ארכיון יומן של יולי 2021

יולי 16, 2021

My old Bio September 2020

It feels like I'm starting from scratch on iNaturalist, I can't even find my old field guides! I love this amazing, supportive community of nerds and "noticers" who are like me.

By sharing my knowledge and love of nature, I hope to infect everyone around me with the disease of respecting, noticing, and connecting nature to their own lives.

Why I'm Here:

  1. My goals are to catalog the critters in my back yard and to learn to identify the invasive plants along my stretch of the bayou.
  2. I am currently taking the Texas Master Naturalist class in the Coastal Prairie Chapter, and loving it!!!
  3. Also, I would love to go back through my old albums and add those observations to create my life list here.

What I do:
These days I spend my time: caring for my family (laundry :P), my 3 indoor cats and 1 dog, my 65+indoor plants, and my ever-evolving pollinator-friendly yet tropical-looking garden; avoiding house work by taking walks/runs on Buffalo Bayou or starting projects that never get finished; planning our next family adventure; volunteering; and meditating, reading, sewing, and crafting when I have extra time or don't feel like vacuuming.

How I became a naturalist:
As a youngin' in rural New Jersey I always played with the insects, frogs and mud in my back yard, and usually had some wild thing held captive in a shoe box or jar. My parents were amazing and took us camping and hiking and trips to the beach. A family of Opiliones lived in my bedroom window for years, and I bragged at school about my daddy-long-legs friends that I shared my room with :)

I was fascinated by the differences I observed when we moved back to our native Texas (Corpus) as a tween. Coyotes and mosquitos and tiny deer and venomous snakes and lizards everywhere; and it looked different in almost every way from NJ. I loved taking trips to the beach and going fishing in the brackish backwaters, playing with crabs and wondering about the flowers in the dunes. Then the desert. Then the hill country. Then the piney woods.
I worked as vet assistant for years, starting in high school and loved not only the animals but the microbiology/pathology I learned working in the hospital.
In a brief 7 years!!! I finally earned a BS in Bioenvironmental Science at TAMU, where I learned that my passion had a name: Ecology. I loved working in the department's plant pathology labs, fell in love with soil microbiology, and that's also when I started my nature/macro photography hobby.
The best fantasy job I've had was working as a seasonal park naturalist for Robbers Cave State Park in SE Oklahoma after I graduated, where I actually got paid to play with snakes and "critters", take nature hikes, teach people about wetlands while "hillbilly" fishing, observe and explain the natural world with visitors, and even take my show into the local schools. Briefly I had a real job as an environmental scientist where I got to use my degree, completing Phase I ESAs and working with the endangered American Burying Beetle. Then I became a mom!

All my family and friends know about my love of nature, as I never shut up about my latest discoveries! Of course I have shared my passion with my 2 kids, in spite of them :) Though I did purposefully stop my obsessive photography and plant/insect ID hobbies so that I could dedicate my hyperfocus elsewhere, nature has never stopped being my medicine.

הועלה ב-יולי 16, 2021 06:06 אחה"צ על ידי bayoushari bayoushari

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