Southwestern U.S. : May – Nov. 2003
I spent a lot of time in the field after finishing my undergraduate degree, first working on a large field survey of national parks in the Chihuahua Desert in Texas and New Mexico, then as a volunteer at the Southwestern Research Station in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona. In the former, I worked as a part of a field team from May to September, and each week we searched (primarily on foot) for roughly 10 hours a day for amphibians and reptiles. In the latter, I volunteered at the station while spending my free time working on a small research project with Sceloporus jarrovii, a primarily Mexican lizard that just reaches the U.S. via these “sky island” mountain ranges that reach into southern New Mexico and Arizona.