Talk on the Wild Side
with Jessica McIntosh

Transcription

Vikki Locke

Hi, I’m Vikki Locke with C2 Communications and this is Talk on the Wild Side, where we talk all about jobs in conservation, and it’s brought to you by the Florida Wildlife Federation. With us today is Jessica McIntosh. Hey, Jessica.

Jessica McIntosh

Hey, Vikki. It’s great to be here.

Vikki Locke

I’m so happy to talk to you. Jessica is the coastal training program coordinator at the Rookery Bay Research Reserve. Now that’s a mouthful, but you’re going to tell us what happens at the reserve.

Jessica McIntosh

Yes, I know it is quite a mouthful, but the Rookery Bay Reserve is located in Southwest Florida and we protect a large area of land as well as do education and training and research there. We have a property that’s 110,000 acres, so it’s a big area. Collier County is the second-largest county in Florida and that’s 40% of the shoreline in Collier County that we’re managing, doing things like prescribed fire, protecting sea turtles, and then doing training and education as well.

Vikki Locke

Training, you’re a connector between scientists and other people, say, law enforcement, correct?

Jessica McIntosh

Yes, that’s right. It’s all about connecting people because there’s so much science and research that’s out there, but sometimes it’s really hard to read through a scientific paper and understand what is being said, so I help connect people with the science that they need in easily accessible ways.

Vikki Locke

Do you meet directly with these law enforcement officials? Is it a seminar? Tell me how that happens, how they’re educated?

Jessica McIntosh

Yes, so law enforcement is one of the audiences that I work with. We do workshops with them, so it’s like a class, we’ll meet for half a day. We bring in biologists to teach them about how to identify some of the species that there are special laws to protect. We bring in experts in the laws to make sure that they really understand all those wildlife laws, and that way, the officers have the information that they need to either inform people that might be just accidentally causing harm to wildlife, or to make sure that a court case will hold up by identifying species correctly.

Vikki Locke

Tell us about Project Greenscape.

Jessica McIntosh

The Project Greenscape is another program that we run at Rookery Bay in our training program, and for that, the audience is professional landscapers. Those people go out, they do things all the time, like fertilize or select plants that are going to impact the environment. We make sure that they have information that they need to do their job in the most environmentally way friendly.

We talk to them about how to select plants that are natives or that are friendly to the environment, how to use fertilizer at the right time and in the right amounts so that it doesn’t harm the watershed. We do classes about things like mangrove trimming so that they can cut back mangroves so that they’re not impeding people, but they’re still staying healthy.

Vikki Locke

So very important work. You studied biology your undergrad, then ecology your master’s, but this whole training thing really wasn’t on your radar at first, so tell us how you started, your first job and how you evolved into becoming a trainer.

Jessica McIntosh

My first job after starting with a biology degree, I was working for the National Park Service and I actually worked underneath law enforcement, but doing biological stuff like identifying plants and counting how many animals, also talking to visitors and things like that, but really more on the science side going out and monitoring. I thought it was interesting work, I learned a lot of new things, but a lot of times I was out in the woods by myself counting birds or counting plants, and I really missed working with people, and so I started to go more into education.

As I got further along in my career, I started to realize there’s so much science and research out there that people just don’t know about. I started to transition more into this training field to help really connect people with the science that they needed to do their jobs better and protect the environment.

Vikki Locke

Today, I think you have a network of what, 28, 29 reserves?

Jessica McIntosh

Yes, so we are a National Estuarine Research Reserve. There are 29 of these sites throughout the US. We’ve got sites in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, all over the place and they all do the same thing as us just in these different locations. There is a person that has my same position at each of those 29 sites. A cool thing if you were in the Naples area is that the coastal training program actually started at the Recruit Bay Reserve and all the other reserves thought it was such a great idea that they took that model and adopted it throughout the national system.

Vikki Locke

Congratulations, were you part of that?

Jessica McIntosh

What advice do you have for students listening right now that think, “Wow, I like biology, I like ecology,” what would you suggest they study or do or maybe volunteer?

Vikki Locke

That was about 20 years ago before I ever started.

Jessica McIntosh

I think that getting experience either through volunteering or through working is really important. School is great, you learn so much, but in my experience of being an intern or maybe having a temporary position somewhere, I learned a lot. My biggest advice is when you do those things, to not think that you’re too good for anything. When I was talking about my first job, sometimes I was cleaning out trash cans at the park, and I couldn’t think I was too good for that because I wouldn’t have gotten to where I was today because people wouldn’t have respected me.

Vikki Locke

What part of your job gives you the greatest satisfaction?

Jessica McIntosh

The greatest satisfaction that I think I get is when I have somebody that takes one of my classes and tells me afterwards, “Wow, that really changed the way that I do everything.” If we have a landscaper that comes to our class and says, “I didn’t realize what the right way was to calibrate my equipment, and now, instead of spending $100 a month on fertilizer, I’m only spending $50 a month on fertilizer because I’m using the right amount.”

That makes me really happy because it’s good for their business, but I know it’s good for the environment as well. It’s very fulfilling when somebody says, “I came to a two-hour workshop that you held and it changed my whole life.”

Vikki Locke

Thanks so much for being with us, Jessica. Great information, great advice, great suggestions. If you’d like to find out more information from the Florida Wildlife Federation, you can check out their website at floridawildlifefederation.org. We want to thank them for sponsoring Talk on the Wild Side and keeping the wild in Florida since 1936. Thanks, Jessica.

Jessica McIntosh

Thanks, Vikki.