New life in Lincoln, NE and the passing of a loved one

After my job ended for The Nature Conservancy, I made the long drive (well, it was only 7 hours) from Milnor, ND to Lincoln, NE. I got here on Wednesday a couple weeks ago, did my move-in paperwork, and headed to my new home. It was about 5pm so I didn't have too much time to do anything, but I unloaded my car and managed to get to WalMart for the essentials (a pot, things to eat off of, things to eat with) and some other items. I ended up spending $300 at WalMart just on that first night here. It's amazing to me how expensive moving always is, especially when you're moving into a place that is unfurnished. I spent over $400 on a mattress and boxspring (about the same as what I spent in Canada on my bed). Over the next couple of days I did a bit of work for my first class, bought some more items, went to lots of garage sales on Saturday, and tried to get settled in. My neighbors across the hall are one grad student in ag economics, and her boyfriend who is supporting her. My downstairs neighbor is a lady with a 4-year old son. Unfortunately, she smokes, so I can't leave my windows opened unattended. But, she and her son are very friendly. My other downstairs neighbors just moved in last week, and I haven't really met them yet.

My parents came for a few days, it's hard to believe they left a week ago already. Time is going by very fast and very slow at the same time. When they came (along with Jenny) they brought a load of furniture and other house supplies (and some very yummy garden vegetables), which I am extremely thankful for. I very much enjoy sitting on the couch getting frustrated about stats homework (well, I enjoy the couch sitting part). Eventually I'll have people over too, and I hope they'll find my place enjoyable, not so messy like some places you don't know where to sit, and not too clean like some places you don't want to sit and wrinkle the cushions.

Classes are going really well, as I mentioned I'm taking (another) stats class, but in this class we're learning R instead of SAS, which is what I learned in my last stats class. So it's been tough to get into a different programming language, but I will surely get the hang of it. My other class is a law class, all about water law, where the biggest grade in the course is a term paper (70%!). I don't know how to write law papers, so I'm unsure of how that will go...

Lab meetings are going well, IGERT meetings are going well, and I'm meeting lots of people and friendly faces. Lincoln has been very welcoming and I think I'm transitioning well. I even got my first paycheck this morning, which was expected but still a delightful event.

My Dad called me today, which is a very rare occurrence so I knew I should pick up the phone. He called to tell me that my grandfather had passed away. Grandpa's been in a nursing home for too many years now, and I don't think he was very happy in the nursing home, and I'm pretty certain that it was very hard on my Dad to see his Dad like that for so long. In that sense, it's a relief. In another sense, I know that there is no chance, no opportunity for some scientific breakthrough, to make my Grandpa sane for a day so I can ask him all the things I wished I'd asked him. He grew up in the 20s, experienced the Great Depression, fought in WWII, experienced the Civil Rights Movement and the invention of the television. So many amazing things happened during my Grandpa's life that I wish I had taken the time to talk to him about. I was fortunate to get some of his stories, and I make his recipes very often (which is probably why I keep on an extra 5 lbs all the time). And I know that I learned a lot from my Grandpa and that he loved me. I'll miss my Grandpa, but then again, I've been missing him since he lost his marbles...but at least I've got lots of great memories. And now Grandpa is not suffering any longer.

Almost done in North Dakota!

This week is my last week in North Dakota working with The Nature Conservancy at the Brown Ranch. The only task I have left is to collect biomass samples from each pasture and put them in the freezer. Biomass sampling involves clipping all the plant material out of a certain area, it's simple and usually pretty quick. I did this a couple falls ago for the Saskatchewan project, too. I'm hoping to get those done on Wednesday and Thursday, (Friday if need be) and then head up to Winnipeg for a few days to see friends and collect some stuff I left there last year!

Over last week I was home for a very nice, relaxing time with family. I had fun picking up my niece, Addi, from daycare on Wednesday morning, she almost knocked a couple of her classmates over trying to get to the front of the room! And Eli is getting so much bigger, he likes to point at light switches and then switch them on and off to see what they do--Addi actually liked to do the same thing at that age! Mom took Addi swimming one afternoon as well, and I jumped in for a few minutes (the water was cold!), Addi really likes to swim! Also got to see Gramma, Aunt Nancy, and Uncle Roger for dinner on Friday, and then had the siblings over for dinner on Monday. It was a very nice trip home!

In North Dakota I've been helping a little bit with the LEAF students, who are from Atlanta, Georgia. They are part of an environmentally focused high school, and The Nature Conservancy hosts a bunch of different "LEAF" groups for about a month each year, to give them experience working in the conservation field. The girls have been pretty fun to work with, they don't mind getting their hands dirty and are eager to learn. But they sure are a handful on Sundays when they're well-rested and roudy!

I'm looking forward to my last few days in North Dakota. The prairie plants are really coming into full force right now, and I'm glad that I have a reason to go back out into each of the pastures to see what's blooming. But I'm also looking forward to moving to Lincoln, NE and starting to decorate my new apartment! It will be nice (for the first time) to have a place to myself where I can decorate how I want and follow my own rules!

The prairie is coming into bloom!

Two of my good friends from mixed-grass prairies, Tonya and Adrienne, got really excited last summer when they saw a tallgrass prairie garden in Sioux Falls while we were at a conference. They couldn't stop blubbering over the big bluestem that was growing there. Now I understand why...I've started to see big bluestem flowering, and it is a sight to see. I can just imagine what these prairies must have looked like 400 years ago, before European settlers started messing with the ecosystem that had been in place for a thousands of years.

Purple prairie clover with bumblebee pollinating.

Big bluestem flowering.

Great Blazing Star starting to bloom

My birds have all but gone quiet, but the plants and grasshoppers are making up for that. Not only is there big bluestem, but there are great blazingstars starting to bloom, the prairie clovers have been blooming, bouteloua (blue grama grass), and many more plants that are fun to look at. Also, I've noticed that there are grasshoppers of every color to match the vegetation that they are living on (think reds, sage greens, browns, spotted, etc.). I'm very much enjoying to tallgrass prairies, but I think it would be even better if I had an expert with me to tell me about all these cool things I am seeing.

Sunflowers blooming along the roadside.

Purple and white prairie clover, along with prairie sage, in one
of the restoration sites at Pigeon Point.

Tomorrow I am off to home for a week, I'm really excited to see my family, especially  my niece and nephew. When I get back, I am hoping to take a road trip out the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and stop at a bunch of sites along the way, like the Frontier Village in Jamestown, the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Medora, and the Enchanted Highway east of the park. And I'm still waiting for the best time to get up to Winnipeg! This past weekend instead of going up north, I went east to the Bagg Bonanza Farm, which is a National Historic Site. It was really interesting to hear about how these bonanza farms helped to open up the west to settlement, although I'm not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing...

Mr. and Mrs. Bagg pictured in a wedding present made out of
old cigar boxes. Lots of artifacts (actually, more than I could
believe) were preserved, because no one had stolen things from
the house, which was run-down, and no one had decided to
burn the place down, which is the fate of many old buildings.
Even all of Mr. Bagg's office paperwork were still in the office.
It was quite an amazing place.

This is the door through which the workforce
entered and exited for all meals. The dining room
sat about 25 men, and there were 100 men to
feed in 45 minutes, so they moved through pretty
quickly. Women were not allowed in the room.

Old farm machinery. The one on the right is a thrasher, which is
what was used to collect grain before the combine came along.
The thrasher sat in one spot in the field, while men brought the
wheat to it. It took a lot of people to get the job done. This was one
reason that "bonanza" farms were required--the large workforce
needed to harvest the crop.

About 30 transient workers would have slept in this attic. Only
permanent or semi-permanent help had rooms, everyone was
given a pillow and blanket and told to find a spot to sleep. The
day I visited, this space was probably about 100 degrees!

I'm working too quickly!

Last Friday I turned 27, and got to celebrate with my new friends in North Dakota! I woke up to a banner and flowers in front of my door (the flowers in a homemade wooden "vase"), and happy birthdays all around (well, there are only two other people here...). I didn't do much during the day, watched "Iron Lady" (interesting movie), and then got ready to go to Fargo. We were meeting Anna and Pete (quite the character, both very fun to hang out with) for Indian food! I've been wanting Indian food since I got the ND, but when we go out for lunch on Sundays with the native North Dakotans, Indian is not an option (their mouths could not handle the spice). The food turned out to be amazing, and our server overheard that it was my birthday and brought out a delicious cake for all of us! We went for drinks afterward at a nice, uncrowded pub. It was another great birthday.

Not a very good photo, but this is what I woke up to!

It's now July 12, and I am almost done with the work I was assigned for the summer. I have 5 veg transects left to do in Bjugstad, which will take about 2 hours. That means I am going to be making much less money than I had hoped! I rarely made it to 40 hours a week for the first part of the summer, and even still have enough time to go home for a week. Does this mean I can ask my boss for a retroactive raise, since I was so efficient? I don't know...I always say it doesn't hurt to ask!

Bluestem, a very important grass in the tallgrass prairie ecosystem.

When my boss found out I was so ahead of schedule, she did mention another project I could do. I would go to each point count and determine the "ecological site" at that count, which is based on the soil type found at the site. However, point counts cover a large area (>200m radius) and "ecological sites" can change very rapidly here, and each point count could include many different eco sites. So, I'm not sure if I will end up doing the necessary soil sampling, but perhaps I will have some other classification to do when I return to Brown Ranch.

Neato caterpillar I saw one morning!

Monarch caterpillar on Milkweed.

On Monday and Tuesday I drove to Lincoln (and back!) to find an apartment to live in during my PhD (and one that hopefully I can spend four years in so I won't have to move). I found a nice place, on Apple Street, which is within walking distance of Hardin Hall, where most of my classes will be. The first couple places I looked at were not very nice, and I started to get discouraged, but then Nancy (my agent) said "the last one on Apple is pretty quaint", I wasn't sure if she meant quaint in a good way, but my ears perked up! The first-floor apartment I looked at hardwood floors, a decent kitchen (although a bit out of date), a decent bathroom, and two bedrooms. I liked that it had big windows and a good sized living room (and didn't feel like a jail cell, like the others did). So I put in an application for a second floor apartment (I think I'll feel safer on the second floor), and today got the e-mail that I was approved. Yay!

Back of my apartment building! 

Jones' grocery store, too bad they're closing because they even
had good grammar!

After doing veg transects today I decided to take the scenic route home past Pigeon Point...I ended up getting lost and drove twice as many miles as I normally would have for the Bjugstad pasture (60 miles instead of 30), and got to visit the booming town of Sheldon (actually was larger than most towns around here). I stopped and asked some guys working on telephone lines how to get back to the highway, and they didn't even know! But I stopped another older gentleman in his car and got directions to the way out. Phew! It's not fun getting lost in the grasslands!

A truck filling with grain in Sheldon, ND.

Hot and sticky, but point counts are done!

Yesterday, Tuesday, I got up at 4:30am (hopefully) for the last time this summer. I do have to admit that getting out that early in the morning can be quite beautiful. As a tribute to early mornings, here are some of the beautiful sites I saw in the wee hours. The last few days of counts were getting very hot, and very sticky in the waders, but fortunately I didn't have to wear them the last day because so much of the water has dried up in the last couple of weeks. Some of Eric's supposed best duck hunting holes are dry right now.

Dewy foxtail barley.

Western Prairie Fringed Orchid

Foxtail barley

Cows silhouetted at sunrise. 

Where is the snipe? He's there somewhere!

Some kind of caterpillar munching on cattails.

Common nighthawk nest. No nest really, just bare ground and eggs.

Sunrise over the prairies.

Sunrise in pasture three with lots of dew.

One of my wooded plots.

Red moon setting in the west...

Red sun rising in the east.

Upland sandpiper! Wish I'd had my DSLR!

Monarch caterpillar munching on milkweed.

Some kind of primrose I believe.

Today, Independence Day, I took the day off. My first day off in TEN days. We went to the parade in McLeod, which was just a hoot, there were more tractors in it than anything else. And they threw out piles of candy to all the onlookers (not just children!). We then walked around the museum exhibits, found out a little more about the Brown Family (the Brown brothers owned the ranch I stay on), and saw an old homestead house. It's been a fun day. And soon, it'll be time to eat the apple pie I made this morning!

Round 3 and 1 Pasture of Veg, DONE

Yesterday I (finally) finished Round 3 of point counts, after being stalled for six days due to bad weather in the mornings. I have to admit that I was glad to be back out counting birds, and that the mornings were both beautiful. I finally took my DSLR with me on Friday morning and think I managed some decent shots of bobolinks. I can't really tell though, since this computer (TNC's) doesn't have any good photo software, so I can only look at the sub-MB size JPEGs. (Sorry this post is getting full of acronyms!) Also, I got to hear tons of dickcissels in a couple pastures I surveyed, hopefully they will stick around! Dickcissels tend to be irruptive, and you can't predict where they will be one year from the next.

Marbled Godwits are nice to photograph because they
swoop at you (and get really close).

The cows were really loving my vehicle Friday morning.
It got very slobbery.

While I wasn't doing morning bird surveys, I did manage to get a couple of good days of vegetation surveys in. I finished the pasture with the most plots in it, Gregor, at 32 plots. One pasture has 28, another 22, and the last two each have 17. These veg surveys are better than the habitat structure surveys I was doing in Saskatchewan, but they make my neck hurt because I'm always looking at the ground. And, I think I identified one of the thistles wrong, calling it a non-native kind when it was actually the native (the two small photos below are the native kind). Woops! I'll rectify that in my future surveys, but I don't intend to go back to each plot and check it out.

Wood Lilly, one of the very pretty natives I get to see.

Prairie Larkspur, another nice native.

Last week we (Alli, Brittany, Eric, and Molly) went on a nice hike to an old fire tower, which is at the top of a "tall" hill. It was a really nice hike, and the view from the hill was really beautiful. I think I was hearing lark sparrows and vesper sparrows too, I don't hear them in my actual surveys at all so that was pleasant for my ears.

View from the top of the hill. Pretty nice lookout spot for fires, that's for sure.

Today Alli and Brittany left for their next preserve, Davis Ranch, where they will stay for two weeks to do vegetation surveys. It sure was nice having them here. On Thursday night we had a picnic of sorts and shot guns to celebrate their finished surveys and their last couple days at the ranch. I shot one of the guns twice, but didn't really enjoy it. Katie, Eric's assistant, is here now, but we do completely different types of work so probably won't have as much to talk about. But, she is really nice and will be good company. And there is always my new Nook Color that my parents got me for my birthday to keep me company, haha! It's awesome!

Alli, shooting one of the guns, she hit the targets!

Katie and Eric shooting clays. Katie hit most, Eric hit none.

I can't believe it is almost July already. I'm hoping the weather is good this next week so I can get lots of work done. I haven't actually made it to 40 hours of work in a week yet, but maybe this week I will!

Asters, Poas, and Thistles, OH MY!

This week a lot of time has been spent on learning plant identification. Part of my job here is to do "rapid assessment" vegetation surveys, in which I determine the cover of native and invasive plants, and also have to determine which species on a list of about 60 are present in the transect. I did work similar to this in Grasslands National Park, where we had to know how to ID over 200 plant species, but we had two highly trained botanists teaching us all how to ID the plants, and we spent a couple weeks each summer learning the plants. Here, the story has not been similar.

Alli looking at some unknown grass species.

One difference is that we only have to know how to ID the 60 species on the list, which is far less than what we had to know in Saskatchewan. But, we also have to know whether every other species we encounter is native or invasive, so really we have to know all the species in my opinion. Last week on Thursday and Friday, Marissa came to show us how to run the transects and use the "classification tree" to fill out the codes on the datasheet. She showed us a few plants that we had to know, but no nearly all of them (plus, she had Lexi in tow, so it was hard to really move around a lot looking for different plants). We were then set loose for a few days to try doing transects on our own.

Brittany and Meredith discussing plant ID

The crew looking at various plants

 On Wednesday, Rhett from the TNC Bluestem office, came for a day of intensive training. In the morning, we learned about different terms for plants, like opposite and alternate, palmate, pinnate, raceme, etc. We learned how to tell different families apart, like the asters from the peas. A lot was, however, focused on flowers, while many of the flowers in the prairie aren't out just yet. Even the protocol for the "rapid assessment" states that the surveys don't start until July! So why we're doing them in mid-June is beyond my understanding.

Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium bellum), a native

After the morning of powerpoints, which were actually really useful and interesting, we went into the prairie looking for various plants species. Rhett is a big grass and sedge guy, so unfortunately we focused a lot on those for the first few hours, even though we don't need to know how to ID sedges because they're pretty much all native. We did get some really good tips on grass ID, which is important because it can be hard to tell grasses apart, and some are native while others are invasive. So, Wednesday was a pretty good day for learning new plant species, but I still don't know all of the ones on our "indicator" list. There are four different blazing stars, four different thistles, and probably a hundred asters (although not all the asters are on the list). We didn't really see many of those.

Some kind of wild sunflower.

Another annoying thing is that the protocol we're using is a little bit odd. It talks about native and invasives, but unfortunately these two terms are not necessarily mutually exclusive. You can have a native plant that starts to take over, making it an invasive, and you can have a non-native plant that doesn't take over, which means it is not invasive. So that confounds the protocol. Second, we're doing cover, which is always hard, but we're also supposed to ignore woody cover up to a certain point. Yeesh. I've done about 5 transects on my own now, each taking about an hour to complete, and running into these various problems has been annoying.

Dame's Rocket (Hespersis matronalis), an invasive

Somehow these veg transects are going to get done, they may not be exactly right but I think that is ok since they're supposed to be "rapid assessment" anyway. I'm also still working through the point counts, I'm half way done now. Still have two days left for round 3, and the there are rounds 4 and 5 to go. Field work is never perfect, even with the point counts I realized I may have been missing Upland Sandpipers because they make a noise I hadn't recognized before round 3. It just goes with the territory I suppose!

Lady's slipper, a very nice native that probably won't be in any of our plots.

I'm thinking of visiting Winnipeg next weekend, hopefully between rounds of counts, as a sort of vacation. I might need it after a week of early morning point counts and afternoon veg transects!

Tall cinquefoil, a native species on the indicator list.

That's my shadow at about 7am, after I'd been out since 5am!
Don't worry, I didn't have to walk through that water.

Second Round Finished!

This week I was able to plow through the second round of point counts in just five days. The weather cooperated for me, even though a few days were supposed to be too windy to do the counts. I did work on Saturday to get them done, but I'm very glad to have the second round finished. Three left!

On Tuesday night, Marissa got here with Lexi, her baby, and on Wednesday afternoon Brittany and Alli got here. Brittany and Alli are two TNC interns doing vegetation surveys at a bunch of different spots across North Dakota and South Dakota this summer. It's really good to have them around! We were trained how to do the surveys on Thursday and Friday (because I am doing the veg surveys, too!), but we're all feeling a little concerned about actually doing the surveys correctly. We have to know a list of about 50 plant species, which isn't hard (although, we haven't seen most of them yet so can't readily ID them in the field). Beyond that, we have to know which species are native and which are not native, so we really need to know ALL the species, even though Marissa insists that we don't. I'm sure we'll get the hang of it, and I hope Brittany and Alli get the hang of it quickly, since whatever they don't finish I will have to do!

Although I am still partial to mixed-grass prairies, I have seen some pretty cool things so far here in the tallgrass. Because there is more precipitation here, there are different plants and birds to see, but there are no mule deer or pronghorn antelope, and no bison. There probably were in the past, but now that farming and ranching have taken over those large species have been pushed out.

Even though I don't like that native species are getting pushed out, I know that farming and ranching are important both for our economy and for feeding ourselves. Without farming, there would be no food after all (or, we'd all have to grow our own food). I also really like the culture that tends to surround these farming and ranching communities. The three of us went out to the McLeod bar last night. I had a delicious steak and a couple beers, and there was a live band playing as well. Locals were just sitting around, talking, and enjoying the music. One couple even got up a two-stepped for a song! People like learning about where "foreigners" come from and why we're here. Although many locals probably don't much like TNC, they're still friendly to us. I also think part of the reason is that we're female and maybe more approachable. Men doing field work out here probably have a totally different experience than women.

I've been taking my Dad's waterproof camera with me when I do my point counts in the mornings, which is really handy to have in the field. I have also gone for a couple walks with my DSLR. So, enjoy some photos of plants and animals in tallgrass prairies!

Wilson's snipe nest. I almost ran it over with my ATV.

Baby robin that I shooed off the road.

Hognosed snake that lives under our porch.

Yellow-headed blackbird with dragonfly. Too bad they
eat the insects that eat the mosquitoes!

Prairie rose, one of many natives.

A butterfly, not sure which kind, but it was pretty!

Bracted spiderwort, another beautiful native flower.

One of a few nice sunrises I've seen. I see the
sunrise but am in bed before sunset.

I think this is a northern leopard frog.

Black tern, not a bird I'd expect to find in the prairies, but
they feed in the open wetlands where there are small fish.

A nice dragonfly.

Allison looking at grasses we have to learn.

Blue-eyed grass, not actually a grass.

Tree swallow at her nest.

I've been dog-sitting for a few days now, this is Molly!
Don't tell Cora!