Volunteer Voices - Sonya Guidry

Sonya Guidry is a plant-walk volunteer at Canaveral National Seashore. She is a second-generation Florida native (born in Daytona Beach) with memories of running the shell-path trails at Turtle Mound long before it became a national park.

Here’s how Sonya describes her decades of life exploring nature in Florida:

My interest in science and nature has been a lifelong venture. Early on, I spent time during the summers observing nature on my mother's family farm on the west side of the state, exploring their limestone cave and even once bringing home a pet skunk. One formative summer was spent exploring the wonders of New Hampshire mountains and woods while my dad prepared my Grandpa's old, spring-fed farmhouse for sale.

Our family moved throughout Florida with the advent of  World War II -- from Daytona Beach, to Jacksonville, the family farm near Crystal River, Auburndale and Winter Haven, where I graduated from high school. 

I graduated from the University of Florida with a bachelor of science degree in education. Dr. Archie Carr and Dr. Eugene Odum were my professors while studying there. I later taught science and biology at a junior high school in Titusville, married a Cajun NASA engineer and while 

taking a child-rearing hiatus, I led nature trail walks at the nature center in Brevard County’s Wuesthoff Park.

In 1980, I retrained for applied science work as a laboratory medical technologist and moved to New Smyrna Beach in 1981, to work at Bert Fish Medical Center for 28 years.

Nature still fascinated me and in the mid-1980s, I joined the Sierra Club and trained to become an outings leader. In the early 1990’s, I joined Florida Native Plant Society’s (FNPS) Volusia Pawpaw Chapter and have been leading native plant field trips since 1994. I also helped organize 20 field trips for two State FNPS Conferences held in Volusia County 2006 and 2016.

My involvement in Canaveral National Seashore began in 2015, when I was coerced into becoming a plant walk volunteer by Wayne Sherman when he caught me “botanizing” for a future field trip at Seminole Rest.

I volunteer in other places, including: four years at the Boys’ and Girls’ Club; helping to maintain public gardens with Pawpaw Chapter FNPS, as well as Park of Honor in South Daytona, Marine Discovery Center, and Mary Harrell Black Heritage Museum’s back-fence garden.

I have also served on land management reviews for the Florida Native Plant Society at Doris Leeper Spruce Creek Preserve, in Palm Bluff, Calif., at Caravelle Ranch Wildlife Management Area in Putnam County, Fla., at Tomoka State Park and Gamble Rogers State Park.

I’ve been blessed to experience flora and fauna around the world, including on: church missions in Guatemala; helping to build a preschool and orphanage in Kenya; traveling with the Sierra Club to Alaska; Earthwatch citizen science expeditions to the Amazonian rainforests of Peru, cloud forest excursions in Costa Rica, and the Himalayan foothills in India.

In addition, I have taken a multi-province botanical excursion in Western China with a retired Stetson University professor; walked 190 miles across England; rafted and hiked in the Grand Canyon; hiked the White Mountains of New Hampshire; paddled 230 miles on the Suwannee River and on many other Florida spring runs and rivers .

The whole world is full of natural wonders and my motivation for leading walks in nature has always been to encourage both children and adults to know and love their environment with the hope they will begin to treasure it and help preserve it. Better yet, through adding native plants to their own home landscapes, they can both attract and begin to explore nature in their own back yards! In mocked disdain, my kids have even referred to me as ”MOTHER Nature!”