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2021 Summer interns slowly starting

May 18, 2021 | Blog, Summer Intern Blog

Interns for the 2021 summer crew have been hired. Nic Haye began working for Starker Forests early and will be posting a weekly blog about her experiences. Here is her first entry:

Hi, my name is Nic and I am interning at Starker Forests for the summer.

I graduated from the University of British Columbia last spring with a bachelor’s degree in Forest Resource Management. Although I went to school in Vancouver, B.C., I grew up in West Linn. Both my parents are OSU grads so I am familiar with Corvallis, especially Reser Stadium.

The last couple of weeks (Starker forester) Lys has been teaching me how to cruise in some of our recently thinned stands. I’ve just started cruising by myself, and even though the stands have been quite steep (thinned by cable yarding), I’ve been enjoying spending so much time out in the field. It is also fun to see the trails and corridors left by the cable yarding process and piece together how that kind of thinning practice works in a real stand.

I’m quickly learning that the beautiful spring sunshine and warmth also comes with challenges when cruising, specifically in getting heights of trees. In winter, when all of the deciduous trees don’t have their foliage, it’s much easier to see treetops with a laser. Clearly that changes when the leaves come back! It’s a fun new challenge to make sure I’m really getting clear shots and accurate heights for my data collection.

I have also been learning some of the basics of Access, the forest inventory management program we use here at Starker Forests. I’m mostly just doing inventory on the 10-year stands that I, and a few other crew members, surveyed about a month ago. As with most things that involve a lot of data, it is very detail-oriented work, and requires a lot of patience to look through and fix each small error. Though it is very rewarding in the end to have the program fully run through and to receive the information it solved for me!

I’m looking forward to what the next week holds, as well as when the rest of this summer’s internship crew shows up.

 

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