Huntley Meadows Park
This summer, I’ve had the pleasure of working as an intern at Huntley Meadows Park in Alexandria, Virginia. I first learned about this position on Handshake, as I was desperately searching for an internship that related to my environmental science degree and would give me useful skills for my future career, and this internship seemed almost too good to be true. Thankfully, I didn’t hit my head and dream it up and I’ve been enjoying my time at Huntley Meadows ever since.
At the park, I‘m one of two natural resource management interns, and my position is partially funded by the Virginia Native Plant Society, which basically means that my long-term project for the summer is plant-related. I’ll be making an aquatic plant guide for the park that can be used to educate visitors on all the different plants located in the wetland.
For this internship I have the pleasure of shadowing the natural resource manager around the park and assisting with his day-to-day tasks as well as ongoing park projects. A lot of my job is related to invasive species management and trail maintenance. Combating against invasive plant species is an ongoing, uphill battle in such an urban area so I have had many long days dedicated to hand pulling and spraying herbicide on stubborn invasive. There were even a few exhausting days where park staff and volunteers had to cut down tree saplings that had begun to overtake an ecologically important meadow.
Huntley Meadows Park underwent a wetland restoration project in 2014, so another interesting part of my job entails manually maintaining the wetland water level in the park. Over the course of the summer the natural resource manager has shown me how to lower the water level to mimic a natural wetland and encourage plant growth, and at the end of the summer the water level will be raised again.
In addition to my long-term water quality survey project I am also assisting the other resource management intern with his summer project and doing a water quality survey. The water quality survey we are currently conducting entails the two of us putting on waders and going out into the wetland to collect large samples of macroinvertebrates to analyze under a microscope. The presence or absence of certain macroinvertebrates can give us a better understanding of how polluted our water is. Because of our frequent trips into the water I now hold the record for most consecutive falls into the wetland (though for the sake of my pride I will be withholding the exact number of falls).
Another project I get to assist with this summer is a turtle survey for the park. While this project has only begun recently, it has already been pretty interesting to see what kinds of turtles we’ve found; as of now we’ve seen red-eared sliders, painted turtles, some pretty ferocious snapping turtles, and even a fairly unexpected musk turtle. So far my summer has been more enjoyable and insightful than I ever thought possible and I can’t wait to see what the rest of my internship will entail!