Working Vacation

It’s been a great month for me, here on the westcoast. I’ve been visiting friends, family, cat, car, etc. on Vancouver Island, and doing some canopy sampling while I’m here also. The project, called ABASS (Arboreal Biodiversity Across Spatial Scales), was initiated at the end of my PhD, and this year I went into the field to collect HoBo dataloggers and a few arboreal moss samples. So, it’s a working vacation of sorts. But it’s the kind of work that I love to do. Firstly, the field sites are some of the most spectacular in the world. And secondly, because it’s an area that I have a connection to, as a scientist, and also because it’s home and I have history here.

This year I visited three sites in Clayoquot Sound UNESCO Biosphere Reserve on the west coast of Vancouver Island, just north of Tofino, BC. This is ancient temperate rainforest, and canopy samples are collected from 60m Sitka Spruce trees of coastal estuaries.

Of the three sites (Sydney, Watta, Moyeha), the Sydney is my favourite; mostly for it’s pristine forests, amazing wildlife, and sheer isolation. It’s located 1.5 hours by boat from Tofino, and about 45 minutes north of the village of Ahousat, where the new national chief of the Assembly of First Nations was celebrated just last week. In the Sydney it’s just water, rock, trees and sky as far as you can see.

A typical day in the field started with collecting Blue and Huckleberries from around the camp site before canoeing off to the estuary. This year has been phenomenal for berries all over Vancouver Island, and the Huckleberries were the biggest I’ve ever seen. I work with a professional tree climber (Kev the arbornaut), who has climbed over an estimated 15,000 trees in his career (he stopped counting at 10,000). Our task is to climb 12 Sitka Spruce trees in each of the three watersheds, and collect dataloggers and moss samples for extraction of microarthropods (mainly mites). Climbing big trees, it always amazes me that they are just plants, related to a piece of celery or an African violet, and here I am clumsily climbing up them like an ant crawling up a blade of grass. At the top you can feel them sway in the wind.

Of course, also on a typical day in the field, you need to accept the good with the bad. Good parts were napping and swimming in the estuary, and watching a Humpback whale lunge feed for pilchards in the inlet for 4 hours, while we sat on the rocks, drinking beer and eating oysters. The bad parts were falling down and bashing my knee on the rocks in the dry riverbed, getting stung by a bee and having my whole arm swell-up to the point where I couldn’t bend my fingers, and stabbing myself with my pocket knife.

But, it’s almost time to wrap-up and return to Montreal. I’m anxious to get back into the lab and start some new experiments, play with moss, and see some new mites. We have at least one new addition to our lab starting sometime this fall, so it should be an exciting time in the Gonzalez lab as some people finish up their projects and new ones get underway.

I hope everyone had a great summer, and I’ll see you all soon.

The littlest HOBO

“An hour in the field is a week in the lab” was the warning I was given as an M.Sc. student. Which means that Jon and I have enough samples to process for a year.

It has been a highly productive week. I can tell because I’m tired and sore all over. The snow has almost melted, and I escaped before the mosquitoes became too fierce. For the past week we have had a neighbourhood puppy follow us into the bush each day. We call her Georgia – she is very cute. She chases squirrels and takes naps while we measure nitrogen fixation.

P.S. The title of this post is somewhat of an inside joke, as we use HOBO dataloggers to record temperature & relative humidity year-round at the experimental site.  "The littlest Hobo" is also a mainstay of Canadian family television from the 1980s, featuring a wandering dog who helps everyone he happens to meet during his wandering.  Thanks for the company, Georgia.

Snow

Jon and I survived the 2 day trip to our northern Quebec field site near Schefferville.
This morning we left the McGill sub-arctic field station in almost all the clothes we brought, and my feet were still cold by 9:30am.




What can we say, there was a lot of snow.  The upside is that there are no bugs.

Where is Schefferville, Anyway?

Cross-posted from my other blog

Yes, I'm spending the next 2 full weeks at the McGill Subarctic Research Station in Schefferville, Québec, sampling my field experiment with moss & their associated micro-ecosystem. And the most common question I get is: “Where is that?” *sigh* If only I'd found a reason to do research at the Bellairs research institute in the Barbados, I might have avoided this question :P

Schefferville is in northern Québec, near the border between Québec and Labrador. So close, I could easily walk to Labrador in a few hours from town. Getting to Labrador City would take a little longer ;-)

Vital statistics:

• 54º48'00” N, 66º50'00” W
  
• Government of Canada Topographic Map reference: 023J15
  
• Declination as of 2009: 23° 9' West
  
• Population as of 2006: 202 (actually closer to 800-1000 people in town)
  

Formerly known as the town of Knob Lake, Schefferville was home to a mining community until the iron mine closed in the 1980's and most people left. It has since been a destination for hunting, fishing, and other outdoor activities, facilitated by the outfitters based in town. There is, however renewed interest in iron ore mining in the area, though not by the same company that built the railway. As far as I know, Schefferville has one school, an arena, sports field, one general store, a hardware store / snowmobile repair shop, a combination Dépanneur & SAQ Express (alcohol counter), much of it owned by the same man. There are also at least 2 bars in the area, although I was told not to go to a certain one unless I wanted to get into a bar fight. The airport is actually much closer to town than the train station, although there is a taxi from the train. It doesn't look like one, and is in fact an old ambulance past it’s prime, but you can ask around and someone will point it out when it comes.

I've been impressed with the depth of the scenery here: the land and the sky have a distinctly more three-dimensional appearance and feeling than in an urban environment. Even the sky has more depth than I remember in Vancouver, with usually at least 3 layers, making for some striking and beautiful sunsets.

I made a little flyby tour of the area in Google Earth, including my study site. I am such a nerd.