Natalie Boelman, an ecosystem ecologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, writes from the North Slope of Alaska, where she is studying the effects of climate change on the interactions among plants, insects and migratory songbirds.
Thursday, June 2
This is the best time of the season to be working up here. When the sun is out, temperatures can be around 70 degrees Fahrenheit, but the critical factor is that there are no mosquitoes out yet! In a week or so, they’ll be out by the millions, forcing everyone into head nets, bug shirts and DEET use until as late as September, depending on the weather.
Over the past week we’ve visited all four of our field sites multiple times. While the members of our team focused on songbirds and insects went about their data collection at each site, a Columbia University graduate student working with me, Shannan Sweet, and I focused on the vegetation monitoring. Last spring our group set up four 100-meter-long transects at each of our field sites, with the intent of monitoring the vegetation along them every year. As soon as the transects became snow-free, which happened just a few days ago, we sprang into action. The first thing we did was to get down on our hands and knees and take inventory of the old berries and catkins — cylindrical flower clusters with no petals — left over from last summer. When the migratory songbirds first arrive on the tundra, this is their main food source. As we counted, we also did some taste-testing, and decided that compared with bog blueberries and crowberries, the overwintered bog cranberries taste the best. I wonder if the birds would agree. Read more…