Summer 2024: NEVBD Blog

 Monday: Today I did a few things I wanted to try before my last day. In the morning I tried getting into GIS to fix some things in the tutorial I made, but it turns out that I lost my access to it, so I had to add things by memory, and without pictures. When Molly and Steve got in we went to both of the Longhorn sites one last time before my last day tomorrow, and collected a decent number. When we got back I ate lunch than began working on sorting the ticks from said sites until Mike called me over and I got to test a dead crow for West Nile Virus, which is done by swabbing mucus from the throat of the bird and putting it in a machine. I then returned to sorting ticks until I again stopped to go out and I learned how to set up the mosquito traps. When I got back I continued to work on the ticks until it was time to leave. Tuesday: Today is my last day at the lab! I started in the morning by sorting the ticks from yesterday into petri dishes and counting them. In the middle of this I

 Monday: I started the morning with going back to entering data into the excel spreadsheet. I was also able to finally fix the mistake in the equations that has been bugging me for the past week. After a little while me and the other Michael went to two sites, Longhorn site 2 and our Deer tick site in Babylon. It poured over the weekend, so they're weren't many ticks in general but it was nice not dealing with millions of larvae on our flags after one or two clicks. The other site regularly does not have any ticks because there are no deer, and not many rodents, so this was quite literally a walk in the park (I'm sorry). When we got back I went right back to entering the data in excel and fixing the mistakes the last intern had made. I also organized the bags we put our vials in at the end of sampling at a site. These bags have all the weather and distance info written on them, and they are kept for for a little while. The last intern had messed up transferring data in some

 Monday: It was absolutely pouring rain all day today, so me and Steve did no field visits. From getting into work to lunch I was working on the GIS project, mapping out the sites for future tick flaggers, and I also made a tutorial on Power point for my boss and the new hire Entomologist that starts next week, so they are able to add on or make changes need be. I had a lot of software set backs, as I accidentally clicked something and it deleted the whole project and grayed out all the buttons, this took a little while to fix and catch back up to where I was. After lunch me and Steve spent the whole day grinding away at putting all the ticks in vials. There was maybe 3/4 left to go and now we are down to only 2 sites to complete. We also had the Lab tech Mike do some more tick sorting today with ticks from Longhorn site 2 from last week. Tuesday: This morning I did a little more work on the GIS project, and had Chris sit down with me to make sure I was marking the right areas. There a