Hello!
My name is Wilkins Ventura and I am this summer’s Nantucket Field Station intern along with my friend Michael Low! Now, I am to make use of this blog by posting interesting events and experiences Michael and I have here on the island. Sometimes, it is too hard to pick and choose because there have been so many good experiences within the past two weeks. I can only imagine what will happen in the next two to come!
I will list a couple of events so as to catch everyone up on what I have been up to recently. But first, I should tell you more about myself!
My first experience with Nantucket was through my school. I go to UMass Boston and every year the School for the Environment has a semester in Nantucket. UMass has a field station, which I’m sure you know about, right off of Polpis Road. It is through that field station that I began to learn about Nantucket, about oceanography, coastal ecology, and much more.
Flash forward to the end of April, I find out Sarah Oktay wants to have me work for her as a summer intern! It’s exciting to see large, green spaces replacing dull and cold winter fields. Summer time is delightful and it will be more so now that I am in Nantucket for the season! I am excited to work on water testing around the island, beach profiling, weed picking and so on.
Some of the events that I have experienced so far are large and small. For example, Michael and I have renovated the trail kiosks around the field station. They are brand-spankin’ new and they look darn sharp. A couple of days ago, we found a plastic container in the lab which turned out to have an ootheca. An ootheca is an egg case where hundreds of baby praying mantis (known as mantids) come out of. This ootheca only had a couple of them (15 max). Len Germinara, Dr. Oktay’s husband, came into the lab once holding a baby sparrow in his hand that had fallen from its nests. It’s memories like these that I am excited to make and hopefully it will be blog-worthy! I will try to post a blog post a week, so stay tuned for more posts about the Nantucket field station!
-WV