Jace: Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm Jace Cobb. I'm 27. I was originally born in Colorado, but I've been across the United States doing a bunch of different field works, from California, Nevada, all the way to Georgia even. And now I've found myself in Wyoming of all places.

Nancy: What kind of field work do you do?

Jace: So I mostly work with... Actually, I've done quite a bit. Mostly with birds lately, but I got started with working with butterflies. Worked with the fisher and marten populations in the Sierra Nevadas. But now lately it's been sage-grouse.

Nancy: Sage-grouse. Yeah. That's such an important species for Wyoming.

Jace: Yeah, really. Yeah, they're amazing.

Nancy: Yeah. What inspires you to do the work that you do?

Jace: I think just we, as like, we are also an animal on this world, sharing it with all this other life. We're all interconnected with one another, and yeah, it really inspires me to just protect and conserve this wildlife, and to also observe its beauty too.

Nancy: That's beautiful. Yeah. That's really beautiful. Have you learned anything fun today at BioBlitz?

Jace: Yeah. Oh, gosh. I didn't realize that lichens were so complex. There's multiple organism species within a single community that forms what we call lichens. It's so crazy.

Nancy: Isn't that amazing? To me, I was thinking about how all the little tiny minute things that we as humans can't perceive without a microscope, or sometimes not even at all, it's like it's just all living around us all the time, which is remarkable.

Jace: Yeah, it really is. Now we got a drone above us.

Nancy: We got a drone overhead, which sounds like a really big mosquito.

Jace: Yeah, yeah. Well, the mosquitoes haven't been bad. At least that's good.

Nancy: Okay. So from bear spray to lichens, we've been out here learning a lot today. So I just think to wrap up, Jace, what would you like outsiders to know about people in Wyoming?

Jace: Wyoming is so much more diverse than people give it credit for. There is so many different kinds of people here, from all different backgrounds, from different communities. I've never met more, I guess, diverse amount of people than I have out here. It's kind of surprising how it happens that way.

Nancy: Yeah. It's not how we sometimes get storied from the outside.

Jace: Yep. Yeah. It's not all just the same exact kind of person. But there's a lot of different types of people like us.

Note: The transcript above has been condensed from its original audio recording to improve the flow and readability of the story.