Second Summer on the Harbor

Hey y'all!

I'm McRae (she/her pronouns), a member of team Jason, and this is my second summer as a JPA at Save the Harbor. I was also a winter intern during the 2020-21 school year. I just recently graduated from the O'Bryant School in Roxbury and will be attending Penn State - University Park in the fall as a student in the Schreyer Honors College with an intended major in Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences. If it wasn't obvious from my major, I'm hoping to become a veterinarian (small animal, to be specific). Save the Harbor, with its biological and ecological focuses, has been a great summer job and learning opportunity for me and I'm looking forward to another great summer out on the Harbor.

Me and Ari (teammates for two years in a row) in front of Rumney Marsh

For our first week, team Jason went to Revere to visit Short Beach, Revere Beach, and Rumney Marsh. Short Beach was our first stop of the week; it was small and empty, covered in rocks and kelp, scattered with trash, and rather strange-smelling. In short, it wasn't exactly a pleasant beach and we left after a few hours to meet a representative from the National Parks Service at the edge of Revere Beach. The parks rep led us through two surveys of the shoreline: one for bivalves (mussels and clams and such), one for invasive species (mostly bryozoans and tunicates). On our second day, we went back to Revere Beach (much nicer than Short Beach) and spent the whole day there, bonding as a team and coming up with ideas for our deliverable. Then, on our last day in Revere, we went to visit Rumney Marsh, a large salt marsh a little ways away from Wonderland, where we got eaten up by mosquitos. We weren't able to observe too much in the marsh other than a hawk and a very unfortunate squirrel because, in looking for a better place to enter the marsh, every person we asked told us not to enter the marsh (apparently there are coyotes in there). So we headed back to Revere Beach to finish off our week and get a couple of team pictures before moving on to a new site next week.

Team Jason at Revere Beach

Peace out y'all :)

McRae