Adios, Maine!

Sorry for the lack of post recently, but we’ve really kicked the course into high gear this week.  I’ll be home tomorrow around 4:00 p.m. and leave early Tuesday morning for sunny, schvitzy Costa Rica.

Monday, as mentioned, was dedicated to birds.  Getting up early was no fun and we stopped a lot to listen for birdcalls whilst getting eaten alive by skeeters and black flies.  It got better after breakfast.  We took a drive to Petit Manan and hiked out to the shore to look at herring gull behavior, which amounted to a relaxing recline on the boulder beach with some binoculars.  We had a free afternoon and got a lesson in R from Cory, the resident expert on all things statistical.

Tuesday turned out to be our last field day and one of the most enjoyable.  We drove back out to Acadia National Park and began the morning by climbing Acadia Mountain in search of scrub oak, which reaches its northern limit in the park.  Might have lost the group for a while as I jetted up to the especially picturesque summit.  Took a quick napzies in the sun and went back down to find the “stragglers” working on the set up of a scrub oak plot.  This plot was pretty cozy as a ledge overlooked the entire thing, making estimation of cover rapid and comfortable.

After summing up things at the plot, I practically dragged folks up to the summit and we took this group picture.  Ran down the mountain to the car.  Drove down the road a little bit to Eagle Lake at one of the carriage road parking lots.  The Acadia carriage roads were funded by John D. Rockefeller, an avid carriage man, between 1913 and 1941 in the pursuit of getting away from the noise, hustle and bustle of automobiles.  The roads remain up kept in the same spirit today.

We walked up one of the roads with a search in mind again.  We wanted to find red pine and typical northern hardwoods plots.  Of course, we succeeded.  My team took the hardwood plot and it was really awesome.  A great soil profile and thirteen tree species (!), a record for this course.  The skies opened up as we finished up the last items and we got a little soak on the run back to the cars.

Before checking out Bar Harbor, we did our last plot (ever!) in a pure red oak stand.  I did an extensive search for the elusive chestnut oak, but couldn’t find the little bugger.  In Bar Harbor (Bahhhh Hahhhhbaahhh), I was naturally attracted to the local outfitter.  They carry many sizes of Crocs, but no 13’s.  I bought a waterproof trail map anticipating my return to the park.

Note: I finished my papers before everyone else – weird – we have an 11:59 p.m. deadline…I finished at 9:13 p.m….quite uncharacteristic.

Well that was two days…Wednesday I gathered all the samples for my individual project and later in the day we met the Blueberry Baron himself, Fred Olday.  In reality, Fred is a researcher at Cherryfield Foods, who operate 10,000 acres of low bush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium) fields in Downeast Maine.  Fred agreed to meet us up in Columbia Falls for a tour and history of Maine’s low bush blueberry industry.  Low bush berries are much unlike the high bush berries you’re used to from the produce department.  They are much smaller and have higher antioxidant content.  Ninety percent of the crop is packaged for processing pies, yogurts and countless other delicacies.  That night I did water displacement to get volumes for my 90 samples.

Thursday = work.  Made graphs, ordinated, weighed dry samples, wrote papers and goofed around a fair amount.  I thought about the art project, but got nothing accomplished.

Today is crunch day.  I’m still the only person not working on my papers (mind-boggling).  Wrote and did ordination all morning.  After lunch I did my art project and I think it came out pretty cool.  Later on, we did a tour of the largest art gallery this side of the Hudson, mainly because Polik’s was located on the beach.  When we returned from our hour-long tour of art pieces, we did individual project presentations right up until dinner.  I test drove Keynote for this presentation and it definitely has superior aesthetics (especially 3D transitions) to Powerpoint.

And that gets us here.  Hope y’all enjoyed sparse information about EEB 452 – Field Ecology!  Four days and I’ll be writing you from the rain forest.  Thanks for reading!

BP

Surf & Turf

Hella busy day, but I took a bunch of pictures so there will be no boring post today.  Yesterday afternoon, I went out and cored 13 trees of which, six were paper birch, six red maples and one red spruce.  Chopped ‘em and bagged ‘em, which was worthwhile practice for the project in Costa Rica.  We just got a new balance that takes grams to the thousands place, so I’ve yet to begin measurements, but will tomorrow.

We all stayed up past midnight last night playing Egyptian Ratscrew and a home brewed Scategories.  No answers matched the genius of Steven’s “Ku Klux Klan outfit” for the letter K and category of “Things you keep hidden.”  I also lost pretty badly.  Up early for breakfast the next morning and soon after that we were off to Beals, Maine. 

Our first stop was Great Wass Island, a preserve owned by The Nature Conservancy.  On the way, the other car spotted a baby moose galloping alongside the road, but somehow we missed it.  The imitations were priceless.  At GWI, we hiked two miles out to the especially picturesque coast.  Here’s a group picture of everyone on the shore.

Apparently there’s a cabin on the shore where a summer intern gets to stay.  Good thing to look into for some of y’all.

We headed back inland after a granola bar and some exploring.  We did a series of three inventory plots beginning with a jack pine crest and heading down to a bog/heath area.  Today came with the most beautiful weather of the trip; 70 and sunny.  Good deal of sunburn and sweat to go with.

After eating lunch (fried chicken!) (in the field!) in the parking lot, we moved onto the Jonesport bog around 2:00 p.m.  Turned out to be right behind a high school and the biggest bog any of us had ever been in.  Check out the picture of some serious boggin’.  We did another three plots, bringing the total to 30, 8 more than the course four years ago.  Our second to last plot amounted to everyone laying down on the bog and me trying to shout out species and get cover estimate.  A boggin’ good time.

On the ride home we stopped at the blueberry, see the picture.  Made a b-double e-double-r-u-n in Millbridge before dinner.  Tomorrow we’ll be up at 5:00 a.m. to go look (?) at birds…myeaah.  I find birds pretty boring with the exceptions of penguins and when they kill each other (see old post, “Ornitocido”).  After that, we still have to begin data analysis and I need to process my wood samples and take more before the end of the week. 

At dinner we discussed obscure MFA candidate exhibits.  Mostly naked pictures and bodily fluids.  If you have time check this out (nothing to do with naked pictures or bodily fluids):

http://gizmodo.com/393165/the-biggest-drawing-in-the-world-created-with-the-help-of-gps-and-dhl

Nine days until Costa Rica, another nice weather day tomorrow, bed time now to get up super early.

BP

Lions, Tigers and Bears

Oh my!  So when you do a lot of standing around in national parks and other “pristine” areas there’s bound to be exciting wildlife encounters.  On the Petit Manan peninsula back on Tuesday we saw two porcupines and a bald eagle.  Yesterday we visited the Schoodic Point section of Acadia National Park and I saw a rabbit.  The other team saw a dead beaver and a grouse.  Hopefully there’s more to come. 

The majority of work we’re doing here in Maine are the previously mentioned inventory plots.  The meat of this process is marking out a square plot and identifying every vascular plant occurring there.  Luckily, we’re not in the tropics or we could spend a week in each plot.  I’ve become pretty good at identifying most of the trees with the exception of spruces and moderately adept at common shrubby and herbaceous species.  We also record data on environmental characteristics including latitude/longitude, soil profile, elevation, and surface characteristics.  The goal is to show interrelatedness between species, plots and their environmental conditions through ordination.

That was boring…but now we don’t have to talk about it anymore.  Through today, we’ve completed 24 plots, two more than the class four years ago that came here did in two weeks.  We’ve done plots in bogs, on headlands, on mountains, on slopes and in swamps.  There’s been as few as three species and as many as forty. 

On Wednesday we had a big ole Maine lobster dinner.  We have family style meals, and for the most part we’re the only people here.  Like La Selva, they have a busy season in June/July with seminars and courses coming in and out.  Thursday was a long day on Mount Desert Island.  We did six plots on Cadillac and in Acadia Wild Gardens followed by a little break in Bar Harbor.  Got a coffee and a blueberry scone. 

Sorry for the lack of chronologic organization.  Yesterday there was a truck on the only road out of the station.  So we broke in and pushed it out of the way, see the picture.  We went to the local meat market and unfortunately, they’ve cracked down on game/bush meat and it’s not as easy to find moose these days.

Today is individual project day.  Now it’s going to be individual project afternoon following lunch.  Tomorrow we’re reportedly going to a really big bog and then Monday morning we’re looking at birds, maybe.  It seems that John is making this course up as we go.  We have to make an art project out of nature, using Andy Goldsworthy as inspiration. 

Only ten days until Costa Rica…oh boy!

BP

Downeast

Welcome back to my summer blog!  This time last year I was getting acquainted with 85 degrees and 90 percent humidity, but currently I’m in chilly Downeast Maine on a graduate field course, Field Ecology.  Before I get into juicy (not) details, here’s the grand plan: in Maine until Saturday, May 31st (should be home mid-late afternoon) followed by a few days of laundry and catching up and on to Costa Rica the morning of June 3rd.  The plan is to return on August 11th, which is followed by the MCAT on August 15th.  Quite a packed summer…

The goal is not to scare folks away with uncontrollably long posts, so I’ll try to pack the most interesting stuff into the fewest paragraphs. 

We left for Maine on Sunday from UConn, we being five graduate students (Sarah, Leslie, Vanessa, Cory, and Pat), three undergrads (Bianca, Polik, and yours truly), our TA Bryan and professor John Silander.  We’re staying at the Humboldt Field Research Institute aka Eagle Hill on one of the peninsulas sticking down on the Downeast coastline called Dyer Neck.  We’re an hour’s drive up the coast from Bar Harbor/Acadia National Park and 6.5 hours from Storrs.

So…we had to fill out a little questionnaire about dietary and rooming preferences, one of the questions being, “Do you snore?”  Thanks to my wonderful roommates and some enticing videos, I answered “yup.”  Therefore, upon arrival I was given a “special room,” which amounts to a single…in a building 50 yards from everyone else.

On Tuesday we headed over to the Petit Manan National Wildlife Refuge located on the peninsula just West of Dyer Neck.  That’s Bianca, Cory, Vanessa and myself with our backs to the Mighty Atlantic after doing an inventory plot in a heath bog…hehe, bog.  In the distance is Mount Desert Island.  Weather = windy.

More to come on what exactly I’m doing in Maine and what I will be doing in Costa Rica, when you should come visit me and chase after monkeys, and wonderful anecdotes from the Downeast Maine cultural immersion…

BP