April 22nd, 2016

The school year is finally winding down, but it seems I have as much to do as ever. This month has been particularly action-packed, as we finally got into the build phase of the project we began back in February. It took us four and a half days spread over a couple of weeks, but we finished it, and it looks great. It'll be a really functional piece of work for the environmental center's programs

When we first arrived for our last build day on Tuesday, we found this dragonfly nymph exoskeleton on the trim of our deck. In the words of our professor, our project has already started breeding life. Personally, I took it as a good omen, and things continued to go well as we finished things up.

Here we are adding some finishing touches...

Our final product; we built a deck, two tables, and a net rack for a macro-invertebrate dipping station. Originally, there was also meant to be a kiosk for signage, but as we discovered, there are a lot of subterranean rocks on our site, which meant that that piece could not be built at this time. However, the center has our drafted plans and materials, so if they later on feel like relocating that component to a different area and building it, they can do so.

Our deck, from a different angle.

We saw this lovely (and large!) snake on Tuesday, plus a water snake I couldn't get a picture of.

Later that day, I found this little guy sitting on a campus sidewalk - they were only an inch or two across!