Collegiate Conservation Program

Cassidy Kempf was a CCP intern during the summer of 2016. Take a look at her experience in the program and what she is up to now.

What were some of the projects you enjoyed participating in during your CCP summer?

I really liked getting experience with planting and maintenance of habitat restorations. I used a lot of that experience in job interviews I’ve had since then. I would say that those were a little more useful than the big zoo project planning.

How did your time with CCP shape your future/career opportunities?

CCP made me more confident in my choice to focus on habitat restorations. Also, it made me more interested in education. I had never considered being an educator before CCP, and now I think I could try it out.

What are you currently doing to save/protect wildlife?

I work as a natural resources specialist for the Galveston Bay Estuary Program. We give out grants to habitat, education, and water quality projects that benefit Galveston Bay, as well as convene stakeholders for region-wide conservation planning. My job is to track the implementation of our conservation management plan, the Galveston Bay Plan. I also manage some of our grant contracts. A big part of my job is writing and editing technical documents, so I have really been challenging my communications skills. My favorite part about this job is that we work with so many environmental stakeholders in this region and get to be a part of great projects benefiting the watershed.

Describe the Collegiate Conservation Program internship.

CCP is an internship with the Houston Zoo that introduces students to Zoo conservation and local conservation. Interns learn to plan a Zoo conservation project and hear from Zoo staff about how they save wildlife. In addition, interns travel to local conservation organizations and get hands-on conservation experience through service projects.

Five years ago, the Houston Zoo (HZI) sea lion team, with the support and guidance of the conservation department decided to lead an initiative that would help tackle the global issue of monofilament (fishing line) in our waterways, starting with a jetty in Surfside, TX. Five specially designed receptacles were already built and mounted along the jetty. In the beginning, NOAA (National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration) emptied these receptacles weekly.

The sea lion team would now lead a team of volunteers to the jetty monthly and empty these receptacles, remove trash and recyclables, watch for any distressed local wildlife, and converse with anglers and jetty guests about the zoo’s mission. Once the monofilament is brought back to HZI another set of volunteers free it from all the debris, wash it, and it is then sent to NOAA, who sends it off to a company that transforms it into kids tackle boxes and aquarium furniture.

The program has grown from four sea lion keepers to leading a group of up to twenty volunteers each month. Almost every zoo department participates in these jetty clean-ups and over the last few years we branched out to taking small organized groups (Zoo Crew, girl scouts, home-school programs and Collegiate Conservation Program interns).

Since August 2013 volunteers have collected 306 lbs. of dirty monofilament, 1,643 lbs. of recyclables and 2,952 lbs. of trash and rescued one sea turtle from entanglement! More importantly the positive relationship between zoo volunteers and jetty users has demonstrated a pronounced behavior change; not only do many of them frequently pitch in to help, the receptacles have gone from filled with trash to filled with monofilament. The team continues to strive to move forward with the hope of opening the Surfside jetty clean-ups to public volunteers.