Veg Picking Doldrums

I heard on NPR the other day that Moscow had its darkest month ever recorded with only 6 minutes of sunshine for the entire month of December, 2017. This, down from an average of 18 hours of sunshine/month. I’m having a hard time imagining either scenario.  That said, it has felt terribly dreary this winter with some pretty serious cold temps keeping us inside a lot of the time.  Our inside winter jobs have kept us busy in our pursuit to finally catch up on a backlog of samples and as the lab chugs along and the days grow longer, we start thinking about the upcoming field season.

We will have a busy field season, and I think I can speak for us all when I say that we look forward to getting outside into the wilds and out of our veg cleaning doldrums.   

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.

Science On

Thanks, Kelly, for your great update yesterday!   Athabasca has been our home for a long long time and I look forward to joining Kelly and Hope on Tuesday to start our field season.  Our hearts go out to the people of Fort McMurray, many of whom still do not know if they have homes still standing or a place to return to.  They all wait for word that they can head back to Fort McMurray to see what the fire has left them.

We, too, await word.  We are starting our field season, and it is shaping up to be an odd and possibly treacherous one.  Field work, in general, trends to the tenuous, and we have had to wait to get up to some of our sites before because of fire, but this year is beyond precedent.  We have two sites that may have burned.  We won’t know until we show up.  One is just south of the airport and one is just north of Anzac.  The MODIS satellite imagery has them both questionable. Our sites are the green dots in purple lettering.

Two of our bogs (green dots) amid a see of yellow, orange, and red dots indicating age of fire with red being most recent...  Image was taken off Google Earth May 5th.  The fire has spread into and off the borders of this image since.

This fire season is already in full swing and it is only May.  This year it officially started in March, and since then, the area has seen 30+C weather and a paucity of rain.  The fire threat is Extreme for all of our field sites currently, and the Fort McMurray fire is still burning, and, as of this morning, is just over 251,000 hectares large with several areas still out of control.  There are currently over 1,000 firefighters and firefighting personnel, 134 pieces of heavy equipment, 39 helicopters, and 11 airtankers working on this wildfire, alone.  It remains impressive and devastating and we are holding our collective breath.

All this being said, we are still looking forward to the new field season and I’m excited to get the crew together to start our work this year in the Boreal.  We return to the house where we were last year, and are lucky to do so.  Our colleagues have not been so lucky – some of whom have lost houses in Fort Mac or the ability to get up to the area to do any of their research.  At least we have several projects still in unburned areas and we can start our work.  I expect there may be some camping happening in the Fort Mac area this summer, as housing will be terribly tight.

We will be sure to keep an eye and nose to the sky and earth as we roll from site to site this summer - especially paying close attention to where we park hot trucks.  Bogs tend to hold onto fire deep into the peat, and so we will be vigilant and mindful of the potential for fires everywhere.   For now, we will do our best to keep the science moving forward.  Sites have burned in the past and sites will burn again in the future and there is always room for more questions to be answered.  So…. With that in mind: 

 Science on, crew!  

We hope to be diligent about our updates this year, so stay tuned!







Posted by Kim

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.