Today marked our third day without Stuart. But our arrival to a Stuart-less Hjelm house was made brighter by the appearance of a tiger salamander! (In Roxy’s absence, we’ve noticed quite a bounty of wildlife roaming the area.) Katherine, who has known since the age of 8 that the majestic and bafflingly cute creature is her favorite animal, was especially excited. After an extended photo op and cuddling session, the team finally managed to set the salamander back down and get on with the day’s work. We all agreed that he was an upgrade from Ricky.
Katherine holds her first tiger salamander! Obvious soulmates.
We spent most of the morning doing demography at the Rileys. Despite some grief and hardship caused by the abundance of mowed plants, we finished strong and well before lunch. Back at the Hjelm house we set to work cleaning and organizing, dealing with clutter that had been neglected for too long. Things got really exciting when Amy dug out the label maker. We spent lunch dreaming up big plans to label everything in the Hjelm house–in between fighting off the hornets.
The Hjelm house is looking pretty good.
After lunch, Will and I collected tissue samples from the Cirsium hillii at Hegg (that will be used to determine if the plants are distinct or actually one large plant) while Abby and Danny collected tissue from the angustifolia plants nearby the pallida restoration. Meanwhile, Katherine, Ali, and Amy stayed back to touch up the paint jobs on the heads for q3.
Our work done at Hegg, we headed back to Hjelm and packed away the tissue samples to dry out. We printed labels for the samples, but unfortunately the label maker ran out of paper before we could get on with the rest of our big labeling plans. Oh well. We’ll have to continue to do our best navigating the house with its very average level of labeling.
Heads for q3 wait in p1 to be harvested.
