Hi everyone, happy holiday season! The last few months of my internship have been busy and very exciting!

Over the first half of my internship, I worked a lot with developing and facilitating outreach within the community. Since it has gotten colder, I did my last outreach event at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in mid-November. There I had a pollinator education booth, along with an activity table for families and kids. I brought activity and coloring sheets I created centered around Minnesota’s threatened and endangered pollinators. These sheets eventually helped me make “Pollinator Power!”, an educational booklet with 9 activity sheets, along with informational pages to talk about these pollinators. I’m very proud of this booklet because it provides an opportunity for kids to learn about lesser-known pollinators and to understand the importance of threatened and endangered species.

Additionally, I have been working with the Center for Pollinator Conservation (CPC) to work on Midwest regional guidance handouts for host plants and at-risk butterflies. For this project, I worked closely with CPC conservation biologists, Rodé Krige and Ryan Drum. These sheets list at-risk butterflies and necessary host plants by state-level association and growing requirements. In the future, these handouts will eventually be used both for internal and external audiences to help these crucial pollinators. 

Throughout the last few months, I have continued to work on tasks to assist my Field Office and have been working closely with my supervisor, Araceli Morales Santos. This includes note-taking for the Dakota Skipper Recovery Implementation Strategy workshop, Dakota Skipper 5-year review background, and starting to help out with some Section 7 projects. 

While my internship is ending soon, I have learned so much about pollinator conservation, science communication, and federal documentation. I’m very grateful for the experiences I have had with the MN-WI Ecological Services, and I’m looking forward to the last month and a half!