refuge biologist gave me information for an opportunity to help with bird banding at another local refuge, which is another opportunity I’m looking forward to. Hopefully I can continue to meet more San Diego people and accept more local opportunities.

Agency: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Program: US Fish & Wildlife Service - DFP

Location: Sacramento Fish and Wildlife Office

I am in the Directorate Fellows Program with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I am currently in the listing and recovery division working with the Sacramento office virtually from San Diego. This opportunity was a perfect match because I was keen on staying in San Diego this summer so this opportunity allowed me to gain valuable experiences in the field of conservation while being able to stay close to my family. The project I am working on is to produce documents regarding the recovery of the San Bruno Elfin Butterfly, listed as endangered.

The San Bruno Elfin is located in the coastal mountains near San Francisco and was listed as endangered in the 70s due to population reduction caused largely by habitat fragmentation alongside other threats. This species is particularly sensitive to habitat changes due to its sole reliance on its host plant, sedum spathulifolium, the only plant that the butterfly will lay its eggs on and the only plant that the caterpillars of this species can eat. My job now is to coordinate with local partners to identify actions that will aid in the species’ recovery. At the end of this fellowship I will produce a monitoring protocol, conceptual model, and a recovery implementation strategy.

The goal of the monitoring protocol is to help guide people conducting San Bruno Elfin caterpillar population surveys. Right now all of the different sites have teams that collect data in different ways. When the time comes for the Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct a species status assessment or a five year review, the data is not comparable because the surveyors had different methods of capturing data. This calls for the necessity of a standardized method of collecting data in order to make the data comparable across different sites over time so that we can elucidate real trends in the species’ population size and it’s influences. The purpose of the conceptual model is to help visualize the threats and how specific recovery actions can mitigate the harm inflicted by the threats. The conceptual model will be contextualized within the recovery implementation strategy to help understand the relationships between different actions surrounding the species. The recovery implementation strategy will be a synthesis of recovery actions that have and are taking place, the document will crosswalk current recovery actions with the 2020 recovery plan in order to identify which threats have not yet been mitigated. The recovery plan will contain proposed recovery actions to account for any current recovery deficits the species faces.

Agency: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Program: US Fish & Wildlife Service - DFP

Location: Sacramento Fish and Wildlife Office

Samantha is an undergraduate student at San Diego State University. She is currently pursuing a bachelor’s in biology with an emphasis in ecology, she is also completing a minor in anthropology. Samantha works as a student research assistant in an ecology lab where she studies the effects of fire and bison on arthropods in tallgrass prairies. Samantha also does volunteer work at The Water Conservation Garden where she tends to the butterfly pavilion and informs visitors on the different species of butterflies that are raised in the pavilion. Samantha enjoys studying endangered species and community ecology which contribute to her passion for conservation.