North Carolina National Estuarine Research Reserve (Beaufort, NC)
Below are some interview questions that didn't make it into a podcast episode but still highlight some of the great work of the NERRS! The link to the reserve website is listed at the bottom of this page for further reading.
(interviewing Lori Davis, Education Coordinator)
The NCNERR consists of four separate NERR sites: Currituck Banks, the Rachel Carson Reserve, Masonboro Island, and Zeke's Island. It also hosts six other state protected sites. How does the NCNERR work with partners to preserve and manage such a large reserve system?
Lori: So we do have a huge system and without our partners, we definitely wouldn't be able to manage it all. So, as you probably know, the 10 sites are spread across the whole coastline, from the Virginia border to the South Carolina border. And we only have offices in certain locations. So we rely on state partners and other federal partners to help us manage these and to provide research help, education help and stewardship help, because we're such a small staff and we want to make sure that we hit all the priorities of the national system. And not only on the four national sites, but all of the 10 sites in NC because we have the same mission for all of those sites. So definitely it's with partners we're able to have such a successful program.
Do you have a favorite region or site to go and just take a take a hike or visit?
Lori: What- you're not going to believe this, but I have not been to all 10 sites in our state. Unfortunately, I haven't. But I've been to a lot of them. And my favorite is definitely the Rachel Carson reserve. And I'm not just saying that because it's home to me, but that does help. I just like the Rachel Carson Reserve because of the diverse habitats that it offers for visitors no matter if it's students, teachers, the general public, because you can be in the marsh, you can walk through the maritime forest, you can see true sand dunes and then be at the beach within 20 minutes. And not a lot of places can offer diversity like that. You're going to just have a little bit of marsh, a little bit of dune, maybe no maritime forests. And you're gonna walk straight to the beach. And just the Rachel Carson Reserve can offer that to the visitors. My second favorite is probably Buck Ridge site, and that is you know, more inland so that's more of our maritime forest, we like to focus on that. I like mammals a lot, I like trees too. And I just think that that's a good site to offer people something different talking about our coastline because everybody says "Oh, North Carolina's beaches" and stuff which is wonderful, but they forget that we have those habitats, too. That's it. Those are probably my two favorite with Rachel Carson being my favorite.
Beyond the staff at the reserve, there's also a lot of volunteers that help out around the NCNERR. What do volunteers, interns, and other friends of the reserve do to support the research, education and outreach going on?
Lori: Oh, my goodness. So just back to our partners, we wouldn't be able to get it done without our volunteers. So we do have a nonprofit friends group that's called Friends of the Reserve or FOR for short, and of course they help us with attracting visitors, they help us with attracting new volunteers, they do fundraising for us, and just the members of the friends group serve as volunteers themselves. We do have lots of different volunteer opportunities. Probably our biggest one is site stewards. So the site stewards are trained by our site managers to go out on the island on their own time and look for things to help us out. You know, if there's an injured horse on the Rachel Carson reserve, if they spotted a bird nesting on Currituck or Rachel Carson, if they saw a sea turtle nesting on Masonboro, if they saw litterbug, unfortunately, on any of our sites, these are the things that they're looking for. So it's just eyes on the ground on their time that then they can then report to us on what they're seeing and so and so that's just a wonderful program that we've tapped into and we're very thankful for the people that are able to do that.
We also have volunteers to help us look for Diamondback Terrapins in the water so we can monitor those. We have birdwatchers that help us look for them nesting and then receiving tagged birds that can get those numbers and get them to us so we can track the birds and see when they're moving. We have interns usually in the summer and those interns help with all the programs, so with research, stewardship and education. I'll speak about my education intern of course. That position helps me in the summer with summer camps. So they helped me develop the summer camps, they help lead the summer camps. Of course it's some of the things like cleaning off the boat, checking crayons to make sure they're not broken, but it's what educators have to do. And so it just gets them in there into environmental education to figure out if that's what they want to do. It gives them great hands on experience.
The stewardship interns, they're out there doing trail maintenance, putting up new signs. Yeah, cutting the trail to make sure that it's safe for visitors, and then our research interns of course they are helping whatever research projects that the research or the research coordinator has at that time. And another opportunity we have and we haven't had it here lately because of the pandemic but we do offer summer public field trips, especially at the Rachel Carson reserve and when we can at Currituck Banks and those are led by volunteers, trained volunteers. And then on Bird Island, we have a group called the Friends of Bird Island and they do public field trips for us on that site. So we get a lot of coverage because of volunteers and I wish we could pay them all because they do so much work and we're so thankful for them. But I think they get a lot out of it too, being out there in these magical places.
The reserve, as you mentioned, offers a number of educational opportunities including those field activities at Rachel Carson, classroom and lab activities examining everything from plankton to fiddler crabs and a wide variety of online resources. What are some of your favorite programs currently offered to visitors?
Lori: Well, of course, so my position as education coordinator is to be in the field with kids and teachers. And so my favorite, absolute favorite, is to take a group of children onto the island. From the boat ride to the island to the boat ride back to the facility is just an adventure for them. Some kids have never been on a boat before, even those that live on the coasts and have lived there their whole entire life, it'll be the first time on the boat. And that's my first question, I always ask "who's is this their first boat ride" because I love to see the show of hands. And it's just a short boat ride. It's less than three minutes, you know, and there's nothing exciting. We're not going fast. We're not splashing water, but they're on the water. They're seeing what's around them. They haven't got the opportunity to see it often. They see the birds, they hear the sounds and it's just just a wonderful experience. And then when we get to the island it's their excitement of being outside, of being near the water, of starting to see things start moving around. That's what I enjoy the most. I love to see kids just getting in there, finding crabs, finding snails, getting mud on their hands. I love when they say "why does it smell like rotten eggs?"... it's just so new to them. And I love the process of them just taking it all in. I'm just standing there and I know they're learning something new. So out of everything, that is probably my favorite thing, is getting students on the island.
Now I love to take second, third, fourth graders; those are probably my favorite groups to take over there. Because they're still young. They're still curious. Middle schoolers are fun to take over there too. But they're cool. They're standing back. They're like, "I don't want to touch that mud snail. I'm just too cool for it". But they're still learning. High schoolers, they could go either way. You know they want to pick it up. They want to explore or they're too cool for it. But the thing about high schoolers is when they get to the beach, that's usually when they like it because I feel like they're taking it in, they're thinking about stuff. And I just I just love opening a whole new world to them, to the students.
I also really enjoy taking teachers to the island, because they too are like students and want to take it all in. They're writing notes, they're taking pictures because they want to share with their students what they learned, about their experience. I like to have teachers and educators in the middle of the year visit the reserve, because they've kind of told their kids or the groups that they're going on a field trip and then they share that information. I think that's the best, but it's hard to get educators out in the middle of the school year over on a field trip. But I just like being with the teachers too, because they always seem to learn something new. And I like testing them too, on the shells and little things that they don't really think about. I'm like "what's this shell?", "Oh, that's a conch". I'm like, no, no, no, no, let's backtrack. Let's let's figure this out. What is it really?
So I I like the field part with students and teachers. That's my absolute favorite and that's why these sites are protected, not only for the research part, but also for education. And in this time of the pandemic, we all had to do virtual and we were missing that part. And I tried to do virtual programs with me standing on the island and kids watching on a computer. They didn't like that. They were missing tasting the pickle, they were missing that smell of the rotten eggs in the mud. And so I'm glad that we're opening up and we're able to get these kids back to our NERR sites. It's where they should be, you know? The general public could still go but the students were missing out. And the teachers were missing out on just that experience of being out there. I also enjoy summer camps.
Our summer camps are half field, half classroom activities because with science, it doesn't always happen outside. We have to bring some things outside to the inside. And so we start off with a field trip and then we build on that with nets and placing things under microscopes. We do experiments like dissect squid. Oh yeah, squid, super fun to dissect. And it's really easy for kids to see what's inside. We talk about density. We talk about water quality. Those are huge things that we have talked about. I love to have them do shell identifications, because if you can go to a beach and you can impress your friends by knowing shells, that's big. That's- the summer camps are so fun. And then we also do classroom visits. Classroom visits are fun for me, but my goal is to teach teachers how to use our activities in their own classroom. But I was a classroom teacher too. I know how it is to have a guest coming in to speak because the kids usually latch onto that information. So I don't mind going into classrooms at all either.
Yeah, awesome! Well, you touched on it a bit, but how does hands-on learning and those fieldwork experiences, or just getting out in nature, how do those help foster stewardship and passion in young scientists? Do you see a difference?
Lori: I totally see a difference if a kid is able to experience something firsthand. So like I said, you know these sites have been set aside for a reason. Yes, we want to have the general public come visit. But having young scientists, and I consider all the students that come visit me scientists because by the time they leave I want them thinking about something that they've learned, whether it's about the water quality, whether it's about the environment around them, a plant or an animal or something that they saw, and want them to continue thinking about that. And I think that in a world that has become more virtual, that we get to used to watching a video, and then we talk about something or we hear somebody talk about it and show pictures or they might bring in an item and then we talk about it. We have to get people out into the environment. Doesn't have to be an estuary, it could be a rainforest. It could just be in the backyard exploring... I just feel like we need to get outside more. And we need to take advantage of just a little bit of time to get outside, you know, our student programs, it's a two hour field trip. And we can make it shorter. We can make it longer, but we like the two hours because that will get them through all the habitats that I talked about. And all of our student programs are mainly held on the Rachel Carson reserve. And that's for a variety of reasons, one of them being the different habitats that they can see in that two hour time and then that's where our main offices, that's where I'm located and our classrooms located. So it's really important for for kids to be out there. They need to feel stuff, they need to smell it, they need to see it. It's just it's just a magical place, I think, North Carolina's estuaries.
What to you makes the NCNERR different from other National Estuarine Research reserves?
Lori: So the obvious one is we have so many sites. When we're all together as a group, all the NERR sites from across the country and you hear stories of, oh, they're in one building, all the staffs in one building and we only have one site to manage. And we're... us here in North Carolina, we're thinking "wow, how wonderful could that be?". You know, that makes us extremely unique. But that's okay. We've got more protection, you know, more land to protect in North Carolina, than let's say another site. So go North Carolina for us. But like I said earlier, the diversity down our coastline I think makes us extremely different. Like I said, the marshes up north are completely different from the marshes down south. You can see all different variety of plants as you travel along. In North Carolina, I do think that we have more diverse research opportunities as well. We have in North Carolina universities that will focus just on history and science, and we're lucky enough to have university presence, three universities present in Carteret County, near Rachel Carson reserve. And so I think that we offer a lot of different types of research opportunities. Of course, when it comes to our stewardship activities, that's different too, the maritime forests has to be managed completely different than the marshes down at Zeke's. And so that makes us makes us different as well.
What is your favorite thing about the reserve or a favorite memory that you have from the NCNERR?
Lori: So my favorite... Well, I'm just going to tell you about my favorite animal on the reserve. My favorite animal, people probably think that this is kind of silly, but I love hermit crabs. And the reason hermit crabs are my absolute favorite is because... for multiple reasons, they get to change homes. Kids love that. I talk about if it's your birthday, you get new clothes, you might not want new clothes, but you have to have them. Hermit crabs have to get a new shell every time it's their birthday. I love how hermit crabs can do that. I also love that we have teeny tiny ones on the Rachel Carson reserve, that the littlest kid can just pick up and put in their hand and not be scared of being pinched. I like other crabs too: fiddler crabs, ghost crabs, blue crabs, but those'll pinch you. Hermit crabs, the little ones won't. And so I like hermit crabs because they're usually the first thing we encounter on a field trip. And that's the first thing they put in their hands, I make them do it like "it's not going to hurt you, it's not gonna pinch you, it's not gonna bite you, just put it in your hand". So I like hermit crabs for multiple reasons because they're just cool animals. And plus it gets the conversation started about estuaries with kids.
I could go on and on about my favorite things about the reserve about the horses when I was a little girl. My dad would ride me up and down Front Street in Beaufort, and we would look over at the Rachel Carson reserve and we would talk about how they were from Blackbeard's shipwreck and just talk about how the horses, it was hard for them to live over there. So it's really cool, that being a little girl, not knowing that I would be over there one day telling kids about those horses. That's very special to me. I just love the beauty of our coast. And I like that the reserves offer a place for people to go to observe the beauty of our coast. And it's not just our beaches which are wonderful, but our salt marshes too. Just stand there and you can see the water coming in. You can see the difference of the crabs moving out, you can see what birds are then moving in and moving out, the changes of the tide around our salt marshes. And like I mentioned before, the maritime forests, just seeing what kind of vertebrates you're going to see in there, you know, because not many people know that we have possums and raccoons that rely on our estuaries. And so I just I just like thinking about the diversity and the beauty. And so my favorite thing about reserve ids that these these have been set aside for me to share this with people, the magic of them and the beauty of them.
How can listeners support the reserve? Are there any ongoing citizen science projects that they can be a part of to be involved with research or stewardship or things on the reserve?
Lori: Yes, so I mentioned our Site Steward Program, which is something that people can get involved in, that's not at every site. With our 10 sites, we don't have a site manager located near every site. We have a site manager for our northern sites, so Currituck Banks, Kitty Hawk Woods, Buxton, and then we have one site manager for Buck Ridge. We have a site manager for the Rachel Carson reserve and Bermuda. And then we have a Southern Sites Manager, which is in charge at Zeke's and Bird island. So because of our limited staff, we're not able to do site stewards at every site. But I think you'll find there's opportunities in other ways, other than just a site steward. If you're interested in taking pictures for us, if you're interested in monitoring birds with us or sea turtles, or the diamondback terrapins, there's plenty of ways to do that. Of course, with research, if you want to go out and take some water quality samples, you're more than welcome to give that data back to us. And that's something that we just have to work with our research coordinator on. That's not a program that we've had a lot of volunteers for, because we really haven't had a lot of volunteers interested in that, per se. They usually want to do the stewardship side and then of course education if you're comfortable talking about the reserve with the general public, and students, kids. Sometimes a group of 20 kids is intimidating to people, so I can see why that's hard to get into. But yes, we have lots of different opportunities for you to come volunteer. If you want to be inside, we've got plenty of opportunities for that as well. It's not just all outside. So we're more than welcome to have volunteers. Contact us for opportunities.
Awesome. And lastly, what advice do you have for aspiring scientists, environmental educators, or anyone that's interested in this field or getting involved in something similar?
Lori: I think every child that visits our islands is a young scientist because I want them to walk away thinking about something they learned and wanting to know more about it. As an environmental educator, it's my goal to introduce them to something new because I want them to learn more about it. I want them to share the information about it. I've been doing this job for almost 22 years and in the community I love having kids come up to me and say, "I remember my fourth grade trip to the Rachel Carson Reserve". Because that means we've instilled something and we inspired them to keep thinking about that. And I just want kids to notice the small things, whether it's the hermit crab, whether it's water bubbling out of the mud or the sand on the estuary, and I think as scientists that's what we need to do is always continue looking. Always look at the small stuff and always be able to learn something new. And I just I hope that's what we're instilling in these young ones when they come visit the island and I know I'm talking a lot about the young ones, just because of my job and that's normally the audience that I'm with is is the students, and that's what I mean when I say young ones, it's the K through 12. They're the young ones to me, but the teachers as well. You know, I've had teachers that were art teachers... I just had a program and had a principal on that field trip. And he was amazed because he was like "I didn't know this was out here". So he was inspired to learn more about the whelk shells. He's like, "you're telling me there's only three types of whelks in North Carolina?" I'm like, "yes, there are" and so he's gonna learn more about that because because he didn't know it. And so anybody can learn something new. And we all have an inner scientist in us. Sometimes it needs to be brought out a little bit.
I love that. I- we all have an inner scientist and it's so true. It just takes something like that to create a little spark of curiosity.
Lori: It is, and I think with our our inner scientists, some of us will learn something more about a species, some of us might draw a picture, some of us might just share it with our family or our friends. I think there's different outlets of being a scientist. Some people don't necessarily think that us as environmental educators are scientists, but yes, I have a science background. I have an education background too. But we're constantly learning too, and it's the help of our researchers and our research coordinator to get that information to us. And that's what's so cool about the reserve system, is it allows us to have the stewardship people on site you know, monitoring different species looking at different plants, and then it has scientists looking towards the future, seeing the changes that are happening, and then we all get together. And us educators, education coordinators, get to take that information and make it fun and exciting for the students. Because I don't know it all, you know, and without the expertise of the scientists and the stewardship people, I couldn't do it. And so that's what's so cool about the NERR system, is we work together for a common goal: to protect these places, learn more about these places and then share the magic of them of what's happening every single day out there in our estuaries.
(interviewing Lori Davis, Education Coordinator)
The NCNERR consists of four separate NERR sites: Currituck Banks, the Rachel Carson Reserve, Masonboro Island, and Zeke's Island. It also hosts six other state protected sites. How does the NCNERR work with partners to preserve and manage such a large reserve system?
Lori: So we do have a huge system and without our partners, we definitely wouldn't be able to manage it all. So, as you probably know, the 10 sites are spread across the whole coastline, from the Virginia border to the South Carolina border. And we only have offices in certain locations. So we rely on state partners and other federal partners to help us manage these and to provide research help, education help and stewardship help, because we're such a small staff and we want to make sure that we hit all the priorities of the national system. And not only on the four national sites, but all of the 10 sites in NC because we have the same mission for all of those sites. So definitely it's with partners we're able to have such a successful program.
Do you have a favorite region or site to go and just take a take a hike or visit?
Lori: What- you're not going to believe this, but I have not been to all 10 sites in our state. Unfortunately, I haven't. But I've been to a lot of them. And my favorite is definitely the Rachel Carson reserve. And I'm not just saying that because it's home to me, but that does help. I just like the Rachel Carson Reserve because of the diverse habitats that it offers for visitors no matter if it's students, teachers, the general public, because you can be in the marsh, you can walk through the maritime forest, you can see true sand dunes and then be at the beach within 20 minutes. And not a lot of places can offer diversity like that. You're going to just have a little bit of marsh, a little bit of dune, maybe no maritime forests. And you're gonna walk straight to the beach. And just the Rachel Carson Reserve can offer that to the visitors. My second favorite is probably Buck Ridge site, and that is you know, more inland so that's more of our maritime forest, we like to focus on that. I like mammals a lot, I like trees too. And I just think that that's a good site to offer people something different talking about our coastline because everybody says "Oh, North Carolina's beaches" and stuff which is wonderful, but they forget that we have those habitats, too. That's it. Those are probably my two favorite with Rachel Carson being my favorite.
Beyond the staff at the reserve, there's also a lot of volunteers that help out around the NCNERR. What do volunteers, interns, and other friends of the reserve do to support the research, education and outreach going on?
Lori: Oh, my goodness. So just back to our partners, we wouldn't be able to get it done without our volunteers. So we do have a nonprofit friends group that's called Friends of the Reserve or FOR for short, and of course they help us with attracting visitors, they help us with attracting new volunteers, they do fundraising for us, and just the members of the friends group serve as volunteers themselves. We do have lots of different volunteer opportunities. Probably our biggest one is site stewards. So the site stewards are trained by our site managers to go out on the island on their own time and look for things to help us out. You know, if there's an injured horse on the Rachel Carson reserve, if they spotted a bird nesting on Currituck or Rachel Carson, if they saw a sea turtle nesting on Masonboro, if they saw litterbug, unfortunately, on any of our sites, these are the things that they're looking for. So it's just eyes on the ground on their time that then they can then report to us on what they're seeing and so and so that's just a wonderful program that we've tapped into and we're very thankful for the people that are able to do that.
We also have volunteers to help us look for Diamondback Terrapins in the water so we can monitor those. We have birdwatchers that help us look for them nesting and then receiving tagged birds that can get those numbers and get them to us so we can track the birds and see when they're moving. We have interns usually in the summer and those interns help with all the programs, so with research, stewardship and education. I'll speak about my education intern of course. That position helps me in the summer with summer camps. So they helped me develop the summer camps, they help lead the summer camps. Of course it's some of the things like cleaning off the boat, checking crayons to make sure they're not broken, but it's what educators have to do. And so it just gets them in there into environmental education to figure out if that's what they want to do. It gives them great hands on experience.
The stewardship interns, they're out there doing trail maintenance, putting up new signs. Yeah, cutting the trail to make sure that it's safe for visitors, and then our research interns of course they are helping whatever research projects that the research or the research coordinator has at that time. And another opportunity we have and we haven't had it here lately because of the pandemic but we do offer summer public field trips, especially at the Rachel Carson reserve and when we can at Currituck Banks and those are led by volunteers, trained volunteers. And then on Bird Island, we have a group called the Friends of Bird Island and they do public field trips for us on that site. So we get a lot of coverage because of volunteers and I wish we could pay them all because they do so much work and we're so thankful for them. But I think they get a lot out of it too, being out there in these magical places.
The reserve, as you mentioned, offers a number of educational opportunities including those field activities at Rachel Carson, classroom and lab activities examining everything from plankton to fiddler crabs and a wide variety of online resources. What are some of your favorite programs currently offered to visitors?
Lori: Well, of course, so my position as education coordinator is to be in the field with kids and teachers. And so my favorite, absolute favorite, is to take a group of children onto the island. From the boat ride to the island to the boat ride back to the facility is just an adventure for them. Some kids have never been on a boat before, even those that live on the coasts and have lived there their whole entire life, it'll be the first time on the boat. And that's my first question, I always ask "who's is this their first boat ride" because I love to see the show of hands. And it's just a short boat ride. It's less than three minutes, you know, and there's nothing exciting. We're not going fast. We're not splashing water, but they're on the water. They're seeing what's around them. They haven't got the opportunity to see it often. They see the birds, they hear the sounds and it's just just a wonderful experience. And then when we get to the island it's their excitement of being outside, of being near the water, of starting to see things start moving around. That's what I enjoy the most. I love to see kids just getting in there, finding crabs, finding snails, getting mud on their hands. I love when they say "why does it smell like rotten eggs?"... it's just so new to them. And I love the process of them just taking it all in. I'm just standing there and I know they're learning something new. So out of everything, that is probably my favorite thing, is getting students on the island.
Now I love to take second, third, fourth graders; those are probably my favorite groups to take over there. Because they're still young. They're still curious. Middle schoolers are fun to take over there too. But they're cool. They're standing back. They're like, "I don't want to touch that mud snail. I'm just too cool for it". But they're still learning. High schoolers, they could go either way. You know they want to pick it up. They want to explore or they're too cool for it. But the thing about high schoolers is when they get to the beach, that's usually when they like it because I feel like they're taking it in, they're thinking about stuff. And I just I just love opening a whole new world to them, to the students.
I also really enjoy taking teachers to the island, because they too are like students and want to take it all in. They're writing notes, they're taking pictures because they want to share with their students what they learned, about their experience. I like to have teachers and educators in the middle of the year visit the reserve, because they've kind of told their kids or the groups that they're going on a field trip and then they share that information. I think that's the best, but it's hard to get educators out in the middle of the school year over on a field trip. But I just like being with the teachers too, because they always seem to learn something new. And I like testing them too, on the shells and little things that they don't really think about. I'm like "what's this shell?", "Oh, that's a conch". I'm like, no, no, no, no, let's backtrack. Let's let's figure this out. What is it really?
So I I like the field part with students and teachers. That's my absolute favorite and that's why these sites are protected, not only for the research part, but also for education. And in this time of the pandemic, we all had to do virtual and we were missing that part. And I tried to do virtual programs with me standing on the island and kids watching on a computer. They didn't like that. They were missing tasting the pickle, they were missing that smell of the rotten eggs in the mud. And so I'm glad that we're opening up and we're able to get these kids back to our NERR sites. It's where they should be, you know? The general public could still go but the students were missing out. And the teachers were missing out on just that experience of being out there. I also enjoy summer camps.
Our summer camps are half field, half classroom activities because with science, it doesn't always happen outside. We have to bring some things outside to the inside. And so we start off with a field trip and then we build on that with nets and placing things under microscopes. We do experiments like dissect squid. Oh yeah, squid, super fun to dissect. And it's really easy for kids to see what's inside. We talk about density. We talk about water quality. Those are huge things that we have talked about. I love to have them do shell identifications, because if you can go to a beach and you can impress your friends by knowing shells, that's big. That's- the summer camps are so fun. And then we also do classroom visits. Classroom visits are fun for me, but my goal is to teach teachers how to use our activities in their own classroom. But I was a classroom teacher too. I know how it is to have a guest coming in to speak because the kids usually latch onto that information. So I don't mind going into classrooms at all either.
Yeah, awesome! Well, you touched on it a bit, but how does hands-on learning and those fieldwork experiences, or just getting out in nature, how do those help foster stewardship and passion in young scientists? Do you see a difference?
Lori: I totally see a difference if a kid is able to experience something firsthand. So like I said, you know these sites have been set aside for a reason. Yes, we want to have the general public come visit. But having young scientists, and I consider all the students that come visit me scientists because by the time they leave I want them thinking about something that they've learned, whether it's about the water quality, whether it's about the environment around them, a plant or an animal or something that they saw, and want them to continue thinking about that. And I think that in a world that has become more virtual, that we get to used to watching a video, and then we talk about something or we hear somebody talk about it and show pictures or they might bring in an item and then we talk about it. We have to get people out into the environment. Doesn't have to be an estuary, it could be a rainforest. It could just be in the backyard exploring... I just feel like we need to get outside more. And we need to take advantage of just a little bit of time to get outside, you know, our student programs, it's a two hour field trip. And we can make it shorter. We can make it longer, but we like the two hours because that will get them through all the habitats that I talked about. And all of our student programs are mainly held on the Rachel Carson reserve. And that's for a variety of reasons, one of them being the different habitats that they can see in that two hour time and then that's where our main offices, that's where I'm located and our classrooms located. So it's really important for for kids to be out there. They need to feel stuff, they need to smell it, they need to see it. It's just it's just a magical place, I think, North Carolina's estuaries.
What to you makes the NCNERR different from other National Estuarine Research reserves?
Lori: So the obvious one is we have so many sites. When we're all together as a group, all the NERR sites from across the country and you hear stories of, oh, they're in one building, all the staffs in one building and we only have one site to manage. And we're... us here in North Carolina, we're thinking "wow, how wonderful could that be?". You know, that makes us extremely unique. But that's okay. We've got more protection, you know, more land to protect in North Carolina, than let's say another site. So go North Carolina for us. But like I said earlier, the diversity down our coastline I think makes us extremely different. Like I said, the marshes up north are completely different from the marshes down south. You can see all different variety of plants as you travel along. In North Carolina, I do think that we have more diverse research opportunities as well. We have in North Carolina universities that will focus just on history and science, and we're lucky enough to have university presence, three universities present in Carteret County, near Rachel Carson reserve. And so I think that we offer a lot of different types of research opportunities. Of course, when it comes to our stewardship activities, that's different too, the maritime forests has to be managed completely different than the marshes down at Zeke's. And so that makes us makes us different as well.
What is your favorite thing about the reserve or a favorite memory that you have from the NCNERR?
Lori: So my favorite... Well, I'm just going to tell you about my favorite animal on the reserve. My favorite animal, people probably think that this is kind of silly, but I love hermit crabs. And the reason hermit crabs are my absolute favorite is because... for multiple reasons, they get to change homes. Kids love that. I talk about if it's your birthday, you get new clothes, you might not want new clothes, but you have to have them. Hermit crabs have to get a new shell every time it's their birthday. I love how hermit crabs can do that. I also love that we have teeny tiny ones on the Rachel Carson reserve, that the littlest kid can just pick up and put in their hand and not be scared of being pinched. I like other crabs too: fiddler crabs, ghost crabs, blue crabs, but those'll pinch you. Hermit crabs, the little ones won't. And so I like hermit crabs because they're usually the first thing we encounter on a field trip. And that's the first thing they put in their hands, I make them do it like "it's not going to hurt you, it's not gonna pinch you, it's not gonna bite you, just put it in your hand". So I like hermit crabs for multiple reasons because they're just cool animals. And plus it gets the conversation started about estuaries with kids.
I could go on and on about my favorite things about the reserve about the horses when I was a little girl. My dad would ride me up and down Front Street in Beaufort, and we would look over at the Rachel Carson reserve and we would talk about how they were from Blackbeard's shipwreck and just talk about how the horses, it was hard for them to live over there. So it's really cool, that being a little girl, not knowing that I would be over there one day telling kids about those horses. That's very special to me. I just love the beauty of our coast. And I like that the reserves offer a place for people to go to observe the beauty of our coast. And it's not just our beaches which are wonderful, but our salt marshes too. Just stand there and you can see the water coming in. You can see the difference of the crabs moving out, you can see what birds are then moving in and moving out, the changes of the tide around our salt marshes. And like I mentioned before, the maritime forests, just seeing what kind of vertebrates you're going to see in there, you know, because not many people know that we have possums and raccoons that rely on our estuaries. And so I just I just like thinking about the diversity and the beauty. And so my favorite thing about reserve ids that these these have been set aside for me to share this with people, the magic of them and the beauty of them.
How can listeners support the reserve? Are there any ongoing citizen science projects that they can be a part of to be involved with research or stewardship or things on the reserve?
Lori: Yes, so I mentioned our Site Steward Program, which is something that people can get involved in, that's not at every site. With our 10 sites, we don't have a site manager located near every site. We have a site manager for our northern sites, so Currituck Banks, Kitty Hawk Woods, Buxton, and then we have one site manager for Buck Ridge. We have a site manager for the Rachel Carson reserve and Bermuda. And then we have a Southern Sites Manager, which is in charge at Zeke's and Bird island. So because of our limited staff, we're not able to do site stewards at every site. But I think you'll find there's opportunities in other ways, other than just a site steward. If you're interested in taking pictures for us, if you're interested in monitoring birds with us or sea turtles, or the diamondback terrapins, there's plenty of ways to do that. Of course, with research, if you want to go out and take some water quality samples, you're more than welcome to give that data back to us. And that's something that we just have to work with our research coordinator on. That's not a program that we've had a lot of volunteers for, because we really haven't had a lot of volunteers interested in that, per se. They usually want to do the stewardship side and then of course education if you're comfortable talking about the reserve with the general public, and students, kids. Sometimes a group of 20 kids is intimidating to people, so I can see why that's hard to get into. But yes, we have lots of different opportunities for you to come volunteer. If you want to be inside, we've got plenty of opportunities for that as well. It's not just all outside. So we're more than welcome to have volunteers. Contact us for opportunities.
Awesome. And lastly, what advice do you have for aspiring scientists, environmental educators, or anyone that's interested in this field or getting involved in something similar?
Lori: I think every child that visits our islands is a young scientist because I want them to walk away thinking about something they learned and wanting to know more about it. As an environmental educator, it's my goal to introduce them to something new because I want them to learn more about it. I want them to share the information about it. I've been doing this job for almost 22 years and in the community I love having kids come up to me and say, "I remember my fourth grade trip to the Rachel Carson Reserve". Because that means we've instilled something and we inspired them to keep thinking about that. And I just want kids to notice the small things, whether it's the hermit crab, whether it's water bubbling out of the mud or the sand on the estuary, and I think as scientists that's what we need to do is always continue looking. Always look at the small stuff and always be able to learn something new. And I just I hope that's what we're instilling in these young ones when they come visit the island and I know I'm talking a lot about the young ones, just because of my job and that's normally the audience that I'm with is is the students, and that's what I mean when I say young ones, it's the K through 12. They're the young ones to me, but the teachers as well. You know, I've had teachers that were art teachers... I just had a program and had a principal on that field trip. And he was amazed because he was like "I didn't know this was out here". So he was inspired to learn more about the whelk shells. He's like, "you're telling me there's only three types of whelks in North Carolina?" I'm like, "yes, there are" and so he's gonna learn more about that because because he didn't know it. And so anybody can learn something new. And we all have an inner scientist in us. Sometimes it needs to be brought out a little bit.
I love that. I- we all have an inner scientist and it's so true. It just takes something like that to create a little spark of curiosity.
Lori: It is, and I think with our our inner scientists, some of us will learn something more about a species, some of us might draw a picture, some of us might just share it with our family or our friends. I think there's different outlets of being a scientist. Some people don't necessarily think that us as environmental educators are scientists, but yes, I have a science background. I have an education background too. But we're constantly learning too, and it's the help of our researchers and our research coordinator to get that information to us. And that's what's so cool about the reserve system, is it allows us to have the stewardship people on site you know, monitoring different species looking at different plants, and then it has scientists looking towards the future, seeing the changes that are happening, and then we all get together. And us educators, education coordinators, get to take that information and make it fun and exciting for the students. Because I don't know it all, you know, and without the expertise of the scientists and the stewardship people, I couldn't do it. And so that's what's so cool about the NERR system, is we work together for a common goal: to protect these places, learn more about these places and then share the magic of them of what's happening every single day out there in our estuaries.