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!