Hello! My name is Jeannie van Vianen and I am one of the fall 2017 interns at St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge. I grew up in Crystal Lake, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. Though it wasn’t a huge natural area, there were enough small pockets of forests and wetlands that I used to ride my bike to. I joined Science Olympiad in middle school, where I competed in Ornithology. Memorizing hundreds of birds and learning about their life histories got me interested in birding, and I started to pay a lot more attention to what was going on around me.

I went to Michigan Tech University for college, where I majored in Biological Sciences with minors in Ecology and Spanish. I got involved in our chapter of The Wildlife Society as a freshman, and eventually served as both Vice President and President. For 3 years, I worked on research involving nitrogen availability and insect herbivory in a number of wildflower species, and completed an independent research project. I also got involved in a project researching bird-window collisions on college campuses. We initially were participating in a multi-campus study, but after the one-year study was over, a friend and I took it on and led the research project on our own. I also worked with different local groups, such as the Keweenaw Land Trust. I helped them out by doing point counts of birds on land they hoped to acquire, went through other bird reports in the local area, and helped on writing a grant that they received to purchase the land. I also got to help one of my professors work on her research banding Golden-winged Warblers!

Last summer, I had an internship with the Jo Daviess County Soil and Water Conservation District in northwest Illinois. My primary responsibility was to inventory and map the aquatic plant communities in Apple Canyon Lake, a man-made lake with a large recreational community, and write a management plan. Unfortunately, the lake had more area covered by invasive than native species, but I still learned a lot about management.

After graduating in December 2016, I had an internship at Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge. Here, my duties were mainly split between Mississippi Sandhill Cranes, a critically endangered subspecies, and Dusky Gopher Frogs, another critically endangered species. As it was nesting time, a lot of my time with the cranes was spent tracking breeding pairs and searching for nests. Our Dusky Gopher Frog headstart program had a lot of similarities to St. Mark’s Frosted Flatwoods Salamander program. We raised and released over 1,433 frogs! I look forward to taking the skills that I learned in this job and expanding on them as I learn about the salamanders and how they are similar and different, as well as getting to trap the salamanders in the field.

I am so excited to be at St. Marks this fall to learn about Red-cockaded Woodpeckers and Frosted Flatwoods Salamanders! I can’t wait to get out into the field and learn about the local ecosystem, and hopefully see a Whooping Crane or two! This landscape is incredibly unique and I want to learn all about the wildlife and plant life in the area. I know this internship will help me gain many new field skills, which will hopefully help lead me into getting my Master’s degree studying birds and hopefully achieve my dream job of being a USFWS biologist in the National Wildlife Refuge System! Thank you!