This week at the Echinacea Project we had a few visitors. On Monday and Tuesday Maddie, Grace and I worked hard in P2 to wrap up measuring and ran into an abundance of different creatures. From frogs, to spiders, a garter snake, and grasshoppers there was no shortage of helpers at the experimental plot.
Harvesting is in full swing as fall begins to roll around, also bringing many different caterpillars and monarchs along the way for our viewing pleasure. On Wednesday we had some real human visitors! Gasp! Riley and Amy W. came and paid Echinacea Project a visit and helped with the collection of measure data in P7 and P9 and contributed an abundance of harvesting in P1 and P8.
In the final days of this week, we got an additional human visitor Aaron who came back to help us for a morning before returning back to school for the afternoon. We regaled on memories from this summer and thought about the ending of the season while reflecting on everything that has been accomplished by our mighty team of 8. Thousands of demo records, tons of surv records, measuring, and many healthy heads that have been harvested.
For me, I spent many hours doing aster walks this week for my thesis encountering many different friends in the prairie along the way. This included monarchs, a mysterious caterpillar, many spiders, and a handful of wooly bear caterpillars (or as I like to call them wooly worms). The record for the most amount of aster species at a single site was broken this week at 27 different species at Staffanson E (previous winner was HeggW with 25).
Additional tidbit: We had found an injured monarch on the way to harvest and created a monarch motel for the little diva to recoup before hopefully taking flight again.
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