Jakob with a fully grown adult Northern saw-whet owl during a banding survey (Aegolius acadicus).
Joining us on September 28th as an AmeriCorps Member working with Conservation Legacy Stewards Individual Placements, is Jakob Snipes. He is from Scott Township, Lackawanna County, just outside the Northern Anthracite Coalfields, in the Lackawanna Valley. Jakob graduated from Keystone College on May 16th with a bachelor’s degree in Wildlife Biology. Jakob was in the Eco Club where he found many volunteer opportunities such as Hellbender surveying, song bird banding, and northern saw-whet owl banding.
From the Club he even got an internship for the summer working for Lackawanna County Parks and Recreation where they were taught to maintain the quality of the parks under the department and the Lackawanna Heritage Valley trail. While working on the trail they would work to clean the trail while fighting back against invasive species such as Japanese Knotweed (Reynoutria japonica) and Spotted Lantern Fly (Lycorma delicatula). During his final days working for the County, Jakob went on the Lackawanna coal mine tour in McDade Park, Scranton, where he was given a crash course in the history on Anthracite coal mining and the legacy of what it has done to the landscapes and waterways surrounding nearly 474 square miles of northeastern PA.
Jakob (right) working with Morgan (left) doing a culvert survey and measuring the average wetted width of the stream channel in the Shickshinny watershed on Shickshinny Creek on the Kittleson property.
Jakob originally joined EPCAMR as a volunteer in the Spring of 2025, attending illegal dumpsite cleanups and doing culvert surveys, but will now be working with EPCAMR for 10 weeks, thanks to the AmeriCorps program, which fully funded his position with his host site at EPCAMR, supervised by Bobby Hughes, EPCAMR Executive Director. Jakob is already certified in Aquatic Organism Passage (AOP) through his earlier volunteer experiences with EPCAMR that was completed online for free with the NAACC. While he was a volunteer, he got to experience all that the Shickshinny watershed had to offer by doing culvert surveys, macro-invertebrate studies, and water quality sampling and everything EPCAMR was trying to do to restore stream health from mine drainage pollution and abandoned mine land degradation on State Game Lands 260 in the Shickshinny area, as well as stormwater runoff and streambank degradation from episodic flooding within the watershed and a number of tributary creeks.
Bobby stated, ” It’s great to have Jakob back with us for the Fall to give him some additional field experience and to pick up where he left off as a volunteer with us over the last year. He’s been in and out of a number of watersheds with us already and is familiar with our work. It won’t take long to give him a refresher on the field work sampling and to get him caught up on our newer projects that we are working on. I can appreciate his love of nature and wildlife, especially birds of prey, since we see all kinds of birds, owls, turkey vultures, osprey, American black ducks, mallards, Great blue herons, and even American Bald Eagles on our field excursions, in addition to songbirds on the abandoned mine lands that are reclaimed and red-winged black birds at AMD treatment systems we visit. I’m thinking he will be able to do an educational article or two on his familiarity with wildlife and tie it in to our reclamation and restoration work while he’s with us.”
Jakob, along with Carolyn Phillips, a returning intern from King’s College, will have plenty of projects to keep them busy with assisting us in our work. Look for another feature article on her in our news section. We also will see the return of Ian Padden, our Wilkes University, Bonner Leader Program volunteer intern, who just finished a Summer State and National volunteer position with EPCAMR.
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