FIELD NOTES BLOG

Introducing Sydney

Sydney Sherbitsky
November 1, 2024

Hello everyone! My name is Sydney Sherbitsky (she/her) and I am excited to join the Severson Dells team as an Environmental Education AmeriCorps member! I’m from Long Island, New York, so I am looking forward to experiencing the beauty of the Midwest and its changing seasons for the first time.

I graduated this past spring from Stony Brook University with a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies as well as minors in coastal studies and urban planning. My studies have allowed me to deepen my experiences in the natural world where I studied abroad in Ecuador, led the Stony Brook Environmental Club, and conducted ecotoxicology research.

My curiosity for nature began at a young age, with my family frequently visiting local parks and nature centers. This early spark carried into young adulthood, where I took a high school hands-on environmental science class that explained environmental complexities I could observe outside and fueled my passion to pursue an environmental career.

As an environmental educator, I believe that people can’t care about what they don’t know about, so I’m excited to help bridge that gap and ignite new curiosity for the natural world in others.

While I am in the Midwest I would like to explore the many conservation areas nearby, but when I’m not at Severson Dells or hiking you can find me catching up with friends and family, embroidering, painting, or reading.

I look forward to learning with you all soon!

RECENT ARTICLES

By Sydney Sherbitsky July 16, 2025
Summer days have an intense energy. For us, it’s easy to pack a lot of activity into long, sunlight-filled days. The atmosphere is packed in a different way, with thick, heavy humidity and sun-baked heat. You have probably experienced one of these particularly sweltering days where periods of calm are interrupted with a sudden summer storm. One moment you are relaxing, the next, you hear the rumbling of thunder, and it begins to rain, instantly cooling the hot ground and taking the stickiness from the air. You don’t have long to take in the scene as the intensity of the heat gives way to an intense storm. This is a different kind of energy in the air; this is a summer storm.
By Shannon Osadjan July 3, 2025
Nature holds the answers for how to be more efficient with managing our supplies of earth’s natural resources. In fact, nature serves as the inspiration and blueprint for many structures and objects we use every day! Biomimicry is a practice of engineering that creates designs based on structures and sequences from the Earth’s natural world, including but not limited to plants, animals, and geographies. Biomimicry designs are meant to imitate functions that already exist and occur in nature. These designs are being transferred over and scaled up to provide solutions to human caused problems. There are three main core principles that make up biomimicry: recreating natural shapes, processes, and entire ecosystems.
By Alex Lunde June 26, 2025
*please note: This blog was adapted from a blog series authored in 2023.