Independent project proposal drafts were supposed to be due to Stuart by Saturday at 6AM. Unfortunately, I changed my mind what I wanted my project to be the Thursday night before the due date, so I had limited time to actually do the proposal. On Friday afternoon, I asked Stuart if he would like me turn in any other writing to him. Stuart asked for a Haiku, so here we are:

Echinacea plant
A juxtaposition of
science and beauty

Hey Flog!

It’s me, Amy! It’s been a while but I’m glad to be back here in Kensington. Today, the team’s activities started out with some goat wrangling. I wasn’t there because I was bringing up some seedlings from the cities, but I heard it was pretty cool!

Later, the team split up to look for Stipa and flowering Echinacea plants in P1 and to check on ash plants in P8. My high point for the day was that I figured out how to connect my computer to the printer, but my low point was that I accidentally made it so that no one else could use the printer. Ruth graced us with her presence and at lunch we shared our project ideas.

Lastly, it was Michael’s last day on the job as a Team Echinacea intern! We concluded the bittersweet end of the era with Stuart’s chocolate cake™.

Sincerely yours,
Amy

We dove right into work this Wednesday morning. The first task of the day required our whole team to gear up with flag bags, meter sticks, and visors and trek down to experimental plot 1, where a few of us were taught, and others were reminded, how to actively search for and measure Hesperostipa spartea, or Stipa as we referred to it. We paired up and as small teams did our best to locate either the very small and narrow blades of basal Stipa plants or the more obvious awns of the flowering Stipa. Micheal and I tackled rows 39 and 19, and while hoping to identify more plants, with the help of our active search skills, we were able to spot and measure 1 basal and 4 flowering plants. I learned a lot from Micheal as we “searched for grass in the sea of grass” and I appreciate his willingness to teach. I’m referring to a couple locations when he would abruptly stop his stroll, give me a look out of the corner of his eye, and wait for me to spot the plant that he had just found. Micheal, thank you for your patience! We used our visor to record the location of each plant and the measurements that pertained to it such as culm and fruit count, along with aborted and missing fruit counts. We aim to continue this search in the next day or two in hopes that cloudier conditions and more experienced searchers will result in more Stipa measurements for our 2019 data.

Amy Dykstra graced us with her presence in the field as well today and gave a post-lunch presentation on her dissertation work and some ongoing studies. Amy asked a lot of great questions in her research and was able to connect them to her findings regarding the future success of Echinacea Angustifolia in fragmented prairie. Her research gave me a lot to think about regarding the Echinacea project’s history as a whole and more specifically, the impact that prairie fragmentation makes on the genetic diversity of our prairie remnants. It’s presentations like Amy’s that are helping me continue to learn and develop my own proposal for this summer.

Last but not least, John and I were eager to get out and stake this afternoon for our yellow pan trap experiment. We have 38 sites within a 5 mile radius of the Hjelm house, and at each site we will have one flagged stake for catching bees. John and I were excited to take out the infamous Darwin (the Echinacea project’s GPS device) to stake our sites. We got about halfway done and will have to finish up tomorrow, but we’re excited to start catching and eventually pinning and identifying our local pollinators. We’ll keep you updated on what we find, but in the meantime we’ll be cruising the countryside in a van, with Darwin.

We started off our sunny day in the field by breaking off into two groups: the demo team (starring Michael and Erin) and the planting team (comprising Jay, Shea, Riley, Drake, and myself). Today, we were peppering P1 with Asclepias viridiflora that were grown from seed at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Here’s Shea and Jay returning after putting our last few seedlings in the ground:

After lunch, Jay and I went back into the plot to check on the plants for the Pollen Limitation Experiment. We were hoping to count how many had developed flowering stalks… but strangely enough, none of the plants in the Pollen Limitation Experiment were flowering! No florets left to limit pollen access to, but even no data is still data. And while we were checking the plants in P1, Jay and I had lots of opportunities to make some field friends! From damselflies and monarchs to spittlebugs and cocoons, we had plenty of company as we counted our Echinacea.

On this fine first Sunday of Summer some of the gang got grocery at Aldi. We purchased produce for salads, salsa for quesadillas, beans, beans, beans, and more beans for four bean variety vegetarian chili. Chef cooking the chili will be me tomorrow. Tonight we had the quesadillas ’cause they are quicker to make. Earlier Erin and Michael marched off on an exciting excursion having hopes of observing life birds. Both Amy and I did fieldwork forgetting Sunday is supposed to stay slothful. However, I had Pedicularis plants that needed tagging today and sundried seeds needed harvesting. Here hoping for many more fun-filled Summer Sundays.

Signing out,

Drake

P.S. The forced alliterations in this post were inspired by Mochi Julie bought at Aldi.