Listening to the Desert: A French Volunteer's Summer with Park Service Scientists

When staff who had worked for ten years at the research learning center in Tucson, Arizona, listened to test recordings from a new acoustic monitor, they heard bird species they had never heard there before. The monitor was part of a project led by Wesley Reverdy, a volunteer from France who spent the spring and summer of 2022 with National Park Service scientists in the desert Southwest.

NPS Photo.

Wesley Reverdy in the field. Credit: National Park Service.

From France to the Sonoran Desert

In France, students must complete a final internship to finish their degrees, and Reverdy — who spends his free time in the mountains near home watching wildlife — dreamed of doing his in a U.S. national park. "The National Park Service is a big thing in Europe when it comes to nature conservation especially," he said. Not knowing how to arrange it, he found the International Volunteers-in-Parks (IVIP) website and applied.

During five months with the Sonoran Desert Inventory and Monitoring Network in Arizona and the Chihuahuan Desert Inventory and Monitoring Network in New Mexico, working at projects across Saguaro National Park and beyond, he completed his master's degree in environmental science. His work included:

NPS Photo.

• field studies of park mammals and birds, showing which species live where and how that is changing;
• stream and spring water monitoring, including measuring stream water quality and collecting environmental DNA (eDNA) shed by organisms living in or using the springs;
• data processing, where the coding courses from his degree proved "really, really helpful."

Recording birds and bats

His biggest project, for the Chihuahuan Desert network, set up a new protocol for acoustic monitoring of birds and bats — the first time acoustic devices were deployed in the network's parks.

NPS Photo.

"Instead of sending people on the field to hear the bird vocalization, you can just put… an acoustic monitor on the field during maybe one month," he explained, then retrieve it and listen on a computer. "It's not one-shot… you can hear it multiple times." Remote recording captures far more vocalizations than observers in person, and lets scientists identify more species. The method is expected to have a big impact on future bird and bat surveys.

What the data show is sobering. "It's clear that there is a big issue with birds related to global warming," Reverdy said, along with fragmented and lost habitat — "and it's kind of same thing for bats."

Different views of wildlife

International volunteers bring different perspectives. The biggest difference he saw, Reverdy said, was attitudes toward large predators: in France, many people don't love wolves or bears, "something very cultural," which makes programs to bring those species back less effective than some elsewhere. Volunteers from diverse backgrounds make park work more dynamic and can take new stewardship values home.

For young people, he said, involvement matters because climate change "will be a problem for our generation, for everyone" — and working with Park Service scientists teaches "so many things that we are going to learn in maybe 10 years."

Reverdy returned to France to finish his degree, hoping to work in a French national park.

The program

IVIP brings people of many cultural, educational and professional backgrounds to work on conservation in Park Service parks and programs — and lets the agency learn from them. It is open to all ages, and over twenty-five years it has coordinated more than two thousand programs for international students and young park professionals. The Park Service also offers jobs, internships and volunteering for young people aged 15–30 and veterans 35 and younger.

Sources

Based on "Conservation Diaries: Wesley Reverdy, International Volunteer," an episode of the National Park Service podcast Conservation Diaries, hosted by Celeste Morales and recorded in 2022; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.