Ordway Field Notes

It’s that time of year again. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting chillier, and the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is getting perilously thin. That’s what the ancient Celts believed, anyway. To them, this dangerous time of year – which they called Samhain (pronounced ‘Saa-wn’, and literally translated as ‘summer’s end’) – was the pivot-point between the light half of the year, concerned with planting and growing and harvesting, and the dark half, when the life-giving sun turned away from them, and life became frighteningly precarious. To protect themselves during this tense time, Celtic people held festivals of sacrifice, offering crops and animals to their gods in large communal bonfires. They often hid themselves from angry or vengeful spirits that might be moving across the veil – you can’t be too careful, after all – by dressing as spirits or animals, themselves. They also sought their own advantage: asking their priests – the Druids – to peer i...

This summer I had the opportunity to spearhead a new element of the on-going oak forest exclosures project here at Ordway: putting out camera traps! Camera traps are just trail cameras (the only trapping part is catching an animal in a photo or video taken by the camera) that are set out in a designated area to catch photo or video footage of animals in action. Here at Ordway, we are interested in deer herbivory and its impacts on various plant communities, so we put out 11 cameras to specifically catch deer.  How do these cameras work?  With both IR and motion sensors, the cameras pick up changes in heat or movement caused by animals (and occasionally plants). When this happens, it triggers the camera to take photos, videos, or both, depending on the settings selected.  Have you caught any cool photos?  My favorite part of this project was looking through the photos to see who was wandering around during the study period! Besides catching ourselves doing work on the...

Above: Photos from 5/10-5/11 at Ordway Field Station (credit: Jerald Dosch and Claire Wiley) Seeing the Northern Lights is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for many, and earlier this season Ordway was blessed with the spectacular light show!  I was particularly excited because seeing them was on my bucket list and after many failed attempts back home in Wisconsin, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to see them any time soon. But when local news outlets started whispering about an incoming geomagnetic storm, I knew that I had to try to see them.  The Northern Lights are caused when electrons sent from the sun crash into the atmosphere and move in line with the Earth’s magnetic field, bumping into different gasses like oxygen and nitrogen. The different colors that appear are from crashing into these gasses, so for example, the characteristic green is caused from collisions with oxygen atoms.  They normally appear between 60-75 degrees in latitude, so when there is an espe...

Oak Forest Exclosures Where: In sets of paired plots spread throughout the oak dominated forest. The map below shows the locations of each plot pair, divided by relative garlic mustard abundance (HGM = high garlic mustard, LGM = low garlic mustard). Why: To test the hypothesis that white-tailed deer facilitate the invasion of garlic mustard by preferentially eating native plants and investigate the impact of white-tailed deer on the structure of the herb layer plant community at Ordway. What: Each set of paired plots contains one open 0.5m 2 plot and one fenced-in 0.5m 2 plot designed to exclude deer but not smaller herbivores (rabbits, etc.). The fenced-in plot includes a buffer region of 0.5m on each side, since deer can potentially eat parts of plants growing along the inside of the fence. Each year we collect estimated ground cover data on 23 key plant species, measure the tallest plants in each plot, and take note of deer herbivory.        RVS: R...

  8 July 2024-  Last week’s receding floodwaters meant we were finally able to rescue the dock and put it back in its proper place. This meant we got up close and personal with one of Mike’s favorite creatures: fishing spiders (genus Dolomedes ). They are common around the world, and you’ll likely find them on docks or floating vegetation in permanent bodies of water. Unlike other spiders you may be familiar with, fishing spiders do not spin webs to catch their prey; they are hunters! Fishing spiders are covered in tiny hairs that pick up the slightest vibration, allowing them to walk on water and sense their prey from great distances. Sometimes the hairs are also used to capture small water bubbles so the spider can breathe while pursuing their prey underwater. They eat mostly aquatic insects, and occasionally small fish and tadpoles. This particular friend is a female carrying her egg sac full of spiderlings (that is indeed what baby spiders are called… fun fact). Just befor...

  18 June 2024-  While investigating the floodwaters this afternoon we stumbled upon some earthworms! Here are two that we affectionately dubbed Mike and Jerald (guess which one is which). My limited worm identification skills allowed me to deduce that these are probably nightcrawlers, lumbricus terrestris . Nightcrawlers can’t swim, so we think these fellows were probably trying to escape the floodwaters like we were! Like all other terrestrial earthworms in Minnesota, nightcrawlers are non-native and invasive, introduced by European settlers. Minnesotan forests developed without the presence of earthworms, so their introduction dramatically changed the forest floor, nutrient cycling, and decomposition. Without earthworms, leaf litter and other organic matter collects on the forest floor. This layer protects the soil from erosion and freezing temperatures, providing nutrients and habitat for all types of organisms. Earthworms decompose the leaf litter faster than it can be re...