The Bears Will Wait

Heading back to the trucks post bear

There are fieldwork days and there are fieldwork days.  Site set-up days are the latter. Full of hauling, and hammering, and organization, all told, our set-ups this trip went pretty smoothly.  At our first, there were 12 of us eager and ready.  I pulled out my flagging tape and forged the path pre-delimited.  We trooped in with raw lumber, t-posts, weather station, electric fence supplies, nails, hammers, chainsaw, sample bags, spectral analysis equipment, water wells, augers, post-pounders, sphagnometers, resin tubes, hose clamps, funnels, nut-drivers, loppers.  Within 30 minutes everyone was smoothly onto jobs most have probably never done before.  It was to hit 31 C this day according to the newly deployed weather station and the horseflies provoked.

Our crew is great.  Our VU contingent is 7 strong – including two new undergrads who are experiencing the wilds up here for the first time.  Spencer and Eric are great additions to our team – they are already comfortable ID-ing Ledum, know leaves on bog rosemary are opposite and not alternate, and can tell Evernia from Usnea.  Power tools, hammers, chainsaws, big trucks – no problems.   I’m proud of everyone.  It has not always gone to plan on this trip, but it never does, and rolling with it and improvising have been and continue to be strengths for us all– qualities all field ecologists need in spades.  Joining our VU crew, the SIU team set up with us, and it was just right.  They are family.

But I digress….   the set up.  I heard a ring.  Jeremy was calling.  The SIU crew had just finished up and had headed to their diesel.  I had one more thing to do in the bog and the VU crew would be right behind them.  Jeremy is calm: “There is a bear in the cutline just hanging out – I don’t mean to be alarmist, but you should know.”  I decided the last thing on my agenda could wait.  I walked out of the bog with Caitlyn to where the crew waited and to where the bear decided to explore.  Eric was yelling at the bear and waving his arms.  Our group tried to look large.  The bear seemed nonplussed.  I hit the airhorn.  The bear just looked at us. Again, with the airhorn - to the point, where it became obvious to me that airhorns are good for notifying your friends that you might be in trouble, but might not be the best at motivating a bear to curb its enthusiasm.  Good to know.  Kel had his bear spray at the ready.  Ten meters away, the bear stared, curious, and ambled, slowly, into the bog. 

That was the second bear of the day for us – the first was a beautiful Cinnamon roused from its grazing near the road.  I personally saw 5 bears this trip – all but the curious one, from the safety of our F-150.  It could be an interesting year.

Jeremy Hartsock took this pic of the Cinnamon from the SIU truck. A Boreal beauty.

It is now 6 C and raining and we are driving back to Athabasca.  Thoughts of snow-tube extraction from Crow Lake niggled at us this past 24 hours or so, but today is not the day.  We have until October and hopefully conditions will be better next trip - or the next - I’m not complaining.  My joints are tired.  I think we are all ready to head home and take a day or two to realign our alternate realities back home;  I know I am.   For now, the bears, bugs, and bogs will have to wait.  The beers, however, will not.  Cheers from Alberta!  

Field Work Time!

A doe and her twins visit and eye us slyly from the yard:  we are their new neighbors at the bottom of the hill that angles sharply up to Athabasca University.  Instead of 18-wheelers and rowdy road workers waking us up in the mornings (last year’s motel fun), I found myself this morning moaning about an industrious woodpecker that roused me a tiny bit too early.  Our digs have improved by orders of magnitude.  Athabasca University has again made our arrival so welcoming; and this summer, we hang our hats in a building they own and maintain.  It is nestled among trees and open space and we are making it our own until our season ends this fall.  The kitchen has a commercial gas stove with 6 burners, two fridges, two sinks, two dishwashers, 1 gas oven, and 2 convection ovens.   Need I say more?  We are living in luxury.  A big shout-out to the folks that have been working so hard to make our arrival such a wonderful experience.

Our crew is arriving in two waves this year.  I am here with 5 other folks and we have been fixing things, settling in, and prepping for the summer.  The second wave arrives on Saturday (two days!) and includes not only a seasoned grad student (hey, Julia!), but also our new crew of field techs who will be experiencing bogs for the first time!  Logistically, it is a tricky thing to balance airport runs, maintenance work, site construction, and isolated research tasks, so this year we decided to mix it up with airport runs.  We look forward to the whole crew’s arrival so we can start the summer fun.  Meanwhile, today, a small group of us are heading up to Fort McMurray to set vegetation growth markers, swap out precipitation collectors for the summer and put together a new site.  We hate to leave our cushy digs in Athabasca, but we look forward to squishing through the bogs.  Our first site up is a bog we call Anzac.  It is one of my favorites. 

This is an image of part of our walk to the site, but we have yet to arrive there-- right now I am in the truck and I am happy to report that we just passed a bear – our first bear of the season!  Construction continues on the road to Fort McMurray and bear sightings along this strip are fewer than they used to be as there is a lot more dust and big construction vehicles to deal with. We will have a very busy day tomorrow as we head into the Fort Mac area where the construction is ridiculous and the air is even more dirty, but we look forward to the work and visiting our old bog friends. 

Welcome to Alberta 2015!!!

An Athabasca Welcome

The 2014 summer field campaign has begun in earnest.   We bring with us spring, which also is just arriving in this northerly part of Alberta -- the leaves are just beginning to show their greens and the rains are cold.  In some ways it is like we never left, but in so many other ways, it is all new territory.  Meanook remains vacant and is no longer really Meanook.  There isn’t much left, and we still mourn…  the Athabasca Lodge Motel is a far cry from the field station.  We miss it very much, but Athabasca University has adopted us and we have been welcomed with so much enthusiasm.  We are wildly grateful for the space that we now struggle to organize and for the abundance of help and welcoming we’ve received.  A huge thanks goes out especially to Elaine Goth-Birkigt without whom we would be completely floundering.  I cannot express how much we appreciate the efforts that continue to be made on our behalf by Elaine and how welcome we feel here at the University by everyone. 

Our new students are doing a wonderful job, and we are all excited to start the field work.  We made it to all of our sites before the rains set in, and as it eases up tomorrow, we will tackle some heavy water transport of our own.  So far so good.  Bring on the fun and the bugs!