Kalysha Clark

I posted a little while back reflecting on the first part of my ten week summer class. I was able to improve my test grades from the first exam and ended up making a B in the class! And to end my summer, the class successfully transferred back to State and officially shows up on my transcript! Yay.

Only another week of summer until it's back to the grind!

As of July 25th, I finished my first ever internship. After 10 weeks of turtle tracking, raptor training, spiderwebs to the face, and mosquito bites, I am happy to have gained many relevant skills toward my career and to have expanded my professional network.

I'd like to give a huge shout out and thank-you to the following people, who donated their hard-earned money to help support me through my unpaid internship. Your contribution was truly appreciated and helped me greatly!


Check out some of the photos below from the internship.

Kellogg the Corn Snake and I.

Nessie, the Bearded Dragon.

Otus the Eastern Screech Owl. He was having a small retreat inside the cabin while his blood feathers grew out.

An outreach event at the Nature Research Center.

Myself with Jade, the Greenish Rat Snake, at the outreach event. The Greenish Rat Snake is a mix between a Black Rat Snake found in the triad and the Yellow Rat Snake found on the coast.

Myself with Pigwidgeon, our newest Eastern Screech Owl. As you can see, his is missing his left eye, which was removed at the Blue Ridge Wildlife Institute (part of Lees McRae college) after being hit by a car.

A large part of my internship was marking box  turtles and recording their information as part of the Box Turtle Connection. To find out how to  become a citizen scientist and to help with the Box Turtle Connection, click here. This turtle is likely a female, because of its muted colors, brown arms (versus yellow on males) and brown eyes (versus red on males). Also, based on the number of annuli (grooves in one scute), she is around 11 years old!

Overall, my internship was very rewarding and I'm very glad I was able to have such a great experience. I plan to continue raptor training so I can progress to the other Barred Owl Lily, our Red-Tailed Hawk Ivan and our Kestrel Artemis.

Some of the staff witnessed one of our transmitter turtles laying eggs. They saw her lay two.

Just laid the eggs.

Covering the nest.

To protect her eggs from predators, one of the conservation interns and myself built her a nest cage.

We used left over chicken wire, zip ties and sticks to build it. Check out the pictures below. I also laminated a sign that reads: BOX TURTLE NEST - DO NOT DISTURB.

View from the top, with the sign.

Side view.

My goal was to take my required statistics and chemistry II at the local community college in Raleigh, but I was only able to get into chemistry. So every Monday and Wednesday I am on campus from 8:15-1:25. The class is going well though! We have open note quizzes before each lab to make sure we've looked over the material and I've made 100s on all but one (which was an 80). We also have informal lab reports, which is good considering I haven't written a chemistry lab report since high school. The one formal report we had to do has already been done and my lab partner and I made a 100 on that. Next week is oral presentation week for the lab sections. I am doing my presentation on the chemistry of depression. It's got a nice biological aspect to it so that's why I picked it.

We had our first test a week ago and I made a little lower than I hoped but hopefully now I know how to better prepare myself and plan to go by my professor's office hours beforehand. My next exam is in two weeks so hopefully I can redeem myself. I'm thinking it should be easy to maintain an A average in lab and homework, so hopefully I can pull out a B!

I found this baby frog while out in the woods at my internship. I believe it is a leopard frog!

While working outside today, two of the volunteers told me they had found a baby box turtle at the top of the path they were clearing. I had them take me to the site so I could see if I could find it. I had no idea it would be so small! It's so cute! It's pretty small so I couldn't tell whether it was a male or female. Maybe we'll find him/her again soon!

Check out the pictures below!