My name is Preston Earley, and I am an intern for the Milkweed-Monarch Initiative at St. Marks NWR! Born and raised nearby in Tallahassee, Florida, my family and I spent many weekends down at St. Marks when I was young, so the opportunity to work here is an honor and a dream come true. I have always loved being outdoors and working with my hands; I spend a lot of my free time hiking, backpacking, kayaking, camping, and gardening. As you can imagine, this makes St. Marks a great fit for me!

My internship consists of field work and experimental nursery work to study and propagate rare species of Asclepias, AKA “milkweeds”. These species are significant for their evolutionary history and modern day ecology (and their cool looking flowers); most populations are declining across the greater Southeast, and this Initiative is part of a much larger effort by government and private organizations, and the American public, to save them. A continued decline in milkweed populations would also spell disaster for the transcontinental Monarch butterfly migration, since Monarchs rely on milkweed as their sole larval food host.

St. Marks is all about preserving nature, in all its forms and systems. Milkweeds, because of their biology, ecology, inherent beauty, and importance for Monarch butterflies, provide St. Marks with a unique opportunity to meet that objective. I believe in the importance of our natural world in all its beauty, and more specifically, in the inherent value of biodiversity. Asclepias spp. are an important part of that biodiversity, well worth protecting. That is why I intern at St. Marks.

I highly encourage everyone to drive down to the Refuge and visit the lighthouse for some beautiful views of the Forgotten Coast- if you do, you’ll see what motivates myself and others to work on this project (and others like it) down at the Refuge. Along with my internship, I am also an Orthodox Christian catechumen, a Geology student at FSU in my second year, and an employee at Trillium Gardens Nursery in Tallahassee, Florida.