It's Still Winter Here...

Today I was introduced to a couple of the residents here - they live in the Annex and sleep from the ceiling!

These are Little Brown Bats - that's really their name (or, Myotis lucifugus). 1 As long as we're quiet, they don't mind a quick visit.
Check out those adorable toes they are holding themselves up with.

In a beautiful patch of old-growth forest, we settled on the wet moss to watch a newt lumber like the slowest wind-up toy, like a dinosaur, through the undergrowth.

Looking up to 80-meter trees, I see white sleet hanging from the sky. It has been a strange winter this year - first an early thaw, then, after several days of warm sunshine, and shortly before I arrived, a snowstorm that has stayed, and stayed, and stayed. It will be interesting to compare this to other years - although since I have never been here for more than a few days at a time, I have no sense of normality.


Everything here is new to me! The chance to get to know this place on a more intimate level is something for which I will be thankful forever. Already I am learning to look at the world in a different way. <>

1. Peterson Field Guide to Mammals

Late Winter

Rain today, and snow up higher. Varied thrushes singing from the old hemlocks. Startled two deer going into the woods, footprints in the mud showing their haste.

Then home – a door, a step, a light, and warmth – as if the house itself has been keeping for me.

Bucking up fallen logs across the road, my breath steams in front of me, as my clothes steam in the cold, as the saw steams as Jay melts it through red rotted Doug Fir.

Home, and curry powder on my potatoes, meat, onions. Sweet-spicy smell of my hearth.

Giving my thanks the best I can, bow drawn slowly across strings, I compose a
thrush-song on the fiddle. <>

Phenology

Phenology: I didn't know what the word meant until I had to apply for my current job. Even still, I didn't understand the full meaning of it until I began working here.

Phenology is the study of the timing of periodic changes in biology, as they relate to climate. Migration, breeding, flowering, root growth and leaf growth, metamorphosis - all of these are studied by phenologists. The research I am helping with involves plants, insects, and songbirds - a nice collection of trophic levels that might show some measurable interaction. My job is to look at the plants, and to collect the insect traps. I thought that I would be measuring stem lengths with a little ruler, or counting leaves. In retrospect I was quite naive. And here I was with a college degree in biology!

Fading bloom of Coptis laciniata,
called "cut-leaved goldthread".

Instead, I am grading each plant on two different scales of 1 to 6: 1 being no growth activity, and 6 being a mature stage. One scale is for vegetative growth; i.e., leaves, and the other scale is for reproductive growth: flowers or cones. Each classification is clearly defined; for example, vegetative 4 is "unfolding leaves" and vegetative 5 is "leaves unfolded, less than 75% full size". There are 16 different sites that we visit, in a variety of habitat types: north slopes, south slopes, old-growth, new growth, 3,000 feet, and 5,000 feet. An interesting idea, based off of previous work in these woods, is that micro-climate may have a profound affect upon phenology. In an attempt to factor that variable into the experiment, each site has a temperature and photoperiod sensor, and all of the study plants are located within 30 meter radius of that sensor. At each site, there are about 50 individually tagged and numbered plants. Some of the studied plants include the little yellow violet, Douglas fir, vine maple, rhododendron, and trillium. The species to be studied have been chosen for their relative ubiquity among sites, their ease of studying, their supposed importance to the forest, and their time range of growth activity. For instance, Snowqueen blooms very early, allowing a measure taken in April to be more than just all 1's ("no bud activity"). Vine maple is found at almost every site. And Oregon grape, which was used in the study last year, has been dropped because of its seemingly random flower activity.

But the study of phenology is giving me something more than a page of numbers, even something more than the beginning of what is, hopefully, a long-term study. As I have been watching individual plants, visiting them at least once a week, making notes of their growth, I feel that I have become aware of a pattern of the forest that I have never truly understood, in two ways. The first is the timing - if you had asked me when maples put out their leaves, I would say, "springtime". But I would not have realized that Douglas fir put out pollen cones before new needles, or been able to tell you that trilliums turn purple before their petals wither. I would have no idea when huckleberries started flowering. The second is in details - I had never paid attention to the way that vine maple leaves emerge, first from their reddish buds, encased in a thin green sheath, and then, elongating, suddenly pop out of their stockings and spend several days unfolding to flatness.

This is movement in the plant world! Here I can see plants as never before; I am beginning to know their changes in an intimate way. The only other growth of a biological organism that I have really consciously observed is in a puppy. I realize that this is the sort of thing "real naturalists" always write about - Thoreau, Leopold, authors like Wallace Stegner and Ivan Doig, people who are somehow (so it always seemed to me) magically aware of this aspect of the living world around them. I had never known how to begin in my self-imposed naturalist studies - now, the mechanism has fallen into my lap and focused my yearning eyes. What was missing from my earlier attempts at phenology - though I wouldn't have known what to call it, before?



Above: vegetative buds of Douglas-fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii. The buds on the right are close to breaking open.

Many of the key attributes of the study can be simplified and applied to almost any backyard.

1. Identification of species
2. Comparison of different species
3. Note-taking

Those are the most important ideas, but there are a couple more that have helped me to really develop an understanding for what is going on throughout the area:

4. Comparison across elevation gradients
5. Multiple individuals of the same species

The future of these plants is entirely unknown to me, and I feel like I am unraveling a mystery - what will bud break look like? When will the flowers open? How will the rhododendron leaves unfold themselves? Only time will tell...
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Welcome to the Woods!

Greetings, Readers!

This is Abner writing to you from deep in the Cascade Mountains. I have recently accepted a position here assisting with research, and I hope that as well as paying my bills, it will provide inspiration and insight into this small, yet vast, facet of the incredible ecosystem that we call Earth.



The Cascade Mountains reach from southern Canada to Northern California. As part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, which here consists of the Juan de Fuca plate subducting underneath the North American Plate, the range includes such notables as Lassen, Mt. Rainer, the Three Sisters, and Mt. Saint Helens, which last erupted (albeit, in a minor way) in 2006. My work, however, is not in these high eastern mountains, which are well-known for their dramatic size and incredible views. Instead, I am on the western slope of the Cascades, surrounded by a different sort of size scale that defies attempts to see much further than even 50 yards away. Here, watered by coastal rainstorms and fed by an intensely interconnected flow of nutrients, 500-year old forests boast 300-foot tall trees living intimately with an amazing diversity of life. Yet while it is the hemlock, Douglas fir, and redcedar that dominate the initial perspective and limit the view to what is immediately reachable, all it takes is a second glance to guess at the discoveries that might await an astute observer. And that often involves an even closer view - from, for example, 5 inches away.

Trientalis latifolia

At this scale, we may begin to understand what it is that has kept researchers from all the natural sciences studying this particular watershed for over 60 years. In seeking to understand the whole ecosystem, they must understand each part of it - and there are very many parts. If "the devil is in the details", then what a delightful devil must animate these deep, dark woods! Here there are over 500 species of vascular plants, matched by 500 species of non-vascular plants (mosses, lichens, and algaes), 180 different species of birds, 50 mammal species, 20 amphibians and reptiles, and over 3,200 invertebrates - a grand total of over 4,450 details! And yet, identifying them is only one step; understanding their ecology, their interactions, and the changes associated therewith, is another.

Leucanthemum vulgare with bee pollinator

Not only do we seek to know the interactions among living organisms. It is the non-biotic factors that make up all of life - adenine and thymine, nitrogen and carbon, water, sunlight, and oxygen. How are living creatures influenced by genes, nutrients, and climate? The work I am participating in is phenological in nature: it is concerned with the timing of changes in development and behavior. And as I write, Schmuel is booking tickets for a conference which will augment understanding of how climate drives soil arthropod communities. Neither of us can photograph primary productivity, DNA, or photons, but we recognize that each organism we observe is a product, expression, and active participant in its ecosystem. I look forward to exploring this place. Welcome to the woods! <>