Talk on the Wild Side
with Savannah Nease

Transcription

Vikki Locke

I am Vikki Locke with C2 Communications, and this is Talk on the Wild Side, where we talk about careers in conservation, and it’s brought to you by the Florida Wildlife Federation. Joining us today is Savannah Nease. Hi, Savannah.

Savannah Nease

Hi.

Vikki Locke

I love your name. I’m from Georgia, so I love your name. Savannah works for Johnson Engineering, and her original plan when she got out of school, I think, or maybe even before school, was to work in the rainforest. Tell us about that.

Savannah Nease

Yes, as a kid, you watch the documentaries of the birds in the rainforest and I thought, how do you get a job working in the rainforest? My grandmother always encouraged us to be outdoors, and I just really loved being outside in nature, so I wanted to find a career that was down that path, and so I ended up going to the University of Florida, I majored in Biology, I wasn’t quite sure where it was going to take me. In my first year there I went ahead and joined an evolutionary ecology lab and then I ended up also working in the Honeybee Research and Extension Lab by the time I had graduated from UF.

Vikki Locke

So tell me about that, because you hear so much about bees, and if the bees die, we’re going to die, and so is there a myth there? Do I have that story right? Tell us about the bees.

Savannah Nease

Bees are incredibly important. They are more of livestock versus an endangered species so to speak. They are never going to actually go extinct because there are so many farmers that are keeping them alive just as you would a herd of cows so to speak because they’re moved around from these monocrops. Native bees on the other hand, yes, they need our help and protection and all that. I was actually into beekeeping and found social biology super interesting. Actually, I got a job working at a commercial bee company right after I graduated, right out of the honey bee lab, and I did that for a couple of years. It was really cool, a really awesome experience, but one day I was like, I don’t want to be a beekeeper for the rest of my life.

Vikki Locke

From the bees, you went to the Babcock Ranch. What did you do there?

Savannah Nease

After that, I ended up getting into an environmental consulting job, which was a career that I didn’t even know existed prior, and I started working for a company that develops with the community called Babcock Ranch, which is America’s first solar-powered town. It’s a super sustainable community. Seventy thousand acres of conservation land is purchased by the state of Florida, and they also maintain their own environmental mitigation on site. I now work for Johnson Engineering, and we are the environmental consultant for Babcock Ranch. It’s a local firm that’s located in Fort Myers that does lots of other things, like surveying, engineering, planning, and environmental consulting. And that’s what I’m doing now.

Vikki Locke

Tell us what a day in the life of Savannah is like as a biologist with Johnson Engineering?

Savannah Nease

My title at Johnson Engineering is Ecologist. We do things like protected species surveys, vegetation monitoring, wildlife monitoring; we’re writing reports for these associated things; we’re meeting with agencies, like Water Management District, SWC, or doing JS maps, welling delineations. The basic idea is environmental permitting, clients are coming to us to navigate environmental regulations put forth by local state, the federal government, and we help them obtain and comply with these permits. We want to help them avoid environmental impact, and we design mitigation plans for unavoidable impacts. South West Florida, where I live, is a really cool place to be doing this type of work because there are so many protected species down here. There’s the Florida panther, the bonneted bat, the crested caracara, gopher tortoise, scrub jays.

Vikki Locke

Have you ever come to contact with any of these animals?

Savannah Nease

Oh, yes. Indigo snakes. I mean, when we go out, and we actually do some research projects, and we trap, we capture indigo snakes, and we take them up to the University of Florida where they put trackers inside of them so that we can map their habitats and know where their ranges are. We’ve done the same thing with the crested caracara. We work with the US Fish and Wildlife Service on a special permit to track these birds, and we put little backpack transmitters on them, and that’s helping with the research on that species where we don’t have a whole lot of research. Gopher tortoises I see on a very frequent basis. And I have been lucky enough to spot a panther out in the wild on the job.

Vikki Locke

Really? That’s amazing. So did you have a mentor before all of this, or would you suggest somebody just listening to everything that you said and said, “oh my gosh, I would love to be immersed in that, I want to do that,” what would you tell them?

Savannah Nease

I would tell them, get in there and get some experience on whatever you think you want to do and reach out to people you think might be in that field. I had a mentor in college who really helped me understand a lot of things and walked me through things, not necessarily on environmental consulting but, my big advice for people who want to do this is that it’s good to have goals but don’t stress too much about like what career you’re going to end up in because the path isn’t always really linear. Go ahead and get some experience in whatever you think you want to do while in school. Maybe get unpaid internships. It may not be something that you like, so it’s good to know that too. Stay competitive with software skills like RTIS, and mentors, if you’re lucky enough to find one, can be your biggest advocates.

Vikki Locke

What gives you the greatest satisfaction about your job?

Savannah Nease

Well, as an Environmental Consultant, I care deeply about the environment. We help our clients develop responsibly within the guidelines of the environmental regulations. We help them design projects that are meant to avoid and minimize impacts on wetlands and wildlife. I enjoy my job immensely, feel privileged to do it, and feel satisfied that I’m contributing to maintaining and improving the wild spaces and protecting wildlife in my local area.

Vikki Locke

That’s a cool job!

Savannah Nease

Yes, I’m pretty pulled about it.

Vikki Locke

Well, thanks so much for being with us today, and thanks to the Florida Wildlife Federation for sponsoring Talk on the Wild Side and keeping the wild in Florida since 1936. You can learn more at floridawildlifefederation.org.