By: River Smart- Summer 2024 Student Conservation Intern
As one of the Student Conservation Interns, I was based out of Lasalle Fish and Wildlife Area and it was a really good fit for me. I’ve spent a lot of time there in the past fishing and hunting so getting to observe all of the work put into the property made me appreciate it a lot more. One of my favorite jobs was probably goose banding and wood duck banding. I’m an avid waterfowl hunter and getting to see the processes that went into banding these birds was really cool. For goose banding, we went with the Department of Natural Resources staff and the State Waterfowl Biologist to Wolf Lake, a golf course, and park that were all located in Northwest Indiana. These spots had previously been scouted for geese.
Once we arrived we started by putting out nets on the shore of the lakes to act as a funnel, with a holding pen at the end of that. Several DNR staff in kayaks paddled around the geese and got them to swim towards the funnel. During the spring and mid-summer, geese go through a molting phase and can’t fly so it makes corralling them into the pen a lot easier. After we had the geese in the holding pen, a few people would identify if they were male or female and age them. The Student Conservation Interns along with others from the DNR would then take them over to the wildlife biologist so they could be banded and released. The bands have unique identification numbers so if the bird is ever harvested or recaptured we can see where that bird traveled or migrated.
“Several DNR staff in kayaks paddled around the geese and got them to swim towards the funnel.”
Wood duck banding is quite a bit different than goose banding. We started the summer by clearing areas for our banding sites because the ducks don’t really like coming up on land when there’s a bunch of grass. We then baited the sites daily with corn for a couple weeks and then put the traps out. The traps are made out of fencing that is made into the shape of a big rectangular box. Each trap has a funnel at the end so ducks can go in the trap, but they have a hard time getting out. Once they got used to the traps, we would set them before the sun came up and check them around 9 am. Some days we would catch only a couple ducks and others we would catch 20 or 30 but it was a pretty fun process.
Other than banding waterfowl we had a lot of other jobs to do. A large majority of our time in the internship was spent pulling and killing invasive plants. We also picked a lot of native plant seeds throughout the summer. I still enjoyed doing these things and really appreciated why we were doing it. Hopefully in the future we can start to see a change in the land we got to work on.
“A large majority of our time in the internship was spent pulling and killing invasive plants.”
