Just west of where the Missouri meets the Mississippi lies a growing Missouri town called Wentzville, an area I should hope I know fairly well. Until August of 2019, I had lived there for all twenty years of my life. Moving to Ashland, Wisconsin was quite the transition as I adjusted to a new landscape,…
After high school, Erick Marchessault of Cary, Illinois, attended community college, traveled around Europe, worked, and made films—even won an award. In the mix of this, he took an EMT course that sparked his interest in medical school. He deliberately went looking for a small school to finish his undergraduate degree—and found Northland College. “I…
Roughly 43 years ago, wildlife biologists detected evidence of breeding wolves in the state for the first time in decades. At that time, wolves had been considered extirpated from the state since 1960, and the only gray wolves remaining in the lower 48 were found in northeastern Minnesota. Today, there is a stable population distributed…
For five weeks, Jennifer Franke hiked the pathways of a Costa Rican park, checking trail cams and looking for signs of wildlife. She slept at ranger stations, awoken each morning by the noisy chorus of howler monkey troupes. “Alpha males making their roaring vocal displays,” she said. This usually started at 3 a.m. but Franke…
The four-person, pink squirrel research team knew they were onto something when their article was published in the Journal of Mammalogy and the media requests started rolling in. “That’s when the excitement started,” said Allie Kohler ’18, lead author on the project and now a graduate student in wildlife and fisheries at Texas A&M. First…
On a Thursday night in the CSE, you will likely see students pacing around a room full of plant specimens as they mutter Latin names under their breath. These BIO 328 students are studying for professor Sarah Johnson’s weekly plant identification quiz, and the specimens they are memorizing represent many of the major species found…
One spring night in Wisconsin, Jon Martin, a biologist, was in his backyard with an ultraviolet flashlight. Suddenly, a hot-pink squirrel flew by. It was a southern flying squirrel, a small, furry creature most active at dawn and dusk. Under most circumstances, it has a warm brown color. But in the beam of Dr. Martin’s…
Researchers placed 160 cameras on 19 of the 22 Apostle Islands on Lake Superior, near campus, to see which carnivores were living there. After taking more than 200,000 photos over… Read More →
On a parcel of land known as the Maxwell property, a dozen Northland students follow Jon Martin, associate professor of forestry, down a narrow footpath near the winding banks of… Read More →
For the past three summers, Northland students have helped to monitor bat populations on National Park Service properties throughout the Great Lakes region. Acoustic bat detectors—designed to record ultrasonic bat… Read More →
