<p>
	<img alt="" src="{filedir_5}Springternssmall.jpg" style="width: 200px; height: 150px; float: right; " />The spring internship is always interesting. Weather can be chaotic at times, with our long cold winter holding on tight, thaw seeping so slowly through its grip. Ice melted on Big Twin Lake a little over a week ago and a week before that on Louie&rsquo;s Pond.&nbsp; Last weekend several inches of snow fell overnight, meaning shovels still reside next to each entryway. And I suppose we can be thankful for all of it.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
	Living in the Great Lakes State, long snowy winters and rainy springs sustain our forests and waterways during the hot, humid summers. Louie&rsquo;s Pond and Beaver Pond look their best in years and consequently, the amount of wildlife on campus has been phenomenal. A couple weeks ago, I watched a coyote descend the slope into the beaver pond kettle, darting in and out of the pines. Wood Ducks and Sandhill Cranes are using the revived wetlands as well. The wood frogs are finding their mates. The Grosbeaks and Yellow-rumped Warblers are singing. Spring has to be close.</p>
<p>
	While we haven&rsquo;t had the easiest time learning plants and wildflowers, and it hasn&rsquo;t been easy to stay outside for long without winter coats, our interns have been keeping busy and warm mostly, training in, helping run workshops, and gaining their curriculum certifications.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
	<img alt="" src="{filedir_5}Sadie.jpg" style="width: 200px; height: 150px; float: left;" /><strong>Sadie Wunder</strong> (left) returns to Au Sable to help deliver programs after participating in the internship during the spring of 2012. Sadie has been all over the world since we last saw her, working in the Bahamas, Alaska, and Minnesota. <img alt="" src="{filedir_5}Nate.jpg" style="width: 150px; height: 200px; float: right; " />Accompanying her this time around is her husband <strong>Nate Sather</strong> (right). Nate is no stranger to Au Sable either. During his undergrad at Bethel University, Nate attended several classes at the Great Lakes campus and also headed up our macroinvertebrate research on the Boardman River Project for several summers. His expertise has been particularly helpful with our new water quality monitoring start-up program, the Upper Manistee River Stream Team, where we help local residents collect and identify macroinvertebrates as a way of telling stream quality and protecting our local watershed.</p>
<p>
	<img alt="" src="{filedir_5}Ian.jpg" style="width: 200px; height: 150px; float: left; " /><strong>Ian Brinkman</strong> recently graduated from Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California with a degree in Environmental Science. He is a long way from home and has been cherishing our cool, rainy weather more than most. Ian has a love of languages, which he has been putting to good use during our Michigan History program as &ldquo;G&uuml;nter,&rdquo; a Bavarian immigrant cook. &nbsp;With his 1900s logging character&#39;s popularity among the students, we are all looking forward to Ian unveiling his character for the 1800&rsquo;s fur trading post later this spring.</p>
<p>
	At our <a href="/k12programs/events/">Upper Manistee River Stream Team leader training</a> this past weekend, a participant reminded me of the old Michigan adage, &ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t like the weather, wait 20 minutes.&rdquo; Naturalizing during early spring can be a challenge. Weather is predictably unpredictable. But there is a beauty that comes with this degree of unpredictability. We are given the opportunity to explore and observe the landscape under multiple conditions over the course of several hours. It challenges us to look harder, to observe subtleties more closely, and in doing so appreciate our time and place more fully.</p>
