Good Luck to Our Animal Care Graduates!

A number of our dedicated volunteers in the Animal Care Department are graduating and moving on with their careers. We hope that their experiences at ECHO have helped them to achieve their future goals because they have certainly helped us maintain an outstanding animal collection and we have had a lot of fun together!

Tyson with Winston on the floor

Claire giving her first demo

Claire Trotter and Tyson-Jerome White are graduating from Champlain Valley Union High School and plan on attending college in the fall. Besides contributing many hours of labor to our core Animal Care duties, both have gone beyond the call of duty by contributing to the daily public programs that we present.

Reinhart feeds brook trout

Emma cleans baby turtles

Emma Fox and Reinhart Meisenheimer are earning Bachelors of Science in Biology degrees from Saint Michael's College. Emma will be working for the Maine Conservation Corps as an Environmental Educator at Mount Desert Island Biological Labs in Bar Harbor, Maine. Reinhart will be working as an Farmyard Educator at Shelburne Farms.

Scott returning a mudpuppy

Alyssa feeding the American toad

 The University of Vermont provides a seemingly never-ending source of motivated students who study Animal Science, Biology, and Natural Resources. We tip our hats to Monica Beers, Boyd Carnal, Annabelle Bower, Alyssa Kircher, and Scott Carson who will all be receiving their degrees from UVM in several weeks.  Monica has been a long-time volunteer in both our Animal Care and Education departments and working next door in the Rubenstein Ecosystem Science Lab; she is true representative of the Leahy Center's many facets.  She will be continue with us this summer and also manage a lab at UVM.  Boyd will be moving south to pursue a graduate degree in Coastal Environmental Management from Duke University. Annabelle hopes to return to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife's Atlantic salmon hatchery in her home state of New Hampshire, where she has worked summers during college. Alyssa plans to return to her home state of Colorado and continue to work in the field of wildlife biology. In addition to helping us, she and has been working with Keeping Track as a wildlife biologist. Scott hopes to stay in Vermont and will be continuing on with ECHO this summer as an Animal Care volunteer and as an Educator with our overnight education program.

Boyd returns the softshell turtle

While its always hard to see our volunteers move on, we wish them luck with all their future plans!