Talk on the Wild Side
with Molly Duval
Molly Duval is a Senior Environmental Specialist with the Collier County Conservation Collier Program. She is one of three land managers and oversees 21 nature preserves in the community. She developed her passion for the wild after spending a year in South Africa, where she lived inside a nature preserve during her graduate studies. She says that the best part of her job is creating a project idea and seeing it through implementation.
Transcription
Vikki Locke
Hi, I’m Vikki Locke with C2 Communications, and this is Talk on the Wild Side where we talk about careers in conservation, and it’s all brought to you by the Florida Wildlife Federation. Joining us right now is Molly Duval. Hey Molly.
Molly Duval
Hi, thanks for having me.
Vikki Locke
Oh, so glad to talk to you. Molly is the Senior Environmental Specialist Collier County Conservation Collier Program, which is a mouthful. She is one of three land managers. So why don’t you explain to everybody exactly what a land manager does?
Molly Duval
Yes, so as part of Conservation Collier, we are a local project. We purchase land that’s at risk for development from willing sellers and we turn them into nature preserves. As a land manager, I’m responsible for overseeing everything on the property like exotic plant restoration, maintenance of habitat, prescribed burning. There’s a whole lot that goes into being a preserve manager but it’s mostly taking wildlands and restoring it to the highest quality it can be for wildlife habitat and to preserve it for future generations.
Vikki Locke
How many of these preserves are under your watch?
Molly Duval
Yes, our program has been going since the early 2000s and in that time we’ve acquired 21 properties. Then we just heard from voters this last November that they are in support of us opening up another acquisition cycle. We’re potentially going to be growing and getting even more preserves just for the local area in the county.
Vikki Locke
That really says something in a time like this, that taxpayers would say yes to spending more money.
Molly Duval
Yes, exactly. We’ve really been lucky with having really high voter approval when the ballot questions are put on the ballot. This last round, we had over 80% of voters that voted yes to tax themselves, to raise money to purchase land to protect it.
Vikki Locke
That is so great to hear. I also want you to tell everybody a little bit about your trip to South Africa that I think maybe sparked your passion into a future in conservation.
Molly Duval
Yes, I guess my route, just in schooling, I have always been really interested in the outdoors and I knew I wanted to get into a job that worked with wildlife, worked with animals, and so I went to school. In undergrad, I majored in biology and I had the opportunity to study abroad and do a couple of research projects while there. I got to go to a really neat program first semester in Kenya and Tanzania. That really sparked my interest in working further in that area.
I was able to find a research project in grad school where I lived out in South Africa for about a year working on wildlife ecology in a nature preserve [unintelligible 00:03:20] Kruger. That was a really great experience. It just showed me how much what you can get out of it and you can find really cool opportunities working with wildlife in the field. That brought me down to Southwest Florida moving forward with future job opportunities.
Vikki Locke
That is amazing. What’s it like living inside a nature preserve?
Molly Duval
It was really neat and special things that are mind-blowing become really normalized. You’ll come home and be standing there washing a dish in the kitchen window and you’ll have a giraffe or elephant standing right there. Sometimes you just saw legs right by the window because the giraffe was so tall. You’d get together with friends on a Friday evening and have a campfire. We had a pride of lions show up one time. It’s really neat and crazy experiences that become your day-to-day.
Vikki Locke
That is amazing. Do you think college is a must for a job like yours?
Molly Duval
Yes, I think so. Not only because it’s a requirement, for a lot of the jobs in my field, you typically need to have at a minimum a bachelor’s degree in a field related to the environment such as biology or environmental science. Going to college and seeking out different opportunities really helped me to figure out what I wanted to do beyond college. I had gone in just with a really general idea of what I wanted to do and then through the biology program, I was able to take part in a lot of different research studies and learn a lot and really learn about what I was most passionate and interested in. That set the stone for the types of opportunities that I took part in going past that.
Typically, I’d say if you wanted to get involved in land management or working outside and managing nature preserves, there’s a whole group of private lands and government agencies that do so. I work for Collier County which is local government. There’s also state government and federal government and one of the avenues that most of the people in my field take part in is after college, they usually get involved with the national wildlife refuge system and do some technician jobs.
The really neat thing about that is if you’re not really sure what you want to study or focus in but you’d love to go to Alaska, you can find a temporary technician position for six months and work out in Alaska, or you can work out in Arizona, or work out in New Jersey, there’s refuges all over the country. That’s what I did following schooling to really get myself in a position where I was building my resume to get a position as a land manager and I think it works really well for a lot of people and you have a really great time doing it.
Vikki Locke
I bet. What is the best part, the most satisfying part of your job?
Molly Duval
A lot of what we do is looking at long-term projects. It’s really neat to go through a project step by step and then see the final product and see that project accomplished what you were trying to do. As a land manager, typically, you have to get pretty creative. You’ll go out to a site and you’ll assess what are some things that we can improve in this area, what species are utilizing it, that are depending on it, what’s going wrong in the system that we can fix and try and improve to improve habitat?
Some of the projects that I do a lot in my position is, we’ll go out to an area that’s covered in exotic vegetation, plants, and different species that shouldn’t be there that aren’t really supporting the local wildlife like they need and we’ll develop a project to remove those. A lot of times we’ll plant different native species. If you’re into gardening, it’s like large-scale gardening, and then that will follow up with a lot of monitoring to see how that project is- how successful that project is with our original goals.
A lot of times you’ll actually be able to see over time wildlife species that we’re not able to use that area before we started the project coming in and benefiting from it and utilizing the area like we were really trying and aiming to do. It’s really neat to sort of come up and come up with a project, see it through to the end, and then see that, wow, this really did help to improve things and really did support the goals that you’re aiming to do in the first place.
Vikki Locke
I guess it’s safe to say if you don’t like the outdoors, this isn’t for you.
Molly Duval
I think a lot of people, I think yes. A lot of your job is outdoors. It’s really, one of the neat things is you can sort of go out with a pair of binoculars and do a survey and walk through the woods and hike and get paid to do it. We do a lot of prescribed burning and so a lot of what we do is go out and set the woods on fire. People will pay you to do that. I think a lot of people that might’ve been hesitant about some parts of the outdoors in the beginning, really get into it and find some really neat things about it but it is one of those things where it’s really tough conditions. A lot of times it’s really hot weather, long days, and you’re off trail a lot of times bushwhacking through really thick stuff. You have to be really passionate about it and love the outdoors I’d say.
Vikki Locke
Obviously, you’re very passionate about it and we thank you so much for spending part of your day with us today.
Molly Duval
Yes, thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the program and the field position.
Vikki Locke
Thanks to the Florida Wildlife Federation for sponsoring Talk on the Wild Side and keeping the wild in Florida since 1936. You can get more information at floridawildlifefederation.org.