Hearing the piercing snarl of a weasel-like mammal as it thrashed in a cage was just part of a day’s work for Tim McCoy.

‘They are neat little guys,’ McCoy said. ‘They are very shy, and people don’t get to see them often.’

McCoy, a graduate student at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, often encountered this creature, called an American marten, when he worked in the Adirondacks two summers ago through an internship with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

The Environmental Conservation Department’s Division of Fish, Wildlife and Marine Resources will hire 26 more graduate and undergraduate students from colleges throughout New York state this summer for similar on-the-job internships, both paid and unpaid. The Division of Lands and Forests will also hire about 18 more students to work on preserving forest health.

McCoy said the program offers students from many colleges throughout New York state an enjoyable and practical, real-life opportunity.

‘For me, there are two types of days: field days and lab days,’ McCoy said.

Some of his time was spent in the woods of Newcomb, where there is an extension of the ESF campus in the heart of the Adirondacks. But McCoy said most of his work was in the lab studying the stomach contents of the marten to determine its diet.

He said his work with the Environmental Conservation Department is important in protecting martens, as this species is of special concern to New York. Although they used to be found throughout the whole Northeast, the martens are now unique to New York, Maine and New Hampshire due to fur trapping and deforestation.

Learning how to identify the animals that the marten eats by studying the hairs and bones in their stomachs was one of the most challenging, but also valuable, experiences he had during the internship, McCoy said.

McCoy also said networking was a major benefit of this internship because the Environmental Conservation Department is a tough agency to get hired into.

‘The more experience you have, the better off you are going to be,’ McCoy said.

Students who apply for this paid internship can work with the Environmental Conservation Department in many locations throughout New York state other than the Adirondacks.

‘It’s a great opportunity for students to get hands-on experience in the field,’ said Jim Eckler, a coordinator for the program and senior wildlife biologist with the Environmental Conservation Department.

Eckler said the students he supervises get to work with the department on many tasks, most of which involve extensive field work, requiring participants to be outside six to eight hours a day. Wildlife surveys are one of the most important tasks in the field the interns work on, Eckler said.

These surveys involve projects such as listening for the calls of rare bird species and recording the sounds bats make at night to locate their food so it can be analyzed later by a computer.

Matt Slade, a senior at ESF, worked with Eckler at the Montezuma Wetlands Complex through an internship with SUNY-Cobleskill from May to August 2011. He said besides gaining practical skills such as identifying plants and animals, the program taught him to communicate and handle responsibilities.

‘Everyone should apply to these positions,’ Slade said. ‘They really are a step in the right direction of where we want to go in the conservation field.’

smhazlit@syr.edu 

Published on April 16, 2012 at 12:00 pm

Contact Shannon: smhazlit@syr.edu