The past couple of days have been lovely for outdoor work–sunny, cool, a little breezy. On Monday we said bon voyage to the Wagenius family as they prepared for their trip back to Chicagoland. Stuart will be back next week, but Gretel and the kids are done for the summer. Now there are five of us and no shortage of work to do.
Monday morning we went to the site off of hwy 27 to take demography data on plants that flowered last year and reconcile errors from this year’s demography census. With two teams working with the GRS-1 GPS units, the task went quickly and smoothly.
We spent Monday afternoon re-finding seedlings at KJ’s. This is a particularly challenging site because there is a high density of plants in a small area. We continued the endeavor this morning, and I’m happy to say are nearly finished. We should be able to defeat the beast tomorrow morning.
Here are Jill and Maria looking for seedlings at KJ’s. Red flags mark completed focal plants.
This afternoon we performed some routine maintenance of the main experimental plot, pulling out flags that marked plant we could not find. Then we spent the rest of the afternoon on individual projects.
Karen Taira, who came up last week, has been spending her days working on her pollination experiment involving several species of Helianthus. Her field story of the day was that she found a pile of entrails next to one of her experimental plants. Apparently they were bigger than a prairie dog’s and smaller than a human’s. Perhaps it’s a new form of sacrificial sun worship–Praise Helianthus!
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