I graduated from the one month long training and left Colorado for my first project in Grey Summit Missouri! That was about three weeks ago, it seems like it has been so much longer because of all of the work I have been doing.
My team has been working for the amazing people at Shaw Nature Reserve.
While we were here I named our van Helen Wheels because she is completely bad ass and the only way to get around where we are. Grey Summit, though very beautiful, is in the middle of no where.
Anyway
One of the first Jobs we have had to do here is seed collecting:
Basically the way we do it is to go out, clip and collect the parts of the plants that have the seeds, and set all of the seeds we collected into cardboard containers and shelve them until they are dried.
Once the plants are dried enough we separate the seeds from the rest of the plant through using different sifters or other methods depending on seed size.
All of our efforts will go into restoring destroyed natural habitats such as wetlands glades and prairies!
We also helped to remove invasive species of plants from the reserve!:
The two main invasive species are privet and honeysuckle.
First we cut them down with brush cutters and then go through and dab the stumps with a herbicide that is relatively safe.
For the invasives in the really steep areas it is very hard to use a brush cutter and so our sponsor John used a chainsaw. It was a blast running up and down the slope treating the stumps!:
We were actually really high up!
And then on rainy days we stayed inside and worker on a few smaller projects (most arent yet finished). I was working with my teammate Heather building bird houses. My other teammates were sanding and staining wood, seed cleaning, and splitting fire wood. =)
That is how most of my week here is.
We did get to work last weekend with a horse rescue in Union Missouri to complete part of our independent service hours.
Everyone got to meet the horses and other animals. They even had a Bashkir Curly horse!
For Thanksgiving our sponor John Behrer invited us to dinner with his family. There were forty people there, it was a lot of fun and the food was delicious! The really cool thing about the way they do thanksgiving is that after they eat before pie they go on a mini hike (since they live on the reserve):
(PIE)
Last weekend we went to St. Louis and saw the arch. Walked around it and stuff (I'll post more pictures once I get them from my teammates):
Visited Missouri Botanical Garden:
Shaw Nature Reserve is actually an extension of Missouri Botanical Garden.
That was all last week.
This week started off like the first half of this project, but it ended with us helping with some prescribed burning! Which it is really exciting to light whole fields on fire!
Thursday they were educating us on the hows and whys of prescribed burning, and so we burned a two acre area and then a few little patchy garden areas.
We wore fire resistant suits and our weapons consisted of rakes and water.
Plus a torch to set the field on fire.
Just so everyone knows, we were working with professionals who knew what they were doing, and have participated in many prescribed burns. It is something they do every year to keep the vegetation as diverse as possible, and it also helps to control invasive species by killing small trees and saplings as well as seeds that have fallen. Native species of plants are actually a bit hardier and so they can withstand the fires. Historically fires like these happen naturally, they act as a fuel reducer so that the large out of control crazy fires that burn down homes are less likely.
Anyway, we took a super cool team photo on the ash!
Today was even more awesome!!
We got to help them with a 70 acre large prescribed burn!!
It was partially forest and partially prairie!
(We burned the area outlined in red)
We split into two groups, my group started on the forest side to widen the firebreak on that edge. The firebreak is basically a path along the edge of the burn area with no fuel (leaves) so the fire cannot progress in that direction. It was really smokey because of the amount of leaves on the ground. Our main Job was to make sure that fires didn't start on the other side of the firebreak into fields we didn't want burned.
Roads make really great firebreaks:
Prairie fires burn really fast with really tall flames and lost of smoke.
Part of my team, enjoying the flames:
Before:
After:
That is my first project so far!!
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Awesome Photos:
