A different path outdoors: Sativa Volbrecht rode CTA with fishing rods, studied turtles, herons & crabs

Sativa Volbrecht lugged 25 rods and reels, terminal tackle and posters on the CTA for her job with the Chicago Urban Fishing Program last summer.

“Who does that, Dale?” said Brenda McKinney, the Chicago Urban Fishing Program coordinator. “That in itself is special. In my 29 years of doing this, I never met anybody who agreed to do this on public transportation. Remember, she has posters, too. That was amazing to me.”

“Yeap, I don’t have a car,” Volbrecht said. “All the locations I went to were too far, so I took public transportation. Being on the bus with 25 fishing poles, people talk to you. I got to talk about the aims of the program. Generally, people were excited about that.”

Yes, I asked if there were any photos. If anybody snapped a photo on the CTA of Volbrecht with her gear, please contact me.

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She has made a remarkable journey in her outdoors life.

She’s interned at the Nature Boardwalk at the Lincoln Park Zoo in 2017, Woods Hole Science Aquarium in 2018 and Shoals Marine Laboratory in 2019. She worked in the Urban Fishing Program last summer and anticipates doing it this summer.

At the Nature Boardwalk, a living laboratory for the Urban Wildlife Institute, she did a little bit of everything. She monitored painted turtles, including taking scute samples. Scutes are plates on their shells. She also helped with the black-crowned night herons at LPZ.

That led her to observe, “Typically, black-crowned night herons are very human-shy. Now lots of chicks are growing up with the sounds of people. Interesting to see the effect it has had on them.”

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At Woods Hole, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, her focus was the biodiversity in three major intertidal zones.

“There was lots of the emphasis of interacting with the public and being really connected to the community,” she said. “There was so much focus on educating the public about why their work is important.”

At Shoals, privately owned, the work was on Appledore Island in Maine.

“They researched on the island for 50 years, so there is a large data set,” Volbrecht said. “They were less connected to the community, but [they did] have people come to tour and get a look at what they do.”

She intends to incorporate the Urban Fishing Program into her master’s thesis at the University of Chicago. Her broad topic is environmental security and looking at community resilience on the South Side. One aspect is how the Urban Fishing Program helps.

Volbrecht came to the Chicago area from the western foothills of the Rockies in Idaho when she was 12, then she graduated from Elgin. As an undergrad, she majored in biology, specializing in ecology and evolution, and creative writing.

She came to the Urban Fishing Program as a job, and because her focus is marine ecology and she really enjoys working with the public.

As a conservation education representative in the program, Volbrecht, like others, educates kids on how to properly handle fish, talks about safety and does an education presentation with posters on fish anatomy, species of fish, the food chain and pollution. Then it’s fishing briefly with the kids at lagoons or the lakefront.

“I really enjoyed seeing kids learn and get excited about working with fish,” Volbrecht said. “A lot of them don’t think about the lake in that context.”

In a survey after a visit, one kid commented — “I don’t really enjoy fish, but I enjoyed learning about them”— and it stuck with Volbrecht.

“I think we accomplished something,” she said.