Today, Team Echinacea spent time in the remnant site East Riley finishing up the seedling search that had been conducted there on Tuesday and then doing demography for the site. All but two heads that we found at East Riley had been mowed over- some possibly more. This site is notorious for that problem, but this year it was mowed over more comprehensively than it has before. Yet, the echinacea come back year after year and they still try to flower. They invest resources into a reproductive gamble, put everything out there, and hope for the best outcome. If echinacea can take a chance on themselves year after year, maybe we all could.

Today, as the Town Hall crew was contemplating our measuring protocol, we realized that our current methods of transporting ourselves down the rows of experimental plots are woefully inefficient. Walking requires that you constantly bend over to check the ground for basal plants and stakes. Crawling puts splinters in your hands and bluestem stalks in your boots. Hopping on one leg may save the airborne ankle from chigger bites, but your ground-bound foot is sure to find a gopher hole. So what does a prairie scientist do, when the time comes to locomote through rows of small plants and tall grass?

Town Hall has the solution: a swing car fleet. The swing car, if you’ve never had the honor of driving one, is a low-riding, 6-wheeled chariot, propelled forward only by your hands on the steering wheel. When we discovered a swing car in a Town Hall closet, the crew knew exactly what we needed to do: test every possible way of driving a swing car to scientifically identify the most efficient method, and assess its utility as a mode of field transportation. Drake demonstrated the remarkably effective “shimmy” method, sidling the chariot back and forth at surprising speed:

Erin, meanwhile, tested the experimental “hang ten” posture, which lets the rider pretend they’re surfing USA, no waves required.

While this method proved to be a wonderful balance exercise, it was woefully inefficient for our transportation purposes, the average distance traveled being -10cm.

To put our swing car to the final test, we had to confirm that operation would be possible in the field. Unfortunately, a thunderstorm outside prevented us from performing this last experiment outside. Instead, we donned our field boots and substituted tall grass duff for shag carpet. A resounding success!

The question of whether swing car riding can outpace walking as the preferred mode of field transportation remains to be tested.

Hey flog!

It was cool and overcast today in Kensington which made for wonderful weather to work in. The team spent the morning in the remnants doing demography at Railroad Crossing. Darwin’s reciever was malfunctioning, so Chekov got a chance to shine. In the afternoon, the team spent some time measuring in P1. It’s a lot of searching for staples, but one does find many cool bugs rifling through the grass.

Hello Flog!

John’s post yesterday provided plenty of updates about Friday’s work on the Hjelm House front. Now it’s my turn to update on the second half of the Western Prairie Fringe Orchid Project, in which Gretel, Stuart, Riley, Drake, and I went out into the wet prairie to assess orchid fitness.

Out in the Nature Conservancy’s wet prairie reserves (which were much drier this time around), we revisited all of the nearly 1000 orchids we identified on the first trip earlier this summer. First, we counted and squeezed all the seed pods to estimate the plant’s seed set, and then we finished shooting GPS points each plant we found. We finished our field work in good time, finishing staking of the South plot in 3 hours, and the Northwest plot in less than 2.