Meeker, associate professor of Natural Resources, is conducting a class called Field Ecology, a spring semester course that meets all day, Monday through Friday, and takes place at the Nature Conservancy property outside of Mellen, Wisconsin. Here, students apply technical skills they acquired in the classroom as they survey the habitats surrounding Twin Lake. This whole class is about getting baseline data for anything we can think of . . . I think of it as a survey course. We're doing about 10 or 15 different things.
Students also take turns camping at the property.
The overnighters watch over equipment and take part in owl and grouse surveys. Tim Ciembronowicz, a senior Natural Resource Management major from Lake Zurich, Illinois, spent a weekend at the site. Because the power went out on the tape recorder, I had to use my mouth to call the birds. They are very social and will answer readily to a call. The GPS is a mapping analysis tool that allows us to get data from satellites in order to pinpoint our location.