May Days in the Bogs

Posted by Kim

     

What is this?  A new post?  Nothing since last July?   What the what is THAT about?

New computers sometimes don't play nice

Well, I'm here to tell you, things have happened, and things are happening now.  Caitlyn and I are just finishing up the start of the Summer 2019 season and it is good to be back doing field work.  Not too many stories (we've seen snow and bears and monster mosquitoes and some kind of Mustelid and almost hit a Kestrel and saw hawks and ravens galore and broke through ice and changed out 72 resin tubes and set 1500 crank wires), but we surely have had a productive time.  Life is somewhat allergy-ridden here for me in Fort Mac as I type, but we are off to Edmonton by tomorrow eve.  Things just keep on moving.   

Here are some pics:

Would Kel be proud?  mmmmm 

We're on a Mission: On a Mission for Bogs

Tasked with scouting new sites for our project, we were excited to be on our own.  New bogs, here we come!  I love walking through bogs and today we planned to hit several.  The sun was shining, we had Tim Hortons in our bellies, hot tea in the thermos, and noises of Fort McMurray were soon behind us.  Armed with black and white printouts from Google Earth and a sense of adventure we set off southbound with our ‘bog-eyes’ on. 

Every so often, this happens… we expand a project or find a new project and all of a sudden, we’re out driving around in the truck with our boots on ready to stop at every peatland with potential.  We get out, walk around a bit, give it the thumbs up or thumbs down, and move on.  Today we had prepared for a few sites. 

The first bog of the day was out a sandy rutty road which was precariously positioned steps from a very large lake seemingly retained by a small berm… cattails flanked the north side.  It has been dry here for quite some time, so we had no problems; the visual, however, was a bit disturbing.  The bog was also right there on the road – just how we like them.  We stopped and put on our boots with two out of three of us squishing a bit from yesterday’s soakers.  The woods were lovely dark and deep and almost immediately we stumbled upon an animal burrow – something we are unaccustomed to seeing.  The openings – 12-15 cm diameter or so – seemed just right for a mustelid of some kind.  Pretty cool stuff.  Full of puffy feathermoss and big black spruce trees, it was not the bog we were looking for, but it was very pretty and after a bit of exploration, we wished it well.  We moved on:  the piece de resistance was yet to come.

Our big goal that day was a fen-lake-bog islands combo.  We should have known it was going to be trouble.  Step one:  finding the road.  We missed it on first pass because we were informed it was a paved road.  It wasn’t.  That’s ok, we went down another road, instead, and found a whole lotta’ VERY DUSTY bogs that could have been delightful were it not for the choking dust haze squelching everyone’s happiness.  We backtracked and found the correct road.  We check in with the woman who is sitting in her truck all day flagging people down to take their numbers and tally business.  Up and down big hills, over one lane tiny bridges, we pass beautiful landscape and countless Jack Pine forests, Aspen uplands, fens, and little bogs.  We pass very few trucks, and eventually, became the only traffic.  Fifteen miles down the dirt road, we stop on the side of the road and hope against all hope that this is the spot.  We only have our odometer and our satellite imagery at this point, foolishly leaving our gps at home.  There is no cellular service here.  We are in the middle of nowhere.  We can only assume we’ll come on it eventually if we walk south from here.

So, we start in.  Brambles.  Lots and lots of prickly brambles.  I’ve never been so mad at wild roses in my life.  They were mixed in with drooping, criss-crossing, akimbo, skinny, branchy, shrubby crap that morphed into full-fledged willow mess at decreasing elevation.  We were scratched, irritated, and realized we should have brought lunch on this adventure.  With willows came wet.  Sloggy mess morphed into treed sloppy mess with holes ready to take a boot.  Avoid trees, avoid willows, avoid holes, slap at bugs, overheat, repeat.  Finally some boggy parts – hummocks, thank God!  But still willows and still larch now and still sloggy holes and not at all what one might want for a scientific research site that must be accessed 5 times a year.  By now, we were demoralized and quite frankly were growing stupid (save your jokes).  We had done way too much fen tromping, willow avoiding, and bramble broaching and now were too tired to truly explore the innards of the Bog island, but from our vantage, we saw big ole’ larch overhead much farther in (in bog parlance, again…. No bueno).  We headed back hoping to find a better route.  

We found cutlines in the fen, so knew where we were and tried a more bee-lined approach to the road.  It took us, eventually, to a beautiful – and I mean BEAUTIFUL – forest of spruce so dense, it shaded out the world.  There were no vasculars in the understory, but Pleurozium moss carpeted the floor.  Everything was covered with it.  We had found what appeared to be a two species forest.  I’m sure there were more species there, but you get the idea.  It was dark and calm and beautiful and amazing.  We sighed a sigh, calmed our brains, and gathered our strength for tackling the brambles to come.  At the edge, Ledum of unusual size appeared, and willows began anew.   We had definitely found a much better way to scale the upland.  Everything seemed better on the way out.  Shockingly, we popped out AT OUR TRUCK.  Amazing.  We filled our water bottles, breathed the air, ate apples, and made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the tailgate.  Deer crossed the road, we recovered, and looked at each other with relief.

We had an adventure filled memory-making day.   I'm sure there are many to come.  Happy return to field season, everyone!

Our Endless and Proper Work

Posted by Kim

There is a deep grey to the gloam this morning and it is likely to rain today here for a bit.  Snow for tomorrow.  Snow yesterday. Snow likely today somewhere.  It has been cold.  But today is Thanksgiving, and we will celebrate it warmly even if first we venture out with toe-warmers at the ready.  Crow Lake is on the docket for today and it is full of treachery. 

We polled last night and it has won the Site-Least-Liked award.  Crow Lake burned around 2000 and so the trees that died then are akimbo, losing their vertical.  The peat has lost integrity producing pools in which many boots are lost: soakers, we call them and sometimes they come in quick succession pulling both boots off unsuspecting undergraduates.  You stop.  You pull your boot(s) out of the dark sodden hole.  You pour the water out, hope for the best, and move on.  The walk into the site from the road is also quite terrible and we’ve lost two folks up to their armpits.   We now are very aware of where that hole lives. 

In contrast, we have two beautifully green and vibrant sites near Wabasca, Alberta – a short drive from Athabasca where our base of operations remains for now.  I have grown to love them both.  The oldest of our sites, Wabasca old, is full of surprises and, as far as bogs go, is pretty diverse.  The trees are dense, which made plot layout a challenge, and this trickles down to me wandering around almost every time I’m there to make sure I’m at the right spot.  Mosses run roughshod over fallen trees and climb up living trees making the spruce throw out new roots in order to survive.  It is a silent battle out there that hardly anyone sees or understands, but we speak some of the language and we try to listen and learn. 

Field work is a comfort to me (even though I may grumble about the cold or the bugs or the snow or the rain) and I have missed it this summer.  It is good to be back in the field and among the mosses so plenty. I’m reminded of a ditty written by Mary Oliver.  This is but a bit of it:

The green mosses, being so many, are as good as brawny.

How important it is to walk along, not in haste but slowly,

looking at everything and calling out

Yes! No! The

swan, for all his pomp, his robes of grass and petals, wants

only to be allowed to live on the nameless pond. The catbrier
is without fault. The water thrushes, down among the sloppy
rocks, are going crazy with happiness. Imagination is better
than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless
and proper work.  

Happy Thanksgiving to especially our Canadian friends.

The Smell of Fort McMurray in the Morning

Posted by:  Kim

Welcome to Field Season 2017!

    Starting it off with a bang, Kel and I are tackling Fort McMurray sites and doing a fine job of it.  No bugs, no rain, no sun, no problem.  Actually, there were bits of each of those things today, but we weren't counting.  Day one went great and we look forward to tomorrow's adventure.   
 Sorry for the tease, but I'm making this short and sweet.  We have some planning to do for tomorrow and some good Fort McMurray food to find for dinner.  We'll have plenty to talk about soon.  It has been too long.  We've all missed the mosses and I'm excited to share scoop on our summer plans and what has been going on over the winter.     For now, I can assure you - the mosses are still here and it makes me happy to be walking among them - so lavish and green.

      

MacGyver's Occam's Razor

Posted by:  Kim 

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them” –Albert Einstein

As a rule, I think the training of field ecologists needs to include some creative problem solving instruction.  Thinking outside the box is often required and is an excellent life skill in general.  For us, the 2-3.5 hour drives to our sites with very little available to us once we leave Meanook, encourage both thinking ahead and thinking on the fly…  it is a long drive back if you forget something, or if a problem arises that you must fix on-site.  We have no electricity, very few gas-stations, and a host of unknowns every time we go out.  It is good to be prepared.  For example, I was cleaning out my field pack this morning and the contents include:   rain jacket, rain pants, 2 spare resin tubes, sunscreen, 2 headnets, granola bar, 4 sharpies, 1 pen, 2 pencils, one notebook, duct tape, electrical tape, 2 flathead screwdrivers, 2 nutdrivers, 1 blue Juice multi-tool, 5 zip ties, an adjustable wrench, 1 Loupe on a BIOGEOMON lanyard, a pair of work gloves, a pair of lab gloves, a tape measure, light in the rain matches, chemical hand warmers, a bandanna  1 carabiner knife, one baseball hat, electric fence insulators for both t-posts and tree-posts, nails, a three-way-stop-cock, flagging tape, a crank-wire setter, tissues, 4 band-aids, stretchy medical tape, lip balm, and an orange.   This motley assortment of gear has been getting me through the days.

That said, sometimes you think you are ready for a situation, and you find that you are not.  There are occasions when even in the safety of our lab back at the field station, sometimes the simplest solution is the best solution.  Two days ago, a time-sensitive project involved grinding over 150 very small samples of peat into a fine powder over a very short period of time.  Our fancy $1500 glorified coffee grinder, it turns out, is rebellious and needs 10 minutes of rest for every minute it works.  And to boot, for such small samples, it wasn’t very talented.  Lazy and inefficient, the grinder was a frustration.  We were spinning for solutions.  The mortar and pestles had all burned in the fire two falls ago, there were none in Athabasca, and golf balls and kitchen bowls were too frictionless to do anything useful.  After 6 hours of using blunt ends of hand tools to rub peat through screens overlaying sieves, our arms and hands suffered, but we were making progress.  Unable to continue to grip the knife sharpener we procured from the kitchen, achiness forced new innovations.  Why we didn’t think of it sooner is beyond me, but simply squeezing and rubbing the samples between our gloved fingers and then sifting it through the three layers of screening was the solution we’d been struggling for for days.  Who needs expensive equipment?  Who needs even small hand tools?  All we really needed was ourselves for perfectly homogenized peat powder.  Gloved hands:  $2.50.  Sweat equity:  $0.  Ground moss:  Priceless.

And so while many of our colleagues are based out of labs and run electricity to their sites and go home at the end of the day, Meanook is our summer home, we drive all over creation, we tough it out, and we MacGyver.  That is what we do.  We take pride in knowing we can handle much. We know Home-Depots like the backs of our hands, can drive quads, use chain saws, run pumps, use fire hose and sprayers, navigate mud-slop in 4WD, and safely man power tools.  We are electricians, plumbers, carpenters, lawyers, writers, scientists, students, and we know how to hammer.  We are ecologists. 

Work updates:  Plot layout- complete!  Fertilizations have begun.  Installation of collars, and resin tubes,  and water samplers, and crank wires is all in progress.  Science is happening.   Along the way, flowers are in bloom, and we’ve all seen bears out our fast-moving truck windows.  Most of us have seen moose, coyote, snowshoe hares, sand hill cranes and a host of other wildlife that keep us occupied on our travels.