My internship at the Wilds began at the start of June and every week I surveyed butterflies and flowering plants in various restored prairies. The first few weeks were a very steep learning curve where all I could think about was trying to figure out what species each butterfly was before it flitted out of sight. It was stressful and the surveys took a lot of concentration.

As the summer continued, I became familiar with the common species, my surveys became much more enjoyable, and I began to look forward to seeing my favorite species. I loved seeing the tiny eastern tailed blue butterflies that would flutter around my feet and the silver spotted skippers that would cluster on purple bergamot flowers. The butterfly I wanted to see the most though, was a Monarch. Monarchs are the one species that everyone (including myself) is familiar with. I knew they were an iconic species and all I wanted was to see just a single one fly past.

Therefore, I will never forget the day I saw my first Monarch butterfly. I was trekking through the prairies as usual when I saw a beautiful and magnificent monarch glide over my head. It was absolutely beautiful and I remember whipping out my camera when I saw it land on a milkweed. It was amazing. Not only did I finally see a Monarch but I saw it land on a milkweed—the infamous plant essential for their survival.

When I got back to the office, I told all my fellow interns about the Monarch and I showed them the video I took of it feeding. However, when my director heard that today—in the middle of July—was the first day I saw a Monarch, she was sad rather than happy.

The summer I was at the Wilds had the lowest number of Monarch butterflies recorded for a summer so far. Over the previous five years, the number of Monarchs recorded had been steadily declining. My happiest moment had become one of the most heart-wrenching.

Butterflies are so small that they are often overlooked. They are creatures that we all recognize yet care very little about. Many people see them flutter through their yard or through fields and although they see them as beautiful, they do not see them as essential.

Butterflies are essential keystone species. They are key pollinators in many habitats such as prairies, savannas, wetlands, and even forests. Butterflies are also indicators of the health of an ecosystem because they are very sensitive to pollutants and toxins. Also, butterflies are very good indicators of the floral diversity in an ecosystem. The results of my study clearly showed that areas with a larger number of flowering plants will have more butterflies. It’s as simple as that.

I began my internship at the Wilds completely ignorant of how important and amazing butterflies truly are. Like many people, I hardly even acknowledged butterflies. I thought they were pretty but I never thought any deeper than that. Over the summer, I gained a deep appreciation for these tiny critters and I realized that I had so much left to learn. However, I am proud to say that now when I see a butterfly flit past while I am out in the field I don’t just see a pretty insect–I see a creature that is essential. I see a creature that is small but mighty.

If you are a biologist and you visit Yellowstone National Park, you often wake up before even the smallest sliver of light has broken across the horizon. You head out and get into position just as a golden edge of light begins to creep into the sky, and you wait. If you are lucky and patient you will notice a faint puff of silver fog on the edge of a tree line. Then a sleek grey muzzle will emerge followed by the slender graceful body of a wolf.

During the summer, most animals will be active at dusk and dawn. These are the coolest hours of the day and when it will cost the least amount of energy for them to forage or hunt. At the peak of the day, sensible creatures will lie down and wait out the heat. Butterflies are one of the exceptions.

Butterflies love the heat. They sit in the sun and slowly open and close their wings as they soak up the warmth. The longer they sit in the light, the more energy their muscles have and the more they can fly. Butterflies also love still windless days. They are small, fragile creatures and they have a very hard time battling any wind without being blown off course. So, I spent my summer trekking through prairies on the hottest, driest, sunniest, windless days in the baking sun in search of butterflies. Despite that, I have rarely seen so many beautiful sights or had so much fun in my life.

The Wilds is located on lands that were once heavily strip-mined. This is a mining practice where huge roving factories dig up the top few feet of the earth over vast landscapes in search of minerals. Then they throw down the seeds for whatever plant will grow the fastest and they leave. Over the years since the Wilds was established, it has worked to remove the resilient invasive plants and restore the native prairies.

The oldest restored prairies on the property are now over fifteen years old and they are absolutely beautiful. Imagine a sea of green interspersed with flowers of all colors: red, yellow, blue, purple, orange, and pink. Then imagine lush green bunches of grass that stretch above your head. Finally, imagine lovely, iridescent, fluttering, creatures that swim through the air dancing from one flower to the next. This was my summer. Of course it was hot and I was very familiar with ticks, but these are very small trade-offs for such an amazing experience.

For as long as I can remember I have loved animals. There are so many beautiful creatures on this earth and even from a young age I knew I wanted to work with them when I grew up. So, when I got to college I started studying some amazing creatures. I learned so much about grizzlies, wolves, elk, and pronghorn and all the challenges they faced. I learned just how much of a negative impact humans are having on these wonderful creatures and my resolve to help them strengthened.

After, a full year of college I thought I had a solid grasp on the key species in most ecosystems and I was ready to get out in the field and put some of my new-found knowledge to the test. So, I began an internship at the Wilds in Cumberland, Ohio. I remember hoping I would get to work on the research project focused on bison. I imagined myself in the middle of rolling green prairies observing bison and recording their every movement.

On the first day of the internship, I sat chatting shyly with my fellow interns. There was a hushed anticipation that seemed to hover in the room as we waited for the clock to hit 8:00 am. At the time I was so confident that I would get to work on the bison project but looking back now I know that my hopes were much higher than my actual experience level. I was as green as a tulip stem back then and I had no true idea what a field project would be like. Anyway, the directors for the internship finally arrived and they began announcing the projects to which we would be assigned for the summer. When they announced my project, all I remember thinking was, “I’m going to be studying . . . butterflies?”

Well today is my last day of my epic spring break trip. My trip took me to five different countries and eleven different cities along the way. From Amsterdam to Budapest to Frankfurt I have covered a huge expanse of Europe and history itself. I have seen the different cultures of Europe through language, food, even clothing. I have walked in the footprints of giants and seen history for all its worth. This is a story of the most memorable things I have seen along my trip.

Berlin holds a special place in my heart because of the great historical importance the city has, both good and bad. I was lucky to travel to the Jewish museum in Berlin which was an eye opening experience. The museum itself is a small picture of what life was like for Jewish culture throughout history leading up to the terrible events of World War II. But the truly breath-taking thing about the museum is the symbolism that the large empty cavities and the room of faces have on the unprepared. When you enter a large empty room that is lined with ten thousand metal faces on the floor representing the people who were killed in the Holocaust it has a staggering effect. It made me pray that the conflict in Syria comes to a speedy end so they don’t need to build a museum to it and do a similar thing.

In Budapest I spent time exploring a city that has many hidden gems waiting to be uncovered by the adventurous. I happened to be bored one day so I looked up museums in Budapest and the top rated one was a pinball museum. I was shocked that I had not heard about this before so I decided to make the trip across the city and visit it. I was not disappointed. There were over fifty pinball machines from the 1940s to the present. And a majority of them were even playable for free. A truly worthwhile experience to explain my time in Budapest.

The last amazing moment I had was in Munich, Germany where I saw the true meaning of being a traveler. I was sitting in an Italian restaurant all by myself when a man and his young son came strolling in. The man ordered in German but spoke to his son with a Southern American accent. As soon as I said hi we spent the rest of the meal talking about our journeys and life in general in the last place I expected. It really shows how the unexpected conversations can sometimes be the most worthwhile if you are with interesting people.

To end this story I think of all of the amazing people who have made my trip possible and the ones who helped make it amazing. It has also made me appreciate the friends I have both in Scotland and back in the United States so much more because its a strange feeling to go three weeks with barley any contact with people you know other than through messages. So thank you to everyone who has helped me and supported me over my travels.

So everyone talks about culture shock like it is this super scary thing that affects everyone in their own special way. Now, I’m one of those people who believes that all you have to do is accept that things are going to be different and everything will be okay but sometimes that can bite you.

I have spent the last three months in Scotland which both very similar and very different from the area in which I come from. It has more people in a much smaller area and they are use to a different way of life but they share many traits. The biggest one for me is the language that they speak. At first it took a few days to get use to some of the things they said, all the while wondering if they were truly speaking English. But I have quickly picked up the accent and have fallen in love with Scotland and all of its wonders to behold because every time I start to think I have seen it all, something happens. I connected so much more with everything around me and I really felt like I belonged in the highlands. But then everything changed.

I decided to city hop across Europe for my spring break and I quickly came to realize that I took so much for granted in Scotland compared to the rest of the world. I landed in Amsterdam and was dazed by all that the city had to offer but one thing seemed to nag at me the whole time. I just shut it out of my mind because I believed that everything would be great as long as I cam at it with a positive attitude. As I prepared to leave Amsterdam I actually met some people who had lived in Montana for quite some time and it made me realize how much I had waiting for me back home.

As I headed off on my next train journey to the German city of Hamburg I quickly realized what it means when you just can’t understand people. My train was delayed for a few hours after an emergency and when they spoke over the intercom they always spoke in Dutch and then German followed by English. It made me cringe because I could see everyone around me knew what was being spoken but I just couldn’t put all the words together fast enough so I would wait for the English one to find out what to do.

To end the crazy day on my journey to Hamburg I decided to go out for some dinner because I hadn’t eaten all day. The restaurant that I chose was so full that they were seating random groups of people together and I ended up siting with two German guys who never spoke a word to me because I wasn’t able to speak German enough to carry a conversation. It really shocked me how much language can divide me and it gave me a quick insight what people who are felling conflicts around the globe must feel when they come to another country and they can’t understand any of the people around them. It’s not a good feeling and it can quickly demoralize a weary traveler.

As one can imagine, this was by far the most painful and hard-to-process subject that I encountered on my trip. The Holocaust has a special kind of lore in America, and is consistently taught as the greatest crime against humanity. It is important to note that this lore is largely shaped by a pro-Israel, anti-USSR sentiment and is largely political. The narrative of the big, bad Third Reich brought to its knees by American liberators is as propagandist as Mein Kampf. It is obviously motivated by different (some would argue moral) intentions, however the level of manipulation is comparable.

I was aware of the political spin on my conception of the Holocaust as we began our trip, and I was struggling to find a way to have a meaningful experience without co-opting the suffering of others for my own political or moral education. I was hypersensitive to the fact that neither I, nor my ancestors, had been victims of the sort of systematic oppression and genocide that the Jews and other people groups murdered by the Nazis had been. While I certainly could empathize with the unimaginable suffering of concentration and death camps, it felt wrong to try and glean any kind of trite message from the deaths of millions. Simply put, I didn’t feel like there should be a lesson from the Holocaust.

This led me to one simple goal as we experienced Dachau and Auschwitz: bear witness to suffering and be open to the emotion the experience would bring. It felt like the most significant thing I could do as an outsider was to allow the sadness and horror to deeply affect me, to simply mourn for the victims.

This is not to say that I didn’t walk away from the experience with any new knowledge. Seeing the absolute intentionality of the Holocaust first-hand drove me to questions about the morality of politics and the circumstances necessary for mass genocide. It forced me to reflect on the reasons I was enthralled with rhetoric and underpinned my quest for a moral code for political communication.

But more importantly than that, I feel very grateful for the opportunity to mourn. The Holocaust was not the first genocide, and it certainly hasn’t been the last. Dachau and Auschwitz not only stand as memorials for 11 million people, they remind us of the millions more since 1945 who have been victims of fear and hatred. They are ugly reminders of the capacity of humanity to do harm to itself and monuments to the necessity of tolerance. The most terrifying part about walking the grounds of Auschwitz is just how “normal” it looked. It could have been a village if it were not for the evil of the men who created it.

I still don’t think there’s a “lesson” to be learned from the Holocaust. The only words of remembrance in Auschwitz read: “At this place where the Nazis assassinated a million and a half men, women, and children, a majority of whom were Jews from diverse European countries, will always be a cry of despair and a warning for humanity.” There’s no nursery rhyme morality that one can glean from the gas chambers, no epitaph on the mass graves. Rather, the Holocaust stands as a terrifying reminder of what we’ve done and, in some cases, what we continue to do.

After driving across most of Germany, we finally arrived in the bustling, edgy, unique city of Berlin. We quickly got ready for what we knew would be the New Years celebration of a lifetime. Unlike the tame (lame) American tradition, the Germans go all out and take full advantage of the lack of open container and fireworks laws. It was certainly a memorable experience.

Our new Syrian friends in the haze of what can only be described as a TON of fireworks.

Through the magic of the New Year, we ended up meeting a group of Syrian refugees who had been in Germany for about a year. Through a complex chain of translating from English to Arabic we were able to have a fascinating conversation about their families still in Syria and American responsibility to intervene. I was struck by the similarity of the conversation we were having about appeasement and crimes against humanity in Syria, and the ones that must have been had as the Nazis and later the GDR rose to power.

A theme of our time in Berlin would be exploring the German national identity and the ways in which they have begun to reconcile with the wounds and wrongs of the past. As xenophobic rhetoric reigns in the USA, I was absolutely awed by the German commitment to provide a safe place for those fleeing persecution. It seems that the painful process of remembering the history of totalitarianism and fear in Germany has allowed them to see past nationality to the common humanity in all those seeking a safe place to exist. America has largely chosen to ignore the dark and shameful parts of our history, hoping that the future will abstain us of guilt. However, it seems obvious to me that this has created a cycle that returns the same problems of racism and distrust into the national dialogue frequently.

As we continued our time in Berlin, exploring both the Nazi and Soviet history, I was consistently reminded of the willingness of Germans, and specifically Berliners, to publically explore their past. This was a powerful theme as we would continue into Poland to explore the pain of the Holocaust. Instead of being able to think about these events in black and white dichotomy as is frequent in the American conception of suffering, we were introduced to the power of the German dialogue regarding Nazism.