Ready and Waiting!

By: Johnica Morrow

Greetings All!

Today's the day. Today we will have our first blood students arrive here at the station. Though a few may trickle in early, we expect most will not arrive until just before dinner is served. No matter when they (you) arrive, we are excited to have them (you) here!

The day started off with yummy bacon sticky buns. Mmmmmm! This is a taste of what's to come with the delicious new array of menu items being prepared in our kitchen even as we speak. Meals have been small over the past week since students have yet to arrive, but they have all been tasty and far from disappointing! 

Sweet, Savory, and Satisfying!

Because we as a station are constantly looking for ways to be "greener", we recycle everything that we can. This includes non-meat/bone food items. We have a compost area maintained by our wonderful maintenance man, Roy, and by our amazing kitchen staff. Last year, our compost buckets got a nice paint job, but the paint has since chipped off and left the previous works of art unrecognizable. This year, a different type of plastic-specific spray paint was used as a base coat prior to decoration with paint pens. Take a look at our newly decorated compost buckets. (For those of you who are unaware, we call the compost buckets our "compost monsters" as they eat almost anything, though they are vegetarians).

Please feed our monsters well this summer!

We have also spent quite a bit of time preparing for student arrival. Our library got a bit of a makeover this year. We now have a large lounge space in the computer room portion of the library with two new couches near outlets so that students can utilize their own personal laptops. Additionally, we have some new tables and bookshelves in the library itself. We also have some new chairs to surround the new tables. 

The library as always been a great place for students to study and read about biology. This year, it will also be a site for hosting our seminar series. Wednesday nights at 7pm, we will have guest lecturers (professors, researchers, and graduate students) presenting on a wide variety of biological topics. The seminars are free and we encourage everyone to ask questions to keep a discussion going after the presentation is complete! Below is the line-up for first session this summer. We will post more information about presentations in the future.

This session, we will be offering two courses. These include Ornithology taught by Dr. John Faaborg and Fundamentals of Biology II taught by Dr. Bill Glider. Both courses are sure to be filled with field trips and interesting information for students belonging to a variety of majors. We've got classrooms set up and gloves ordered in anticipation!

We can't wait to get this session started! See you all soon!