Business Time
• This was a paid internship (about $20/hour),
with special project funding.
• Minors can work for up to 40 hours/week for the
City of Berkeley, with no overtime. The other interns
opted for about 20 hours a week, but Cesar went
for the whole 40 hours, and worked our arborist
shift of 6:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Well done, kid!
• OSHA requirements on minors are clear for forestry
work. We did pruning only on the ground with young
trees, kept tree climbing experiences recreational/educa-
tional in nature and away from work sites, and observed
any major work from outside of the work zone.
• There was a huge amount of work to get an approved
candidate hired— dozens of forms, fingerprints, parent's
signature, and health clearance. Once we did the inter-
views, we only had a couple weeks to coordinate with the
intern (often by text) to meet and pass along forms.
on the next failed attempt, found a spark of potential
success. His face lit up a bit when he started per-
fecting his technique. The next try, he launched it up
and over a 20-foot-tall (6.1 meter) limb, stood in awe
of his success, then gave me a shrug/smirk look that
expressed, "I did that … but how could I do better?"
We observed a lot of trees over the summer. The
City of Berkeley urban forest contains hundreds of
species, and every direction offered something for
Cesar and me to talk about. At first, I spent most
of my time talking, then asking questions … only
to receive silence. Turns out, he was just thinking.
Later, the answers came fast and furious.
Cesar could handily recall species after species. First
it was our commonly pruned trees, but he quickly
got a handle on the obscure, climate-change-ready
species staged in the nursery. Occasionally, he would
casually point out an odd species, like a
bunya-bunya
(Araucaria bidwillii), he'd read about in
A Californian's
Guide to the Trees among Us by Matt Ritter (assigned
reading for the summer). I would also try to trick him
by, for example, pointing to an American sweetgum
(Liquidambar styraciflua) hiding in the middle of
some red maples (Acer rubrum). I'd asked how he
knew it was sweetgum? He'd just point to the unique
seed pods on the ground and say: "Spiky balls." >>
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