Since then, I have been a regular volunteer at the nature center, doing everything from ecological stewardship (removing invasives / collecting, cleaning, and redistributing seeds), to helping start a demonstration native plant pollinator garden at the entrance, to serving as a front-line representative of the nature center and forest preserves at the nature center building. I also lead a monthly photography meetup at the nature center, have led some nature center programs, and helped automate some registration systems. I hope to continue this work and potentially expand upon it going into the future.

I also signed up to become a Butterfly Monitor for the Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network. My route is a mesic woodland at Busse Woods near Elk Pasture. It is a joy and honor to contribute to citizen science that can be used in research to study butterfly populations across habitats and time.

This work has taken away some of my time from this website. I continue my nature and wildlife photography daily, along with exercising my skills at environmental interpretation whenever I encounter anything new or interesting in my journey. I wrote some lightroom plugins and some python scripts, so that I can upload my photos in batches straight from an export directory and grab lightroom metadata and keywording to automatically add new photos to the database with the appropriate tags and information attached. This has enabled me to continue updating the site with my photos, albeit I do it in automated batches rather than manually day-by-day.

I have learned so many new things during these last few years and know I will learn so much more heading into the future. I am reinvesting myself in updating the Discovery Journal to share these discoveries with others and continue to inspire a passion for wildlife and native plants in others as I go. I apologize for being absent these past few years. I always knew that when the time was right, I would return to this platform, with many more experiences and discoveries to share.

I just wanted to pop back in to update you on what I've been doing lately.

You'll notice I haven't posted since February 2023 — more than three years ago. In March of that year, I attended a Woodcock Walk event hosted by Crabtree Nature Center in Barrington, IL. They host a few of these events every year, and I highly recommend attending one if you get the chance. At that event, I happened to meet the volunteer workday leader for Crabtree, who was recruiting volunteers. I had just left a nonprofit position that kept me behind a desk for 60 hours a week, and I was looking for volunteer work that would keep me connected to the outdoors. So I was excited to test the waters in this new role.

Since then, I've been a regular volunteer at the nature center, doing everything from ecological stewardship — removing invasives, collecting, cleaning, and redistributing seeds — to helping start a demonstration native plant pollinator garden at the entrance, to serving as a front-line representative of the nature center and forest preserves at the nature center building and events. I lead a monthly wildlife and nature photography meetup, develop and lead some nature center programs, and helped automate some of their registration systems. I hope to continue this work, and potentially expand on it, going forward.

This work has taken some time away from maintaining the Discovery Journal, but I've kept up my nature and wildlife photography daily, and continue to exercise my skills at environmental interpretation whenever I come across something new or interesting in my journey. To keep the site updated with my latest photos, I wrote some Lightroom plugins and Python scripts to automate the process of uploading photos that have been exported from Lightroom, keeping keywords and metadata attached. I tend to do this in batches now, rather than uploading photos manually day by day.

I've learned so much these past few years, and I know there's much more ahead. I'm reinvesting myself in updating the Discovery Journal to share these discoveries with others, and to keep inspiring a passion for wildlife and native plants along the way. I apologize for being absent these past few years. I always knew that when the time was right, I'd return to this platform — with many more experiences and discoveries to share.

I’ve included photos of my garden this year for tax.