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