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I feel like live for the mornings these days. Before moving to Hjelm House, I spent the early hours avoiding the dew that descends upon the road every morning. It’s not easy being a caterpillar in the wilds of Kensington, Minnesota. I have lived here my whole life, so I suppose that’s all I know. But recently, as I watch the flower children begin to leave (Taylor, sweet girl how I miss thee), my grippy feet get itchy and I long to see the greater world. Perhaps you will find me in Rhode Island, hidden amongst Ben’s clothing this Sunday.
But I shall not digress further. This flog post is dedicated to my day today. Not the day that I sneak into Ben’s bag and travel to Rhode Island. Nor the day when I move in to the third room in Danny and Amy’s apt. Ali has briefly left her computer unattended, and I have decided to flog in her stead, to describe to you loyal followers what I did today.
Today the flower children arrived as they usually do, piling out of the car holding containers of rotting leaves and vegetable matter. I have yet to understand why they do this, but as they joyfully make their way from their cars toward the garden, I long to follow them into the eden of vegetable matter that they must be headed toward. They all sat around the table, shivering like the wimps they are (I find the weather beautiful for sitting on leaves) and giggled at each other sleepily.
Another, more official looking flower person emerged from the house and smiled at the flower children. He promised them warmth later in the day, and told them in the mean time they could venture out to pee as well. As I watched them leave the porch, I visualized what they would be doing during our separation. I wondered why the flowers must be measured in this strange “P Two” location. I wished to ask why they measured the plants rather than immediately eating them. I knew that the numbers were important however, because when they returned for lunch, they spoke excitedly of finishing measuring almost all of the densest section of “Pea Too.”
As they ate their lunch I ate around another leaf. I have been constantly eating since these humans brought me to Hjelm House. They have provided for me very well. After lunch, they sent one of the children off on his own, to collect flags from Hegg Lake. Before that boy left, I tried to get his attention to tell him to say “hi” to Auntie Ellis for me. She flew out to Hegg with a young ‘pillar from down the block last summer. I haven’t seen her since, but think of her fondly. The other children went to the Landfill for a demo. What sort of demo was going on at a Landfill. Perhaps, the gulls will demonstrate how to collect snacks from the garbage piles. But the flower children brought their visors to collect data on, so something tells me that it isn’t the kind of demo that the gulls or I would be interested in.
Four of the girls stayed back near me. Two of them wandered out to move the aphids around from one Echinacea plant to another. Two other girls brought sheets of paper labeled “Q3 data sheets” to paint Echinacea flowers. Before I moved to the house, I saw them painting, out near the road I lived on. I overheard them saying that they were painting to ensure that the put the pollen on the correct anthers on the Echinacea flowers. I don’t understand why these humans don’t trust the bees to carry out pollination. They bees have done this job for so long, and these children have fingers as large as my body– how could they properly transfer the pollen?
At the end of the day, as I was minding my own business, one girl took my picture (I will post it below).
They wonder at my size, saying that I look too big to be a normal caterpillar. One of them even said sarcastically that I was the larval stage of an Eagle. I found that to be ridiculous, and frankly a little sizest.
I have enjoyed my time reporting to you about my day. But Ali approaches, and she looks eager to use her computer and I should begin the walk back to Hjelm House so that the children don’t find out that I left my yogurt container on the porch. It’s a long crawl back, but don’t worry about me, I’ll be just fine.
Till next time,
Ricky The Caterpillar
 Gina rudely interrupts my meal
This morning, Team Echinacea was awakened by a text message from Stuart saying that we would be starting an hour later than usual. Then we were awakened 4 more times by texts from Danny. He wanted to tell us good morning and also that we would be starting an hour later. He also told us he was excited for the extra hour of sleep. Then finally, he apologized because none of those texts were actually meant for our group message.
It was raining really hard this morning, just like it has been for what seems like forever. Most people did computer work. Gina and I continued our statistical analysis on our aphid addition/exclusion data. The rain finally stopped around lunch time, so after lunch we were able to go out to the remnants and do demography.
Ben works in windy conditions at ON27. Amy and Katherine work on demography at RRX. We finished off the day by weeding the rest of the trefoil on the roadside near P1. Will discovered his love for the new tool called the garden knife. We saw a bald eagle while walking back to the Hjelm house at the end of the day and they told me I have to flog about it. So this flog post is dedicated to that bald eagle.
While just last Friday we were straining under the heat and humidity and dripping sweat onto our visors as we pushed through field work, today was one of the coldest days of the summer so far and had us bundled up in our flannels, rain coats, and wool socks.
We started off the frigid morning going over the demography protocol before all heading out as a team to Steven’s Approach and Aanenson to give it a try. A newly-organized g3 helped things run smoothly as we got ready to head out. (As promised in yesterday’s post, here’s a picture featuring g3 as it’s never been seen before!)
 Ben revels in the beauty that is g3. Tubs are now labeled and color-coded. Out in the field, Stuart made sure that we got some “active searching” practice as we tried to find plants that had been missed back in the days of phenology (i.e. a couple weeks ago). After just two sites, greying skies, menacing rain, and numb hands sent us back to the Hjelm house just in time for a chilly lunch on the porch featuring steaming mugs of tea and chocolate chip zucchini cookies (baked by Ali and Amy).
 Brrrrr. Warm cups of tea at lunch helped remedy the cold. Note that Danny broke out his hat! The storm picked up in the afternoon and left us stationed at the Hjelm house for the rest of the day getting some computer work done for our independent projects. After a summer spent applying our aphid addition and exclusion treatments, Abby and I were excited to start looking over our data set and get to work analyzing it! More updates to come.
 Ali and Ben take a look at the results of Ben’s seed harvesting out at Hegg Lake.
There’s no such thing as an ordinary day during the summer for Team Echinacea but today was particularly exciting because we accomplished many different small (but highly necessary) tasks. We started the day sending 4 people out to do phenology in the remnants, p1, and p2. This took us around 30 minutes because there are now less than 20 flowering heads. Out of a total 4293 flowering heads in the places that we’ve been doing phenology only about 0.4% of the heads are still flowering. During phenology part of the team cut down the sumac and pulled thistle in the ’99 south plot. After that the team split in two and half of us organized g3 (picture tomorrow, it looks great!), and the other half dug up bird’s foot trefoil near p1 on the road. Amy GPS-ed a couple more points that still needed GPS-ing while Abby and Gina continued to tame aphids.
 Amy and Stuart hard at work During the afternoon, Hegg Lake was the place to be with gallium being harvested and data taken on thistles. Will, Ali, and Danny did some top quality film work trying to get a measuring protocol video. We also placed 3 RFID capsules at one of our less stable sites to see if they’ll survive the winter. Stuart not only got the demography protocol good to go for the rest of us, he also made it readable on all devices! Finally, and perhaps just as important as the rest, Erica (Ricky/Eric/Ricardo) got much bigger over the weekend! It’s a great start to what will be a productive week.
 Erica looks about as big as my finger!
On our day off, some members of Team Echinacea went up to Glendalough state park to camp for a night. It was a great weekend because lots of things could have gone wrong, but we were super lucky and almost nothing did! For example, one of our tents didn’t have a rainfly, but then Stuart and Gretel let us borrow one of theirs! Thanks Stuart and Gretel! But we didn’t even end up sleeping in it—more about that later!! We also didn’t have a reservation, but it turned out that there was a no-show at a campsite, so we got that one! The lady at the park office told us that if a person named Nathan showed up, we would have to tell him that we had taken his campsite, but fortunately Nathan never showed up. Confrontation avoided! It was a canoe-in site, but lacking a canoe, we hiked there. Thanks for carrying the cooler, Gina!
We ate sandwiches and then went to the water. We decided to try to swim across the lake even though we agreed we weren’t very good at estimating distance across water. Then we swam across the lake! The water was really nice and it only took 45 minutes. We saw a loon and a bald eagle while we were swimming. Katherine and Gina walked to meet us at the beach on the other side. Next, we all spent a good 10-15 minutes giggling in the waves by the shore because we were happy and probably a little dehydrated. Then we realized that the beach we were on was being rented out for a family reunion and everyone around us was probably related and wondering who the heck we were, especially because they would have been able to see us bobbing across the lake for the past half hour! Thanks for sharing the beach, Will family!
Intrepid swimmers bob along swimmingly Next we walked back to our campsite. We built a fire in about 15 minutes which Katherine thought was kind of a while, but many of the rest us agreed was “about as fast as we had ever started a fire before.” We had corn and hot dogs and took a lot of pictures of the fire, hot dogs, and the sunset (see example below).
See similar pic on Gina’s instagram Once it got dark we started looking at the stars and were doing that when two park rangers showed up. “Hey folks just wanted to let you know that your tents are a little bit off the tent pad and also there is a storm a-brewing in North Dakota that has hurricane-force winds and golf-ball sized hail and it’s heading this way,” was approximately what he said. We mumbled responses and then he said, “Tell you what, the folks at the yurt campsite vacated the premises early so I’ll go ahead and leave that unlocked so you can go there if things get dicey.” So we said, “Thanks officer!” and after several minutes of discussion we decided that the opportunity to sleep in a yurt was too good to pass up, especially with the possibility of inclement weather. So then we got to sleep in the yurt and it was warm and dry which was nice because it sounded like a pretty gnarly storm!
The yurt was very sturdy and well furnished. We woke up and took some more pics (see below). Next we ate breakfast at a nice little place in Battle Lake, which we all agreed was “a really cute town.” Then Ali drove us home and we made it back to Town Hall safe and sound! What a great and lucky weekend!
Da yurt!
Today was hot. Like, REALLY hot. But there was work to be done, and Team Echinacea is a tough bunch. So, despite the soul-crushing heat and humidity, we managed to finish measuring in P1!!! Yay!!! It was a monumental moment, and a great way to finish off the week. We celebrated/rehydrated with watermelon and root beer floats!
In other news, progress was made on the aphid and seed harvesting fronts today. Phenology is continuing to wind down, and Ricardo the caterpillar is eating everything in site.
 He/she is getting so big! The team enjoying root beer floats
Today was an exciting day for Team Echinacea! While most of the day was spent measuring, it was made much more invigorating by the constant threat of rain – which we felt drops of from time to time – and by Ruth’s visit and Stuart’s return. We heard about the many exciting talks that Stuart went to at ESA and discussed how our phenology research is going to both fit in and stand out in a wonderful way. Speaking of large data sets, we’rd almost done measuring p1 and will be moving on to plenty of other fun things soon.
The team measuring plants in big batch During lunch we learned about how the 1600 gallon septic tank was emptied yesterday and contained 2000 gallons of waste. How that was possible, the world may never know, but here in the Echinacea Project we redefine what’s possible.
Gretel describes the overfull septic tank as Stuart and Ruth listen
Today is Taylor’s last day which is really sad because she is a cool cat who will be greatly missed. This summer would have been very different without Taylor. She has brought lots of joy and laughs to the town hall. Taylor will be missed dearly.
Taylor is heading out to the Chicago Botanic Gardens to present her poster on the invasive potential of Echinacea palida! She’s been giving us her pitch frequently and it is sounds really good. Good luck to Taylor at the Chicago Botanic Gardens and with all of her adventures in the future! We better see you soon!
In other news it was superhot and humid today. We got treated last week and Monday with cooler and less humid days. Much of Team Echinacea has been zipping off our pant legs and kicking off out shoes in favor of our sandals in spite of the possibility of Chiggers and ticks. We did a little bit of phenology this morning. It did not take long because there were only 26 plants to visit in the remnants. It’s crazy because it does not seem like it was long ago that we were spending all day doing phenology. After phenology we spent all day measuring Experimental Plot 1. I got to spend some time by myself Harvesting Galium for my independent project. We also made a Friend who we named Eric!
Our friend Eric!!
Everyone wore the tye dye that we made on Sunday! IT LOOKS AMAZING!!!
Model life Happiness!
August 11 was an extra hot day. We started the day with phenology and then worked on taking plant measurements in P1 before lunch. The wise decision was made to measure again after lunch and then quit measuring and work on personal projects during the most intense heat of the day! Turned out great! Sounds like the rest of the week is supposed to be extra hot as well. We are going to have to do measuring in the mornings I think. We are making good progress and should have at least P1 and the 99 garden done by weeks end! Phenology is taking very little time now, so it will soon be time for the next stage! Let’s hope for a good breeze tomorrow!
Sunday was a very special day for us at the town hall: our baby Ben turned 20! His sister Liz flew all the way up from Utah to visit him, and we got to hear about her research job out west. At 1, we all headed up to Barrett to see Hattie and Per perform in a production of Robin Hood that they’d been practicing all week at theater camp. It was a great show, and we even got to stay for a potluck afterwards! (Unfortunately, nobody had brought a hot dish for our non-Midwesterners to try.) When we got back to the town hall, we decided to tye-dye, something we’d been meaning to try all summer. Many items got tye-dyed, from shirts to socks to bedsheets to Ben’s knees. To cap off the night, we ate Ben’s birthday cake out at the gazebo, accompanied by a gorgeous sunset. It was a fun-filled day!
Per and Hattie at the end of the show Tye-dying fun! Ben’s beautifully decorated cake “Birthday Boy”
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