We began our drizzly morning by outlining tasks for the week and breaking into three main groups: tag-makers, flag-sorters and hawkweed-exterminators. I volunteered to write out tags with Drake and Amy, the latter of whom showed me the ins and outs of writing standard tags that we’ll place during surv. We bopped to some 2000s pop standards and got a good chunk done, though I’m a little dismayed by how much my fingers hurt from making just a handful. The fact that thousands of these tags are bumping around in the wild is really an astonishing amount of labor!
We came together after about an hour to begin flagging in experimental plot 2 (P2.) We only had 4 corner flags and whatever plants we could find to stake out one-meter intervals in a 80 x 50 meter plot, so it was a pretty nerve-wracking undertaking. Julie and I got a little tied up flagging the north edge where only a few plants have survived, but luckily Michael came to our rescue and put us back on track.
We squished our way out of the field and back to the Hjelm house, where after lunch we worked on our team norm. It was around then that the team realized that the epidemic of googly eyes overtaking Hjelm House has extended to our whiteboard! Stuart and Amy were overheard pondering how to perform fingerprint analysis on the culprit’s work, but since they’re the two main suspects in this open case, was it all a ruse to throw us off?
I spent the rest of the afternoon with Michael as he attempts to impart a year’s worth of knowledge unto me in a scant two weeks. Occasionally it feels as though my cup overfloweth with knowledge, but mostly I’m just looking forward to being as competent as him someday!
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