Field Book of an Ecologist

A little earlier, a little wetter

I'm back at Angelo Coast Range Reserve for four weeks. About ten days ago there was a massive rain storm, the biggest of the winter. It was a little later than usual. Things are green, which is surprising. The water levels are high, but receding quickly. I'm looking forward to how this is affecting the stream ecosystem. The rain brought enough water to scour some of the stream bed, and it might have flushed out a bunch of nutrients from the watershed.

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:

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.