Following our New Jersey and Delaware sites, we blasted through our three sites in Maryland and Virginia with relative ease. But again I was stung by wasps, twice, at our Virginia site on the Rappahannock River. This time it was by a paper wasp, from the large nest which you can see in the photo below (I took the photo after I was stung). The stings from these hurt nowhere near as much as the one I got the previous day, and look nowhere as bad either. I wish I knew what sort of wasp it was that stung me at Estell Manor, but I only caught a fleeting glimpse of it as it buzzed away!
The paper wasps (Polistes sp.) which stung me!
We had Monday off as Tim, the Park Ranger at Mackay Island Wildlife Refuge, couldn't take us out in the boat until Tuesday. So we decided to go to Kitty Hawk, a small town in North Carolina, famous for being the the town right by the huge sand dunes where the Wright brothers performed the first controlled powered flight. The main attraction there was the memorial to the Wright brothers, which was pretty cool. It was situated on the actual site where they made their first flights, which were marked out by boulders. They made four flights on December 17, 1904; the first three just 37, 53, and 61 metres, respectively, but the final one was really impressive, at a whopping 260 metres! The memorial also had a nice museum with exact replicas of both their glider and plane which made the first flight. We also checked out what is supposedly the largest sand dune on the east coast, which was pretty cool, but had nothing on the dunes at Mason Bay on Stewart Island.
Hangliding off the top of the dune
The next day we were up at 5 am for an early start at Mackay Island, where we have three sites. We had been dreading this day since the start of the trip due to the waist deep marsh water in some places, high humidity and heat, and the strong possibility of close encounters with deadly and agressive cottonmouth snakes. As it turned out it was actually a pretty easy day. We didn't see any snakes, the weather was cool and the forecast thunderstorms stayed away. We stayed in a hotel literally right beside our final site in Georgetown, South Carolina, nailed that site early the next morning and then had a boring thirteen hour drive back home.
So the trip was ultimately a success; some useful data was collected for all of our research projects, we arrived back in Baton Rouge two days earlier than planned, and I even managed to add another two states (West Virginia and Pennsylvania) to the list of those I have visited, bring the total now to 21. Classes start back at LSU on August 20, but before then we have our six sites in Louisiana left to do!
The research field trip is well and truly underway. Our trip into Canada was fairly uneventful, including both of the dreaded border crossings where we passed through without even having to pull over to have our car searched - quite a contrast to last time! We didn't have a lot of time for anything other than research-related activities, the three days were pretty fully on: Day 1: Drove north for eight hours, did two hours of field work (one site), then drove three more hours back south to Quebec. Day 2: A total of six hours driving and six hours of field work (three sites). Day 3: Four hours of field work (final two sites) followed by an eight hour drive back to Portland.
Big aphid colony with a predatory hoverfly larvae
Thanks to New York City traffic, the seven hour drive from Portland got turned into an eleven hour one, crawling southwards with everyone heading to Atlantic City for the weekend. Sadly we wouldn't be joining them, heading straight to our paired native and exotic Phragmites sites at Estell Manor Park in New Jersey. This is a really picturesque park and would normally be great to work in. However, this time it was littered with debris from recent storms, was hot and humid, and I was stung by a wasp while sweep-netting, my first wasp sting since I was around ten years old. Sadly, as we progress south the weather conditions are only going to become more severe, and we will have more dangerous things to worry about than wasps - chiefly the famed cottonmouth snakes which we will undoubtedly see at Mackay Island...
The start of the Fall semester at LSU is fast approaching, which means it's time for the second and final big research trip of the summer. This time we are doing our North American transect in reverse, starting with our northernmost sites in Maine and Canada and working our way south to Louisiana. For this trip, Jim, Ganesh, and I are joined by Randee, an undergraduate who has worked on the Phragmites project in our lab over the last 18 months. It's great to have an extra person along for the trip, but by the time we put all our luggage and sampling gear into the truck there really isn't a lot of room, especially for a lanky guy like me!
To get to our start point in Maine we covered 3100 km in three days, a total of around 32 hours driving. As Jim flew in to meet us in Portland on the 30th, he was kind enough to let us have a couple of days holiday before he arrived, so we decided to go check out Acadia National Park again, hoping for some better weather than the dense fog Ganesh and I experienced last time. The first morning there we had booked a whale watching trip out into the Gulf of Maine, hoping to see some humpback, fin, or minke whales. The first hour or so of the cruise was spent bird-watching by various islands around the coast. We saw puffins, terns, guillemots, shearwaters, bald eagles, and even a peregrine falcon, along with a couple of seals. We then headed out to the open water to spot some whales. It was drizzling steadily and a little foggy, so our chances weren't particularly good, and we didn't spot any whales for over an hour and a half. Literally just as the captain announced we were heading back to Bar Harbor, a humpback whale surfaced about 50 metres from the boat. While the crowd was busy rushing off to the side of the boat I was lucky enough to see two more humpback whales breaching spectacularly about 200 metres in front of the boat. It was an amazing sight to see a 30-odd tonne animal launching its whole body out of the ocean! I took a video below of one of the whales going for a dive - it's much better than any of the pictures I managed to get.
Thankfully the next day had the near-perfect weather we had been hoping for, and we made the most of it. We started with a trip up Cadillac Mountain, the highest mountain on the East Coast of the USA, where we took in some pretty spectacular views. Then we headed down to Sandy Beach, which was crowded with people - a bit different to the last time when we were the only ones there. I even went for a quick swim. The water was cold, but I've been in much colder back home so it was bearable. We also went for a walk across the sand bar to Bar Island and checked out the Otter Cliffs walkway. Pretty awesome way to start a field trip really, but now for the hard work, starting with a three day trip into Canada!
Bubble Pond
Sandy Beach
View from the summit of Cadillac Mountain (much better than last time)
