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Rocaforest
There are some huge trees hanging around in Humboldt Redwoods State Park. These were in Rockefeller Forest.
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24 hours of madness
I decided that I needed to know what happens in a deep pool in the stream. Not just what happens, but what happens throughout the day, and in 5 different locations: the inlet, the outlet, 4 meters deep, 1.75 meters deep and 40cm deep. I managed to get almost three hours of sleep in-between sampling.
Base camp:
Honestly, I was afraid of the dark. It was very dark, very, very dark. There are cougars, and bears. I had three strategies for cougar/bear defense:
Of course, the kayak felt like the safest place to be, but there was no way I was going to try to take a nap on it.
6am: first light. Between 4am and 6am I went from being able to see the milky way, to not needing a headlamp.
This is the Geopump, I use it to suck water up from the depths. I think it's kind of cute.
Morning on the stream is beautiful, but then so are all the other times of day. I would know, I was there.
Evening upstream. This is the boardwalk to Walker Meadow, just upstream of my pool.
10pm. The last sampling. As I'm heading out bats swoop down in front of the kayak skimming the surface of the water for insects.
Base camp:
Honestly, I was afraid of the dark. It was very dark, very, very dark. There are cougars, and bears. I had three strategies for cougar/bear defense:
- Light, and more light. I used a lantern and a headlamp. The lantern formed a bubble of safety around me, and acted as a beacon, so I knew where to land the kayak.
- noise - I whistled, and I sang. Oddly enough, the only song I could think of was Neil Young's "Hey, Hey, My, My (Into the Black)"
- Scent marking. Yeah, every time I had to pee I helped build an invisible barrier. Maybe.
Of course, the kayak felt like the safest place to be, but there was no way I was going to try to take a nap on it.
6am: first light. Between 4am and 6am I went from being able to see the milky way, to not needing a headlamp.
This is the Geopump, I use it to suck water up from the depths. I think it's kind of cute.
Morning on the stream is beautiful, but then so are all the other times of day. I would know, I was there.
Evening upstream. This is the boardwalk to Walker Meadow, just upstream of my pool.
10pm. The last sampling. As I'm heading out bats swoop down in front of the kayak skimming the surface of the water for insects.
Into the Jungle [updated]
I helped with the fish survey yesterday. The fish survey is an effort to understand where steelhead salmon are, how many of them, how big, and what they eat. We hiked an hour up Elder to Misery, which wasn't entirely miserable. A lot of the trail wasn't really a trail, some people like to call it a deer path, but that's a lie. I can't imagine deer using the path. We had to scamper over and under trees, pull away branches covered in spiderwebs, and hop across boulders. It felt like I was in an Indiana Jones movie, totally covered in cob webs and collecting little bugs like they were worth their weight in gold. And they'll probably cost much more than their weight in gold to analyze.
Electro-fishing is electro-awesome! The light was getting low, but this really was an action sport. I'm thinking about getting one and starting a magazine, "Recreational Electro-fisher." Electro-fishing uses a battery and transformer to send pulses of current into the water. You use a wand (anode), and a braided steel wire (cathode) trails behind. The pulses of current between the anode and cathode send the fish into convulsions, and they often swim towards the anode, where you scoop them up with a net. Fish are unharmed when used correctly.
Ferry to Kingston
As long as you're going to leave your research site in the middle of nowhere for a week, you might as well have your lovely girlfriend meet you. Everyone took a week off to escape the wildfire smoke that has been smothering us for the last three weeks. I made it to Seattle, where my generous friends have been hosting me. Em and I decided to borrow a car and head to Port Townsend on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. After waiting in a very long line of cars for more than an hour we got to board the ferry to Kingston. From Kingston it was an hour to Port Townsend where we ate some lunch and visited Fort Warden State Park, AKA where "An Officer and a Gentleman" was filmed.
Stream life
I found these eggs in the stream while I was incubating some bags of leaves. I have no idea what they are, but they were pretty.
Get the big picture on the wildfires
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/07/californias_continuing_fires.html
Seventeen gorgeous pictures of the fires and fighting efforts across California.
Seventeen gorgeous pictures of the fires and fighting efforts across California.
An Oasis
This little plant is a morning oasis. The tiny hairlike trichomes covering the leaves collect dew and support a little community of insects.
Oops! Did I dye the river red?
I dumped 5ml (about two teaspoons) of 20% Rhodamine WT into Jack of Hearts stream. It was awesome. The stream turned red and pink. Don't worry though, Rhodamine WT is designed and EPA approved for this purpose. It's just that I used about 10x too much.
Field Day
Did I mention it was smoky? To our eyes the sun was a bright red ball of fire, and a sure sign the apocalypse was near.
California Coast north of Fort Bragg
I love the ocean. Here's my favorite little beach, just north of Fort Bragg around sunset. The full size image is amazing, check it out!
Thunder!
It's the craziest, most backwards thing. Two nights ago we had these clouds roll in, then lightning! It rained for about 20 seconds, nothing even got wet. We heard thunder until 10 yesterday morning. The messed up part is that our little rain storm resulted in more fire than water. There are fires burning and smoldering north of us. The air is visibly smoky, and people with asthma are supposed to stay indoors for the next two days. We're not in much danger of fire, but this is the first time I've experienced a thunderstorm that left me dryer than before it came.
Junebugs Mating
The female sits in a little hole in the dust and dirt and the male flies around trying to locate her by scent. He eventually lands somewhere in the vicinity of the female and bumbles his way towards her. If he's lucky, he's the first one there. When it's over, the female quickly ducks back down her little hole.
University of Minnesota EZProxy Bookmarklet
Are you a student, staff or faculty member at the University of Minnesota? Do you ever find yourself at a webpage of a journal publisher, when you realize you haven't gone in through the Libraries system, and the publisher won't give you access to the full text? All you have to do is make a bookmark with this code:
When you find yourself at a page requiring authorization through the University Libraries, just click your new bookmark and it will ask you to login (if you're not already) before sending you back to the correct page, fully authorized! Of course, it will only work if the Library has itself purchased access to the articles. But it's great when you follow a link in a news story to Nature and want to read the real deal.
javascript:location.href='http://floyd.lib.umn.edu/login?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)When you find yourself at a page requiring authorization through the University Libraries, just click your new bookmark and it will ask you to login (if you're not already) before sending you back to the correct page, fully authorized! Of course, it will only work if the Library has itself purchased access to the articles. But it's great when you follow a link in a news story to Nature and want to read the real deal.
Sink Frogs
So I walk into the bathroom, which is basically an outhouse with plumbing, and these frogs are sitting in the overflow drain holes of the sink. They didn't even flinch as I took their pictures, or washed my hands. I guess there are plenty of bugs and no snakes in the bathroom. Yet.
Starry night
Try viewing a large version of this photo by clicking on it. You should be able to see some stars, and just the slightest hint of star trails. The Moon is nearly full, so I'm expecting werewolves to come hunt down some of the bambis that have been prancing around the meadow like they own the place. The point is, when the moon is new, I'll take some pictures and try to get the Milky Way.
A typical evening at the fire
This is one way to relieve tedium: fire and beer. I asked John to play "rockin' in the free world", because I was getting sick of hearing sad folky songs. He said it was the first time he knew a song someone requested; i helped him sing it.
Box of goodies
Lately I've been doing a lot of this: labeling small plastic bottles, filling them with water and freezing them. I'm going to thaw some of them out in a week and run ammonia on them. The others are going to be next day shipped to Minnesota on dry ice, so that I can spend all of fall semester analyzing them.
Science is tedious, the trick is finding a tedium you can stand.
Science is tedious, the trick is finding a tedium you can stand.
If the countryside is not green it is dying
I knew that California has a Mediterranean climate. I know that means cool wet winters and warm dry summers. I know how important that may be for the evolution of grains. But I didn't really know what that means.
- John Steinbeck - East of Eden
"But Adam, looking out over his dry dust-obscured land, felt the panic the Eastern man always does at first in California. In a Connecticut summer two weeks without rain is a dry spell and four a drought. If the countryside is not green it is dying. But in California it does not ordinarily rain at all between the end of May and the first of November. The Eastern man, though he has been told, feels the Earth is sick in the rainless months."
- John Steinbeck - East of Eden
The end of a long day (with incubations)
Science is tiring. The boxes behind me contain 16 2-liter flasks full of filtered stream water plus a bacterial inoculant. I'm going to track the concentrations of various forms of nitrogen and carbon of the course of two weeks to determine how much of it is usable by bacteria. At the end of the two weeks I'll have hundreds of small vials of frozen water that will keep me busy for quite a while. And of course, it doesn't end there. I have a few other things I'm going to try to do with the water left over, because with science, there's always something else you can do.
Filtered samples for ammonium analysis
After filtering water for hours I took 40ml from each site to analyze for ammonium, a form of nitrogen that bacteria, algae and plants prefer. I also saved another 60ml to send back to minnesota to analyze for nitrate and total nitrogen. Using these numbers I'll be able to estimate the relative importance of different forms of nitrogen for the stream food web.
Filtering water samples
At the bottom of this picture you can see the top of a flask, with a rubber stopper and a brown plastic funnel on top of that. The flask has a nozzle on the side that I use to vacuum water through a filter in the brown nozzle. The filter blocks anything larger than 0.7µm, smaller than a typical bacterium, and about the same size as the wavelength of red light. Small!
Field work!
Yesterday I went to seven sites, spent 4 hours collecting 32 liters of water. This was at the South Fork Eel near Ten Mile Creek. We missed the turnoff on the path and ended up a ways up Ten Mile. Finding our way back to the Eel took 45 minutes and felt like an Indiana Jones adventure, but without the mysticism.
Mendocino Ocean View
This was a nice bay at the headlands in Mendocino. I thought Mendo was going to be big, but it's kind of the Bayfield, WI of the north coast. In this photo you can see pretty flowers in the foreground, and giant kelp in the bay. It was beautiful and windy, and I got cell phone reception.
Tide Pool
Every so often we take a day off to buy groceries and interact with the rest of the world. Sunday we went to Fort Bragg, explored the tide pools, watched seals work on their tans and point at interesting flora and fauna.
Solar Shower (outdoors)
This has to be the finest shower ever made. Excellent water pressure, water temperature, and a great view. Shower in the afternoon, work on your tan; shower at night, gaze at the stars. Seriously, anyone who visits me can experience this beauty.
The White House
This is an old house, long abandoned on reserve property. Someone came and stole the antique furnishings out of it a few years ago. It's not very white these days. Would you like to donate money to renovate it, maybe a new white wash?
The South Fork Eel River
This is it, this is the South Fork Eel River, this is what all of the excitement is all about. Isn't it pretty?
The local environment
The interior of my abode:
My back yard:
Yeah, it really is that beautiful!
My front yard:
If you look closely, you may notice a deer in the background. The deer here haven't been hunted by humans in over 70 years, so they aren't too concerned. It's weird.
If you look closely, you may notice a deer in the background. The deer here haven't been hunted by humans in over 70 years, so they aren't too concerned. It's weird.
My back yard:
Yeah, it really is that beautiful!
Not Minnesota
California is not Minnesota. This became incredible obvious as we drove up 101 from San Francisco. Annual grasslands, vineyards, alcohol in grocery stores, redwoods, small deer, oh and of course mountains.
I'm currently attempting to heat the lodge (not pictured) with a small wood burning stove. It's not working very well.
Current Temp: 11C
Mostly Sunny
Altitude 407m
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