Life on the Outer Coast

September 20-22
The weather that we have had the last few days has been conducive to getting back to some writing projects. I caught up with grading, re-writing lab procedures and finished the long put off kayak/birding paragraphs that I promised Marge. Also finished the muskeg research proposal so that we can ask for a small amount of SCS financial support.

Went over to Alice Island Wednesday and Thursday, the first day just to escape my window-less office and the second because Jan called and reported a pair of mourning doves in the area. The road is paved around the gravel loop and the lots are seeded with grass, but many of the trees were spared. There were two nice maples and a birch near Mermaid cove that I hadn't noticed before or didn't remember. I hope that they go slow building the houses, but it is probably a vain hope. There were abundant robins, juncos and sparrows (song, fox, and lincoln's) eating the grass seed. I didn't see the mourning doves, but I didn't have time to look until 2 hours after she called. On my way back to my office I found several black legged kittiwakes among the gulls in the channel. This might be described as procrastination, but it seemed to be time to start watching the channel again.

On Thursday Marisa, Asa and I went up to the first muskeg along the Indian River trail to collect fresh soil for the bioassay and to re-collect pond water for the Archaea search. I collected soil from the rhizosphere from two distinct areas; a swale area with Carex livida, C. pluriflora, Gentiana douglasiana and Drosera and the other from a hummock with Empetrum, Vaccinium vitis-idaea and a small Pinus. The hummock soil was full of what looked like ectomycorrhizal roots, but I haven't had a chance to look at them closely. Asa was doing rather well until he wandered a little too close to a muskeg pond, he went swimming, but managed to get himself out. There is something terribly compelling about ponds (kind of like bandsaws). I remember jumping into a few when I was little, but I suspect its actually the unstable nature of the sphagnum dominated edges that sucks small people into the ponds around here. Collected some roots from G. douglasiana and Rubus chamaemorus. It isn't the best time of year for this activity. The stems are soft enough on the Gentian that it is a delicate job to keep the roots and stem attached to eachother when cleaning up the sample. The cloudberry was alot easier to keep together, but I don't think I collected an adequate amount of fine roots. The mushrooms seem to be slacking off a little with the dropping temperature.

On Friday set up the bioassay with the Edgecumbe class. The task took substantially longer than the 80 minute class period. We used a two-fold dilution series out to the 7th dilution with 5 replicates of each soil sample. We started with 50g of test soil and 50g of sterile soil, fortunately the students had started weighing the autoclaved soil on Thursday, so were able to get through the mixing and weighing of the dilution series. Marisa and I stayed until noon to finish potting up the dilutions and planting the seeds. The MPN procedure for detecting VA mycorrhizae that we had planned to use, called for the seeds to be planted in a cylinder shaped area of the soil dilution surrounded by 300 g of sterile soil. The idea was that the roots would be surrounded by the inoculum, get infected and then grow into the rest of the soil. At some point we realized that we didn't have enough soil to complete the procedure as planned, so we used a dixie cup (instead of a coffeee size cup) as a planting pot. I plan on allowing the seedlings to grow in the smaller cup until they have occupied the complete soil volume then transplanting them into the larger soil volume. Hopefully, this modification will work reasonably well. Used wheat seed as a test plant, I would prefer to have onion seed, but I didn't realize that I was starting this project this fall, so couldn't plan ahead. I borrowed the multi-tier light stand from UAS so the seedlings should get adequate light. Now it's time to cross my fingers.

After that fun, drove out to the benchlands road to dig alders for the park. Finding adequate numbers was not a problem. Salix sitchensis was also abundant a little further down the road. I am reluctant to plant willow in the old picnic area as there aren't any in that area, so I planted them in the upper parking lot. Only found one sad looking salmonberry to transplant. After planting this load, I think it will take one more session of alder securing to fill the paths approaching the old picnic area. Still looking for easy salmonberry and elderberry.
Walked down to the river mouth after planting, unfortunately without my binoculars. It was a little difficult to distinguish the types of ducks, so didn't stay too long.