Frenetic Phonetic Alphabetic

Flog post for August 29th, 2017.

This morning we broke into two teams to do flowering demography at three sites. The team I was on went to Around Landfill. Normally the cows at Around Landfill stay unseen in a different part of their pasture, but today a few of them cam right up to the fence. Maybe they were telling us to stay away from their calves? We combed the site for any Echinacea that had flowered that previous year, and while we’ve been visiting the site often to collect phenology data, we still managed to find a few previously missed flowers. Both groups converged on the On 27 site after an hour or two and collaborated to sort through the sumac and uncover the Echinacea there.

After lunch, the majority of the team went to harvest Echinacea heads and Bouteloua grass. The county has recently been cutting roadsides in preparation for winter, so we thought we had to act fast to snap up the Bouteloua seed. As it turns out, the mower didn’t reach us yesterday, but we still managed to gather another gallon of seed to spread on P1 after the fall burn.

In an effort to spice up head harvest, we tried to communicate the head I.D.s via the NATO phonetic alphabet. We decided at one point to make some more creative changes to the typical code.

A-Alpha

B- Bravo

C-Charlie

D-Dingo

E-Echo (echo, echo, echo)

F-Foxtrot

G-Gopher

H-Haute

I-Indigo

J-Joey

K-Kangaroo

L-Linda

M-Mancy

N-Norbert

O-Oscar

P-Papa

Q-Quebec (said in a heavy Irish Accent)

R-Roscoe

S-Shwifty

T-Tango

U-Uniform

V-victor

W-whiskey

X-Xylophone or Xray (depending on how confused you are on the spelling of Xylophone)

Y-Yankee

Z-Zulu (or Xylophone, don’t judge us on our spelling).

I think this adapted version is far superior to the current version, and NATO needs to update it stat.

We finished the day with a cookout at Elk Lake. The Andes crew supplied chocolate cake and some CSA veggies, and Stuart supplied vegetables from the garden and cooked. The lake was absolutely beautiful, and everyone went home happy and full of food.