The Return and Start of the 2016 Oil Pad Research

Orchard Grass

What a blessing it is to be back at AuSable for another summer of Research.  Upon arriving, Wednesday afternoon I was introduced to the 2016 Oil Pad Research and Kirtland's Warbler Team.  What a dedicated group of students.  They have been work very hard to establish the Kirkland's project, and therefore the Oil team began their work Thursday morning.  We left campus at 6AM and were to our site in Ostego County by 645AM ~ here we laid out our transects and quickly got to work collecting survivorship data in the cool of the day.

Back when I was in graduate school I remember fearing that the study would reveal no results.  Likewise heading into Thursday I was a bit concerned the trees would all be dead.  To no great surprise this was not so. Many of the trees are doing quite well in the non fertilized treatments.   What a joy it was to see that they had not all died.

Growing Tree - Surrounded by Poa grass species

After a year away it was wonderful and a great relief how the plant and grass species names flooded back to memory.  The students are very proficient in their identification skills.  We worked steadily finding trees and determining plant coverage.  There is a real sense of community in the work!

At our second site (Shell Oil Road) we found a vesper sparrow nesting right in the midst of a study plot.  She flew off her nest and we were able to mark the nest to ensure we would not step on her eggs.  We worked carefully and she returned to her nest.  As the afternoon wore on we also spotted a Black Billed Cuckoo and Baltimore Oriole.

Badger Hole

Upon finishing our second site, we celebrated with a snickers bar and drove onto our last site of the day(Sand Lake).  Here we ate a quick dinner, and with a little sugar in our system we efficiently set out to complete the site.  This site had a new badger hole and we were surprised to find one of our trees buried in the newly dug dirt ~ We were thankful for our metal detector.  This is a new record of completing three sites in one day! The team arrived home right at 9PM.  Off to bed it was for the tired team.

Goat's Beard

Friday was another early morning ~ this time we headed for the Crooked Lake site.  This one requires a lovely walk from the road through a rolling landscape of bracken ferns, popular stand, and final a northern hardwood forest before being dump into the sandy site.  Here the greatest challenge was finding trees which were alive.  In a survivorship study, things will die, however, this site seems to be struggling the most.

After finishing up two sites near Campus, we headed back in time for dinner and preparing for Monday's work in the Boardman River area.