rhgrumski's Journal

Week three at Foxcroft Farm. 41 degrees and cloudy. It is raining, like we thought it would be, but the rain is soft and gentle, falling in small drops on our skin. It is a lot quieter on our walk into the farm’s acreage today, I think everyone knows that this is our last week. I think we are all going to truly miss our gray and cool mornings discovering things we never even knew we were looking for in the first place. Our group follows behind the other groups and we are silent and instead focus on our on boots splashing in the puddles. The rain we have received over the past few days is evident when we get there. Our once low and quiet stream is high and fast moving. Our Biocube which last week was maybe 6 inches in the water is completely submerged this week. It has also completely broken apart. We are unsure if this is because of the fast-moving water or an interaction with an animal. As we sit there on the bridge during our minutes of silent I can hear the rain dropping gently on the streams surface. There is a duck calling in the distance, but I cannot see him. I cannot hear the peepers this week as I have been able to in weeks past. For one last fifteen minutes I hear the wind blowing through the cottontails, through the red maples who are finally starting to blush, through the reeds that decorate the shore. As we sit there I record some of the bird calls I hear in hopes to upload them. I am excited to start taking pictures and to get to upload them later. The naturalist’s community is so awesome. It is really cool how quickly they can identify the species that I upload, several of my photos have received research grade identification and I am excited for what this week will bring. Since it is the third week we have finally started to get the hang of things. Using a shovel, we disturb the dirt on the shore. Then, we put the net in the water and scoop upwards, trapping whatever was inside. Instead of waiting for all the water to drain out, we swing the net in circle motions around our head and let physics do the work for us. In our first grab we find three things I have never seen before, and several things I have. We notice right away the bugs wriggling in the sediment. We see several of the shrimp like bugs that I photographed and recorded last week. A naturalist identified it into the genus Crangonyx. The first bug is about an inch long with 12 legs. The underbelly is white and the top of it is light brown with white speckles and a dark brown line down its back. On one side of the body are thin around antennae while on the other side the antennae are thicker and flat, they are the same light brown color as its back. The bug does not necessarily look like it can swim, it moves its legs underwater as if it was walking but it does not move forward. Its back legs are longer than the front legs. The body of the bug looks like it is segmented, seven segments in total not including the head and rear portions of the bug. The second organism resembles a larger version of the shrimp like organism we found last week. The bug did not swim after capture, so it is hard to tell which end head or tail is. One of the ends of the bug has three long and thin antennae, each about two thirds the length of the bug itself. It is a brown color with varying patches and hues on its back. It has many legs and if you look closely it almost appears to have spikes on its back like armor. The next bug we look at looks like a cross between a stick bug and a dragonfly. It has six legs, the middle pair longer than the other two. It has a very slender body with a head that is horizontally long. Its eyes are located on either side of the head. The bug is like brown and swims leisurely by moving its legs. When we disturb the water, the bug moves its body back and forth like a fish to propel its body forward much faster. The tail of the bug is branched into three segments and they flow like a fish tail. We find two more bugs during our trip. The first of the two is a lot similar to the dragon fly bug described above, except it is a lot bigger; at least double the size in both length and in general body width. It is also a lot darker, however this bug was found in a different part of the stream a little closer to the shade so this could be due to camouflage or something of that nature. The bugs legs are much longer, its tail is only forked in two, and its front antennae are pointed. There are hairs coming off its body. It is scary and we name this bug the scorpion bug. The last bug we find is a small spider, only a little bit bigger than a large tick. The body is black but the legs are a dark brown. We are focused mostly on bug collection this week as we have viewed many of the plants the past few weeks but we just recently discovered how to really get a lot of bug diversity using the new technique. The plants I look at are a light gray-green tinted lichen that resembles barnacles. The lichen is located on a tree with very thin branches. The tree hangs over the stream and wrapping around its bottom are small green buds found on a thorn bush. There are many identical bushes and buds in the surrounding area. The branches have a reddish tint over a green base and the tips of the leaves of the buds are red and serrated. Lastly, near the edge of the stream I pluck a small green plant from one of many identical plants growing in that area. The stalk it was plucked from was several inches high. The plant has small leaves whose pattern of separation from top down reminds me of the petals of a rose. Throughout the time we were recording for our BIocube vdeo. We were laughing along with the birds calling and after some time we didn’t even feel the cold anymore. It was the most fun I have had in a while. While we were recording I saw four robins, which was the species I chose to do my population ecology on. I saw one eating a worm in the field. After a while we saw the duck we had heard in the beginning. It was across the stream, so we walked to it. We got very close and then it saw us and flew off. While we were exploring we saw old boards of what we assumed to be the old bridge. It reminded me a lot of the time I was in my own woods and I saw a tree house that had fallen. Birds nested in the house, plants grew, there even appeared to be an animal home. The boards in the woods were covered with moss, skunk cabbage grew nearby, and ants and other bugs crawled over the decaying wood. It amazed me how easily the boards were incorporated into the ecosystem. Robin Wall Kimmerer once wrote that the word ecology is derived from the Greek word “oikos” meaning home. Whenever I am feeling lost I go to the woods, and this experience has reminded me of that. Nature connects us all to our roots and it offers us its bounties. There is so much the world is asking for us to discover, we just need to listen.

It was Thursday morning and it is really cold, that’s my first observation of the day. It had been raining for the past two days so the ground is very wet. When we get to the stream, our ecosystem, the heavy rainfall of the past few days was evidenced by the water, which was flowing much quicker than it was last week. It was not going fast, but it was not still. Our biocube is also submerged in a few inches of water. When I felt the water it is much warmer than last week, so if it flooded my boots again at least it wouldn’t be as cold (but I had brought extra socks just in case). Our team gets right to work looking for biodiversity. The first thing we do is look for bugs within the water. We watched the surface for a while, but the most effective way is moving the dirt and then putting in the net. Once we pulled up the net we swung it around to get all the water out and then evaluate what we have. After several tries we had put three bugs in tupperware. The first one was so small we barely see it. It looks like a small shrimp, with small legs and feelers, a light beige color with a vertebrae or something of the nature a reddish orange stripe under its translucent skin. It swims by shuffling its legs and contracting its body and it slowly moves forward. It is no longer than my pinky nail. The next bug we find is a spider. It is about the size of a penny, dark black with thin legs. Its front and back legs are about the same size which is slightly longer than both sets of middle legs. The last bug we find is the most interesting to me. It has a silver hard shell with two red dots on the top. However, we never really see it as every time we flip it over in the water it flips back over and attempts to swim downward but pumping its LONG legs. It is a backswimmer. Though we don’t find any other animal species when I walk through the stream ecosystem I find a small hidden animal burrow by a tree. It is very tucked away and if I hadn’t been looking closer than I would have missed it. The small burrow in on an island the opening is about the size of the length from my wrist to the tip of my middle finger. It is surrounded by sticks and moss. Occasionally I can hear spring peepers chirping in the distance, but I know they are too far away to be in our ecosystem. I mallard flew overhead. You could tell it was a male because of its colored plumage, it was honking over and over again but no honks or calls were returned. Other bird sounds I heard were high pitch, the most commonly occuring was one high pitch trill sometimes followed by two shorter notes. In our ecosystem we saw cottontails in all stages. Some were unbloomed, some were in full bloom with some seeds missing, some were completely bare and some had fallen onto the ground and were decaying. We photographed mosses found in the trees as well as ferns with small dark purple seeds on brown stalks. The ferns were found right near the shore of the stream. The other notable thing our team evaluated was skunk cabbage, which was abundant in the area around our ecosystem. Fun fact, skunk cabbage is called skunk cabbage because when you pull out the leaves it smells like skunk, not because skunks eat it. During our 15 minutes of silent I laid on the bridge because it was in the sun, and it was so warm and beautiful. We were surrounded by small splashes, the sound of wind through trees and plants, the faint sound of peepers, and the occasional bird call. It was a great observation week.