Today started with some remnant phenology, the majority of the plants are done flowering at this point which means that the team can make short work of the task. Erin and Emma set off to do demo at north of golf, they staked to 134 different locs!
During lunch we celebrated Erin’s last day of field work with cake and chocolate!
Erin and cake!
In the afternoon the team continued to chip away at p1 measuring, with the help of the one and only Gretel Kiefer. Gretel came up from Chicago and got here at Thursday morning. We have all been highly appreciative of Gretel’s help over the past two days.
The team has been working on our bee ID skills here is an example of one of the bees found visiting Echinacea.
An Agapostemon virescens found by JVK id-ed by Alpha Whiskey
On Friday The Echinacea Project saw the end of an era. Long-time team member Riley Thoen had his last day working for the project after 3 summers spent in the field.
We started off the morning with phenology in the remnants, with the added goal of looking for purple prairie clover at each of our sites.
Purple prairie clover, or Dalea purpurea, at Loeffler’s Corner
During lunch break, we celebrated Riley’s time here with some cake and an eyepatch.
Riley, featuring his cake (eye patch not pictured)
After lunch, we finished measuring all of the inbreeding 2 experiment plants and had an early end to the day. We spent some time eating ice cream bars provided by John and then headed to Elk Lake with some canoes for end-of-work-week and end-of-Riley-working-here activities.
Best wishes to Riley as he heads off to grad school!
Emma, Erin, and I enjoying some time in one of the canoesThe other canoe crew, with Riley, Anna M. and Mia
Unfortunately today started off raining. Some of us went to WCA to work on our indented project and some stayed at Hjelm. My project is the aphid exclusion and addition project but unfortunately we can’t find any aphids in P1 yet so my project is on halt until we find some aphids.
After the rain cleared up, 3 of use went to P2 to do some phenology, or should I say phonology.
We began the day doing phenology in P1, assessing the flowering status for each plant in the plot. Soon after we began phenology, the rain started so we regrouped at the Hjelm House and made an alternative plan. We split up into groups because we weren’t sure the Hjelm House could handle maintaining social distancing and the wifi for a Zoom meeting. We took turns discussing several articles posted in Dropbox having to do with racism. A few phrases that have kept me thinking were: ” Status quo is the problem,” ” We are blind to what we don’t know” “everyone is racist, but not everyone is antiracist” “my white privledge is having not to have to think about race”.
We also thought it may be a good idea to instead of only discussing racisim, but that we do an activity in the future.
After lunch, we returned to the plots, finishing phenology in P1 and the ’99 gardens.
A bee foraging on the freshly emerged pollen. Several flowers had these beetles on them in P1 .Anna A doing phenology after the rain.
Completing that task left us with finishing up the measuring being done in P8, assessing the Echin plants in each row and position. A very satisfying day as we were able to check off everything as completed for the day. We’ve got a great team with great attitudes. We could have just as easily packed it in after P1 phenology but several team members wanted to cross measuring P8 off the list.
Yesterday the team took its biannual trip up to Pembina nature preserve and surveyed western fringed prairie orchid. There was many wildlife sightings including a few prairie chickens, a magpie, a deer and even a snipe!
The beautiful scenery of the wet prairie
After finding around 300 orchids we headed to Pelican Rapids to have dinner with our new friend Pelican Pete!
Darwin, Erin, Allie, and Emma posing with an orchid with 18 flowers!The team with our new friend Pete
All in all it was a good day and we had a good day but Gretel was truly missed.
Bur bye
Mia
Erin showing off part of her new fashion line that will drop in the fall
Today was a wild ride, to say the least. Our morning started off with an intense thunderstorm. Some Team Echinacea members reported strong thunder as early as 2 AM, which persisted into the early morning. Although it left the remnants wet and muddy, we were lucky to start at our usual time.
I spent the majority of the day working with Riley T. as we conquered the phenology route we affectionately call “Choo-Choo Corner.” This path inculdes remnants such as Loefflers’ Corner and Railroad Crossing. Thankfully, Stuart was there to take care of Yellow Orchid Hill and North Railroad Crossing.
Some happy Echinacea are thriving in their flowering state at Loeffler’s Corner West!
While at Loeffler’s Corner, Riley had a strange encounter with a baby deer. The surprise was well justified, as the fawn was alone and near a highway. Unfortunately, the deer left before Riley could take a picture, but he reports the experience as “shocking” and “unusual”.
We ended the morning with some flowers in our on-site experimental plot, “P8.” After a much needed lunch, we returned to the site to conduct measuring. If you’re a seasoned flog-reader, you’ll know that measuring is the process we use to assess the Echinacea planted in our experimental plots. By measuring, we’re able to keep track of plants that survived, were lost, and their physical fitness over time. P8, one of our largest plots, is notorious for its heat and humidity. However, we persisted, and made great progress!
Half-way through our P8 excursion, Riley and I had another wacky experience. One of the rows we were assigned to measure had a constant rate of lost plants and toothpicks, our universal seed-identifying material. During burns and harsh winters, toothpicks (and often plants) tend to go missing. However, row 169 was unusually bare. This is when we realized we had made a dire mistake.
Images taken moments before disaster, featuring Riley T.
To our demise, we discovered that the unusual row was mislabeled. Because of this, we had compared visor records to a completely irrelevant row. Although it was somewhat disappointing, we were glad to know that our mortality rate was much lower than we thought. It was also a good experience that taught me it’s okay to make mistakes, and that we must learn in order to improve. Even with our minor setback, it was an extremely successful day for the team, and a great kick-off to our P8 studies!
All mistakes are “happy accidents” if you learn and grow!
We concluded the afternoon with some Wednesday Watermelon, and a rhine-throwing contest. Watermelon is a team-favorite treat on hot days!
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed our “Wacky Wednesday” as much as we did. It’s always great to have a little excitement at work, and a bit of “phun” with phenology!
Today we were back at it again in the remnants, well-equipped with knowledge of both the phenology protocol and the phonetic alphabet for our radio chatter. John and Mia cruised to Wiley in the Bombusmobile, the New A Team of Anna, Anna and Amy stomped Around the Block, Emma and Riley teamed up in the Big East and Stuart, Allie and I chugged through Choo-Choo Corner. We were all back around 11:30, setting a land-speed record for 2020 rem phen!
chugga chugga buzz buzz
On Wednesday I wrapped up the first round of surv this season, so now every site has a map of flowering plants that the team can use during phenology. Though we’ll keep shooting through the season as we find more plants, the major surv push is over! Now I have time on my hands to help with phenology, so Allie gave me a brief tutorial and then it was off to the races this morning.
I started on Yellow Orchid Hill West, which threw just about every possible problem at me. I had new plants, old plants without phen records, mutant heads and two-small-plants-or-one-big-plant? questions to ponder.
The pollinators were out and about this morning, with a bold augochlorella coming in for a landing on an echinacea I was examining for style persistence. Maybe I should have checked back in a bit to get a more accurate assessment of shriveling! While doing phenology I also interrupted mating beetles and accidentally knocked a goldenrod crab spider off its hiding place on a flowering head, so today I guess I was bugging arthropods instead of the other way around.
In observance of July 3rd, that fateful day preceding the day when soon-to-be ex-British-colonists signed the Declaration of Independence, we ended work at noon. Lunch proceeded with a reduced crew and a lively discussion of all the different kinds of fruit preserves we could think of. It turns out that the good folks at Wikipedia have already made a list which seems to be a lot more comprehensive than ours (did anyone come up with fruit butters or curd? I sure didn’t.)
I’ve kept myself busy this week making memes. Emma and I are cooking up some hot new lingo that we’re excited to unveil to the rest of the team in the next few days, but until then enjoy this biting commentary on the West Central Minnesota Arsonist (still at large?)
The Echinaceas Team has been hitting the phenology of the Echinacea angustifolia on the remnant prairie plots in western Douglas Country. This morning, the team split up, divided and conquered each remnant’s flower’s status . (Latin phrase: Veni, Vidi, Vici – which tranlates to we came, we saw, we conquered). We have been assessing each flower that has been uniquely identified with a number tag and a colored twist tie so that we can be as certain as we can of each of the flowers. The Echinacea Team has been gathering data for 25 years which makes us the world’s foremost authority on Echinacea angustifolia (according to me).
Riley T puts the “f’ in phenology on a site we call on27.
There’s much variation in the flowers, not only in there stages of flowering, but in their differences in color, age and height.
Nearly white petalsBrown petals
The afernoons have been filled getting caught up on Stipa searches in P1, flagging P8 and planning out the execution of our individual projects.
We began week #2 stalking Staffanson Prairie for Echinacea first in the rain and then if the pleasant breeze. We estimated about on 150 flowering plants on the East quadrant and will hopefully get to the West tomorrow morning. It’s simply amazing the variety of species found there and also the colors present. We then spent the afternoon visiting some remnant plots looking for flowering plants.
Prairie Smoke from Staffanson’s PrairieWood LillyPrairie Turnip – my new favorite this summer, replacing Monarda fistulosa
We then had an afternoon Zoom meeting wth Jarred Beck, Echinacea Project Alumni from 2014 discussing the history and benefits of burning praire. He also discussed upcoming research on burning some remnant prairies starting next spring.
Today was a demo day! Demo day is where you collect data from flowering Echinacea. During demo day I went to the Landfill site and found all the flowering plants. When I found the plants I collected how many heads there were, and tagged all of them. After I collected data I changed out the color of the flags so others would know I was there.
Here is a picture of an Echinacea plant that is flowering!
In this picture Emma is holding a turtle that was crossing the road and she decided to help it out. But when she was moving it, the turtle started peeing all over. Luckily it wasn’t on her.
