Last Friday, I attended a neat conservation roundtable symposium for work, which was my first visit to University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. The symposium was designed to bring together researchers, managers, and local government working in the Bay Area on conservation projects from water quality to invasive species to habitat restoration. The program including a "lightning round" of 5-minute project updates, as well as some small group discussions and audience participation with the i-clickers (which I had not used before). The whole program was especially valuable for me to hear about other projects in the area and make lots of local contacts.
The University of Wisconsin System deserves a mention since it is a little different. Some schools are 2-year with diverse, technical programming (i.e., equivalent to a community college in other states) and a handful are independent, 4-year programs with foci in fewer subject areas. It's especially interesting that each university has its own individual identity- for example, UWGB's colors are green and white and their mascot is the Phoenix (very different from the UW-Madison Badgers that most people know). The UWGB campus is right on the Bay, has lots of trails and open space, a well-known Environmental Science program and natural history collection, as well as an arboretum on campus. While UWGB is not a large campus, it is definitely large enough to get lost (speaking from experience).
Ironically enough, I met a Brown County Parks employee at the symposium named Jason who grew up in New Jersey (Pennington). I knew immediately when he started his talk that he was from NJ (he said "wooder" [translation: water]...that accent!). He later mentioned his background when answering a question, so that confirmed my suspicion. I introduced myself later as a fellow New Jerseyan, and we got to discussing accents and delicious foods from home. He told me about a great pizza place (REAL New York style pizza) down in De Pere that I had to check out.
So the next day Scott and I find ourselves heading down to De Pere, which is the city immediately south of Green Bay along the Fox River. There really isn't a clean break between the two cities, but we surprisingly had not been to De Pere for anything yet, so pizza was a good excuse. Sgambati's New York Pizza was delicious and Chatterhouse Brewery beer was tasty. De Pere has a real college town feel since St. Norbert's College, a Catholic university, is located right in the heart of the town. Between the brick college buildings and the Fox River waterfront, I could have sworn I was in Radford, Virginia.
Yesterday, I had the chance to get out to do some field work with Rachel, a UWGB graduate student, studying fish in many of the same wetlands where I am working along the West Shore of Green Bay. She is researching northern pike - here they actually leave the Bay in the spring and swim up some of the tributaries, and essentially ditches along the sides of the road, into interior protected wetlands to spawn. We are getting toward the end of the season for catching adults, but the young will start their way back into the Bay soon. I helped Rachel check some funnel nets and collect temperatures in a few different wetlands. While we did not catch any pike, we did catch and release this awesome female bowfin, the largest I have ever seen! We did also find a few Central mudminnows in the box traps she has set out for the young pike. I had a great morning in the field with Rachel despite the flurries, and the fact that the air and water temperatures were almost the same (a chilly 41 degrees!).
