Wildlife update

An update on the wildlife situation in the Operation Pollinator plots.

You might recall that we have not one...

not two...

but SIX red-winged blackbird eggs in one of my Operation Pollinator plots.

And this happy week, all six eggs hatched into the UGLIEST CUTE LITTLE CHICKS EVER.

Dang, these things are nasty.  All exposed skin and eyesockets and giant mouths.  But also so cute.

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Can't wait to see them grow up over the next couple of weeks (months?).  I know very little about bird biology, so this is going to be really fun and informative.

The groundhog situation has not progressed.  He is still rearing his ugly, stupid head whenever we pull up, then darting back into his miserable hole.

Trapping attempts have been unsuccessful so far.

I will update you all on the groundhog menace as soon as we start to make inroads.

Wildlife in the Operation Pollinator Plots!

It's not all bees, syrphid flies, and butterflies in the OP sites.

We also have many vertebrates taking advantage of the refuge Operation Pollinator provides on golf courses, and most of the time I love to see animals in the sites while we're out surveying them.  We regularly scare off rabbits, chipmunks, and golden finches during our early morning visits.

Last week we found a few very special visitors nestled in a bunch of purple coneflower.

What could it be?

A nest!

And inside the nest?

A single blue egg.

The most beautiful, pale blue with delicate watercolor splotches.

AND GUESS WHAT WE FOUND THIS WEEK?

Three eggs!

And another nest with three more eggs, this time made between stalks of bergamot!

We think they're red-winged black bird eggs, based on some images we found online and the angry red-winged black birds squawking at us while we were taking samples in the plots.

Not all vertebrate visitors are welcome in the Operation Pollinator plots, however.

I have a varmint problem, folks.  Some major groundhog grief.  A serious woodchuck worry.

One of my sites is being absolutely destroyed by the fattest, most inconsiderate groundhog I have ever laid eyes on.

This plot is more or less a giant pile of dirt with a brooding hole right in the middle of it.

The darn thing is out sunning itself every time we approach the plots, and then scampers back into its hole before I have a chance to run it off.

I have a mounting fear of having one of my toes bitten off by a mean groundhog.  It almost happened to my brother once.

I don't have any pictures of the camera-shy beast, so here is an artist's rendition

How do I fix this?!  I am afraid of losing my toes!  And it's wreaking havoc!  HELP!

What do you do on Thursday nights?

I party with beneficial insect predators and the coolest lab mates this side of the Mississippi!

On Thursday night, we went out to my experimental site on the university's research farm and ran a four hour experiment.  It was a long night, but we had fun.

We spent the evening documenting predation on both the larvae and eggs of a pest species, the black cutworm, while in two different environments:  low-mowed grass and high-mowed grass.  You could probably already guess that I'm pro high-mowed.  In addition to reducing inputs (gas, fertilizer, irrigation), high-mowed grass could also have the benefit of increasing beneficial insect populations (like predators and parasitoids) which would reduce the need for treating with insecticides.

Yay!

Eggs went out on garden stakes, 10 to a stake, 2 stakes per plot:

And larvae went out alive on corks which we placed into the ground, five per plot:

Don't judge us.  It isn't cruel.  It's science.  I swear.

End product:

These prey items stayed out for the next three hours, and every 30 minutes we went out and recorded what was being eaten, by whom, and in what quantity.  If we couldn't easily identify something, we grabbed it and took it back to the lab with us for future scrutiny.  Once it got dark, we used flashlights with red cellophane over the lightbulbs, as insects do not perceive red light.

I used a headlamp, as I am cool.

And here's what we were looking at.  I swear it's not horrific insect torture.  Can you tell I feel a little conflicted about this?  

Ants!

Wolf spider!

 We all had a super fun time!  No one was grumpy!  Camaraderie!

Go us.

Cats are bees too

This is my life right now.

Frustration with grant juggling, dying wildflowers, and writing methodologies that I barely understand abounds.

Scorcher

Folks, bad times are coming for the OP plots.

We all know it's been dry.  High temperatures and low rainfall for the last 2-3 weeks have been rough on the wildflowers, and it's only going to get worse.  The wildflowers that had already peaked or were in full swing a few weeks ago are getting pretty crunchy at this point, and those species that should be taking the crunchy flowers place are not coming in very strongly.

For example, bergamot has been pushing its way up for the last month, and has been preparing to bloom for the last week... but bloom it has not.  The few flowers it did put out are looking a little ragged.

What the early bergamot blooms* from two week ago looked like:

And here is what it looks like now.  Kinda rough, for still being in the early stages of bloom.  And there are not a lot of these guys.

I really, really hope it rains soon.  Unfortunately, the current forecast looks a little like this:

So I'm steeling myself for rough times ahead for the ol' OP plots.

We do have a few species that are doing exceptionally well, considering the heat.  Rudbeckia, or Black-Eyed Susan, is definitely still chugging along.

We have a handful of Rudbeckia that are expressing a really odd morphotype.  My personal hypothesis is that this single bloom is just a a weirdo that tripled or quadrupled its expression.  Not the prettiest.  I thought it was a caterpillar fat-ass at first.  It still appears to have a lot of pollen available.  I wonder if pollinators don't recognize it as a flower?

If it ever rains, there will be more flower pictures.  For now, it will mostly be raggedy looking sunflowers and rudbeckia.  C'est la vie.

*Vick, Albert F.W., Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center

We're famous!

Operation Pollinator was written up on Turfnet.com!

The story!

It's not a perfect article.  I've participated in these things before for the lab, and they are always a little bungled.  I don't think that a single one of those quotes isn't heavily paraphrased.

Also, my Liberal Arts senses.  They tingle.  Writing is a skill.  I'm not trying to pronounce myself an excellent writer, I just wish that we had a few more technical writers that could piece together sentences with some degree of craft.

I see plenty of these excellent writers in the blogs that I regularly read, and I know many of them are scientists or work in a technical profession.  Why isn't this skill--a skill that is clearly evident through their non-academic writing!--something that is prized, slapped at the top of C.V.'s, and encouraged in scientific journals?

Academia, you slay me.

On being a semi-reluctant weekend researcher

This last weekend, while millions of Americans were enjoying the beautiful outdoors in a pleasant, relaxing way via farmers' markets, minor league baseball games, and walking their cats (or at least, this is what my overheated, slightly grumpy brain was telling me), I spent mine tending the Operation Pollinator sites.

Not that I don't love my OP sites.

I just don't love them quite as much on Saturday mornings.

Fortunately I had a helper this time around.  I had to bribe Boyfriend out of bed and into the field with the promise of Waffle House, and even then it was a tough sell.

Here he is.  High point of the morning.  Epitome of happiness, because he knows waffles are on the way.

Later, a barely-disguised look of total disgust.  The waffle-induced euphoria has passed.  What is he doing with his life?

We spent Saturday prepping my sites for the bee bowls which will go out later this week for the first sampling set EVER for Operation Pollinator.  A bee bowl is a passive way to collect pollinators (not just bees!).  It is usually a brightly colored bowl (often in fluorescent yellow or blue) filled with soapy water, which has a much lower surface tension than regular water.  Pollinators are attracted to the color, and fall to their doom in the soapy water, where I collect them after the bowl has been out in the sun for a few hours.

Most bee bowls are just set on the ground, but I am elevating mine so that they are at the approximate level of the wildflower bloom, which is also where the pollinators are.  In order to elevate these suckers, I've made a relatively simple contraption, mostly consisting of PVC pipe and gorilla glue, which should be mobile and easily removable from the site when I'm not actively sampling.

It looks like this:

My Paint skills leave something to be desired.

More to the point--you see that purple/brown bar at the bottom of the elevated bee bowl?  That's supposed to represent an 18 inch piece of half inch diameter rebar.  You see how it's 6 to 8 inches in the ground (this should be obvious, given the precision with which this diagram was constructed)?

Yeah.  That's what we were doing.

The tools of the trade:

We pounded the hell out of that rebar.  We showed it who was boss.  And we put in eight rebar stakes at six different sites.

The end product:

Aw yeah.  Rebar never even knew what hit it.

It was me.  With a sledge hammer.