Reptiles at Risk

Gearing up for the summer...

Posted by Jeff Hathaway on June 28, 2007 at 5:33 PM

Now that the website revisions are essentially complete, it's time to start posting again for this summer's Reptiles at Risk on the Road program tour! We have completed some school programs in the Georgian Bay area recently and should be departing for eastern Ontario around July 13th. From there we'll head east into Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia until sometime in late August. It should be an interesting trip, and I'm sure we'll have lots of stories and pictures to put up on the site.

Program scheduling should start appearing on our events calender- our eastern Ontario dates are firming up nicely and the other provinces are starting to take shape as well.

We hope to have a 'new' van and trailer for this tour- we have purchased a 1987 Ford van with a diesel engine, in order to be more fuel efficient. Repairs to this van are nearing completion and we should have it on the road in time for our departure. In the future, we hope to convert it to run on vegetable oil as well as diesel, but that will have to wait until the fall. We also found a great deal on an old 19' travel trailer, which should be an improvement in various ways over the donated tent trailer we've used for the last two summers. The tent trailer will still be in use in Ontario, for the staff who are conducting our regular programs here.

Speaking of staff, we've got some great people for this summer. Since my French is very limited, we've been seeking bilingual staff, and found Mary Ellen, Sarah Jane, and Sarah (yes, two Sarahs), so watch for staff profiles on them eventually. Holding the fort here in Ontario with Jenny will be James, Sean, and Sara (#3), with Robin, Justin, and Brenan also working on a special project this summer delivering species at risk education within the Trent-Severn watershed, in partnership with Kids for Turtles. It is hard to imagine that we have 9 full-time staff for the summer!