This month only, at a forest near you……

Trailing Arbutus

When most people think about the types of habitats that are unique and special about Nantucket, forests are probably not on the top of the list. But we have some beautiful and special ones on our little island, and there is no better place to see spring unfolding. Take a walk in the woods  along the trails on NCF’s properties at Masquetuck, Squam Swamp, Stump Pond, and Norwood Farm (our newest land acquisition), and here are some of the things you can expect to see – but don’t wait too long, because spring on Nantucket is a fleeting phenomenon.

Star Flower

The forest floor is one of the first places to green up by producing a carpet of small, delicate wildflowers and ground covers, including Canada mayflower (Maianthemum canadense), wood anemone (Anemone quinquefolia), star flower (Trientalis borealis), trailing arbutus (Epigaea repens) and wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens). These “spring ephemerals” are among the first flowers to bloom at the end of the winter. They have very short life cycles that enable them to take advantage of the increased sunlight that reaches the forest floor at this time of year, before the overstory trees and shrubs leaf out. These plants are all less than 5 inches tall, and quickly become out shaded at the end of their bloom period by taller shrubs, ferns and the summer and fall blooming asters and goldenrods that dominate later in the growing season. So now is an excellent time to get out and explore these habitats, while these dainty little beauties are still visible.

Wintergreen

Speaking of ferns, the damp soils in these areas support an abundance of species that are now just emerging, including New York fern (Thelypteris noveboracensis), cinnamon fern (Osmunda cinnamomea), sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis), and netted chain fern (Woodwardia areolata). Ferns are among the oldest life forms. They belong to a group of flowerless plants that produce spores (reproductive bodies) in tiny sacs along the underside of their large leaves, or fronds. In spring, the fronds first appear as “fiddleheads” – curved structures reminiscent of the carved upper neck of a violin or fiddle. Cinnamon fern is one of our largest, most common and obvious species and it is just coming up now. It gets its name from the pale cinnamon colored fuzz that covers the fiddleheads when they first emerge.

Cinnamon Fern Fiddleheads

Ferns and flowers are not the only species that are emerging from dormancy at this time of year in Nantucket’s forests. Vernal pools – bodies of fresh water that either dry up for a portion of the year or are not large enough to support fish populations – are at their annual peak of activity right now. These habitats are very important breeding sites for several species of amphibians because there are no fish present to prey on their eggs. Probably the most vociferous of these are northern spring peepers (Pseudacris crucifer). These tiny tree frogs are only about an inch long, but their mating chorus can be heard on spring evenings from up to a quarter mile away. Their eggs, which are laid in clusters attached to the vegetation at the bottom of these temporary wetlands, hatch and mature very rapidly, reaching adult size in 5-8 weeks. Adult peepers are terrestrial and are equipped with adhesive toe pads that they use to climb into tree tops during the summer months – so the only time of year that they are usually detectable is springtime.

A vernal pool at Squam Swamp

A common woodland shrub that is in full bloom right now is high-bush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum). This species bears small, prolific bell-shaped flowers that are white, cream or pale pink. If visited by a pollinating insect, each of these flowers will produce a delicious blue morsel in late July. While other blueberry species on Nantucket are low growing and occur in sunny, upland locations, high-bush blueberry can grow up to 12 feet in height and occurs primarily in moister environments such as forests, swamps, bogs and pond shorelines. Now is a good time to go out and make a note of where the blueberries are in full bloom – then mark your calendar for a follow-up visit with your berry bucket later in the summer!

High-bush Blueberry

 

Horseshoe Crabs on Nantucket – Ancient and Fascinating

Spring on Nantucket means the arrival of peepers, daffodils blooming and American oystercatchers on the beach.  It also means the arrival of one of our more interesting marine species – the horseshoe crab, which begins showing up on protected and sheltered beaches to mate and spawn in May and June.

Mating Horseshoe Crab pair at Warren’s Landing

These prehistoric looking animals aren’t actually crabs – they are most closely related to trilobites which were around 400 million years ago.  Fossil records show that the horseshoe crabs we see on our beaches today do not look very different from the horseshoe crabs that swam around when dinosaurs walked the earth!

These unique and fascinating creatures may be in trouble – anecdotally, populations are much lower than they were 30 years although it’s only recently that serious efforts have been made to document how large horseshoe crab populations actually are.  People that grew up on Nantucket can remember a time when the beaches were covered with horseshoe crabs in the spring! Horseshoe crabs are in high demand as bait for conch and eel fisheries and for use in the medical industry.  Some states currently have a moratorium on horseshoe crab harvesting but the populations may still be in trouble. Check this great website for more information on threats to horseshoe crab populations.

So, to try and get a handle on horseshoe crab populations on Nantucket, in 2009, a group of island researchers from the Nantucket Conservation Foundation, Maria Mitchell Association and the UMASS Boston Nantucket Field Station began monitoring horseshoe crabs.  The monitoring work we do now will help establish a baseline of information so in the future we can see if populations are dramatically increasing of decreasing.  In May and June we start visiting beaches on and around the days of the full and new moons at high tide and count the numbers of horseshoe crabs we see near the shore.

NCF Trustee Nathan Allen helping survey horseshoe crabs

We use PVC poles strung with rope to help us define a survey area and count all males, females, and mating pairs within the area.  Because of the timing of high tides, we are sometimes out surveying beaches in the middle of the night – if you see flashlights out on the beach at Warren’s Landing at 2 am over the next two months – it’s most likely us searching for crabs! Luckily we aren’t alone in these late night endeavors – this effort is being performed all along the East Coast by various conservation, university and government groups.

Male and female horseshoe crabs are fairly easy to distinguish.  Females tend to be quite a bit larger than males, going through 2-3 more molting cycles before reaching maturity.  Additionally, the front set of walking claws on male horseshoe crabs are modified into pinchers that look a lot like boxing gloves which allow the males to hold on to the back of the female crabs shell during mating.

NCF Trustee Dale Hamilton and his wife Susan determine the sex of the horseshoe crab.

 

We monitor horseshoe crab populations in May and June at high tides around the new and full moon due to the unique reproductive biology of these animals. Horseshoe crabs become mature adults in deep ocean waters with males reaching sexual maturity around 9 years old and females around 11 years old. Once mating season starts, typically in May and June, the horseshoe crabs move to shallow areas, particularly around sandy protected beaches near intertidal sand flats.  Mating takes place in shallow water where many males seek out and court a few females.  Females spawn and lay eggs in nests in the sand from the low water up to the spring high-tide and each nest can contain up to 4,000 eggs which each female producing ~80,000 eggs in one season!  The highest amount of spawning occurs with the evening high tides during the full and new moon cycles – this is when we target our beach surveys to help document the largest amount of crabs on the beach.

Horseshoe crab underside – it’s a male!

In addition to counting the number of crabs – male and female that we encounter, we are also tagging each crab with an individual tag to help us identify them.  White circular tags are placed on the back of the crab’s main shell and each tag has an individual identification number.  This can help us figure out how crabs move around the island.  Most of our crabs are being tagged in Madaket Harbor and we tend to see them there again but a few of those crabs have made their way into Nantucket Harbor as well.  Now this is something you can help us out with!  When you see a crab – alive or dead, with a tag on it – write down the tag number and remember where you found it.  Reporting tag numbers is very very easy – just visit this website and fill out the online form – you will get information back on where the crab was tagged!

Keep you eye out for these white tags on horseshoe crabs around Nantucket

Bud Burst and Egg Time

Non-native rusty willow (Salix atrocinerea) buds resemble the native “pussy willow” (Salix discolor).

At this point in the year, we are all hungry for signs of spring. As Danielle wrote in a recent NCF Science and Stewardship blog post, peepers are singing spring songs in the marshes and ponds, and spotted turtles and snakes are emerging to bask in the sun. Otherwise, the landscape remains mainly a study in grays and browns, with occasional patches of green mosses and lichens. It will be a while before everything is lush and green, unless the weather warms for a week or so. But there are already a few things in bloom on Nantucket—and not just the daffodils and other spring bulbs planted in gardens. Passing by one of the large street elms, you may have noticed their shaggy reddish-brown flowers filling the canopy. Or you may have already seen the willow breaking from the fuzzy “pussy willow” stage into green and yellow flowers loaded with pollen. Walking along trails at Squam Farm or Squam Swamp, there are many hazelnut bushes decorated with the dangling caterpillar-like male catkins; take a closer look, and you’ll see the delicate star-shaped red female flowers scattered here and there along the twigs, too.

Male (yellow) and female (red) hazelnut (Corylus cornuta) flowers

And there is another scarlet-and-gold show just arriving in town; for the next few weeks,  the flowers of red maple will emerge around the island and the gray branches will be decked with color. This tree is well named: the flowers are red, the maple keys (helicopter-shaped winged seeds) are red, the leaves are red when they first unfurl, before greening up over the summer…and finally the leaves turn crimson again in the fall.

Female flowers of red maple (Acer rubrum).

Male flowers of red maple (Acer rubrum).

What’s the benefit to blooming so early—weeks before the first leaves unfurl? Leafless canopies allow the best dispersal of pollen—that yellowish dust that leads to plenty of sneezing during spring allergy season. And how does all that pollen get delivered to other flowers so that fertilization can occur and seeds can form? Wind carries the pollen long distances to the waiting flowers. Take the hazelnut catkins, for instance. They have evolved not to attract insects, but to dangle freely in the breeze, shedding pollen every time they shimmy in the wind. Interestingly, the red maple also produces nectar in its flowers. One of the most adaptable trees around, this species can live in swamps or in upland forests, and it even tolerates our wind and salt spray fairly well. So, it’s  a “Jack-of-all-trades” kind of tree. One of the red maple’s skills is “hedging its bets”, for seed production; it blooms early to capitalize on the open canopy for wind dispersal, but it also produces bright red flowers with nectar and pollen, which attract birds and insects, that in turn aid in pollination. An individual tree may have only male flowers, only female flowers, or some of both! It’s a very flexible species. You can read more about the sex life of red maples in this article: Arnoldia Article About Red Maple. The nectar and pollen of red maple provide an early feast for foraging honey bees early in the spring. If you search for “red maple + honeybee” online you will find many photos of honeybees visiting these vivid flowers. But red maple blossoms also sustain an unknown number of native insects. All of these visitors in turn provide a flush of insect protein for the newly arrived migratory birds. It’s all in the timing.

Trees, shrubs, insects and birds have all evolved over thousands of years in any given spot. Cues such as temperature and day length trigger the trees to start flowering or leaf-out, and the insects and birds and other organisms need to be in synch in order for everybody to get a chance at a good meal or a mate. The study of this timing of natural events is called phenology. Unfortunately, some organisms are less able to adapt to rapid changes than others, so sometimes these inter-dependencies are thrown off. It may not matter much if there are shifts back and forth from year to year—with some years being “bad” or “good” for different species. But a strong trend in one direction, or extreme variability, can really upset the apple cart. Consider last April’s weather compared to what we are experiencing this year—and consider the long term trends. Researchers around the world are becoming more and more interested in studying how plants and wildlife respond to changes in climate, and whether the responses of interdependent species are out of synch (termed “phenological mismatch”). In order to measure the changes, scientists record the time of many different events, from the blooming or “bud break” of trees to the return of migrating shorebirds or songbirds. “Bud break” is the time when the scales on a leaf or flower bud split apart, but just before the leaves or blossoms begin to unfurl. Considering that it’s almost time for many birds to lay eggs, the profuse early flowering of wildflowers and trees had better happen soon. Other insect eaters such as snakes, bats and amphibians are also eagerly awaiting the feast as they emerge from dormancy.

Windflower (Anemone quinquefolia) growing amid leaf litter at Squam Farm.

Fortunately, some flowers are just beginning to pop into bloom along the forest floor, such as windflowers (Anemone quinquefolia), with nodding five-petalled flowers (typically white, but often tinged with pink). Like the maples, these tiny wildflowers will take advantage of the leafless early spring canopy, which lets more light fall upon the forest floor and allows the plants to photosynthesize freely. You can see how the timing of all of these events can be so important for the spring food chain. If flowering too soon or too late, somebody may go hungry, or unpollinated.

Canada cinquefoil (Potentilla canadensis) growing in fields and sandplain grasslands.

Walking along the trails you may spot more wildflowers, like the bright yellow cinquefoil (Potentilla canadensis) above, which resembles wild strawberry, but has leaves bearing five leaflets rather than three, and yellow flowers rather than white.

Bluets or Quaker Ladies (Houstonia caerulea)–tiny plants that grow in large masses in fields and sandplain grasslands.

There will also be masses of tiny blue-tinged white flowers, called bluets or Quaker Ladies (Houstonia caerulea). These wildflowers grow along trail edges and in fields, and like the windflowers, they are taking advantage of blooming and photosynthesizing before the canopy trees have leafed out, and before most of the grasses have grown tall. They also grow close to the ground, where the wind speed is lower and the ground absorbs heat to create a pleasant micro-climate for small flying insects. Be sure to check out these tiny wildflowers and look for their insect pollinators while you are on your next walk.

When Why and How We Shear the Sheep

Some of the most popular questions I receive are:  Do we shear the sheep?  Why do we shear the sheep?  When do we shear the sheep?  How do we shear the sheep? And what do we do with the fleeces?

Most sheep do not have the ability to shed like your dog.  If they are not shorn the fleece will continue to grow becoming felted and heavy, posing potential health risks like fly strike which is very unpleasant for the sheep and shepherd alike.  The time of year and the number of times a year sheep are shorn is dependent on many things like the producers’ purpose of production, fiber length needed for the targeted market, the breed, the geological location and timing of the markets demand, to name a few.

Here at NCF Squam Farm we time things a bit differently than most producers.  Our top priority is land management instead of selling at markets.  We time events such as lambing and shearing around where the sheep need to be for optimal grazing effectiveness.  So we shear between the end of March and the first of April.  This is a few weeks before lambing is due to start.  This helps the ewes be more comfortable in late gestation; losing 10 pounds while carrying twins is quit a relief!  It makes for a much cleaner birth and makes it easier and cleaner for lambs to nurse.  The ewes are more in tune with weather conditions when it comes to their newborns’ needs.  Shearing before lambing time also improves the value of the wool.  Normally, the stress of lambing causes a small break in the wool fiber. If this break is at the end of the fiber because the ewe was shorn close to lambing, it doesn’t reduce the value of the wool.   If the ewes are shorn after lambing, this break also poses challenges to the shearer along with making the fiber less useful.

I know your next thought is: won’t the sheep be cold that time of year?  Especially this year!  The answer is yes and no.  Sheep are at more health risk when freshly shorn on hot summer days, believe it or not.  They are more prone to having heat stroke and damaging sun burn from losing their fleece than having negative health effects from being a little chilly.  Their internal furnace works much better than their air conditioner.  I will provide them with fields where they can get out of the wind and a little extra feed to aid in keeping them comfortable in inclement weather.

I do not shear the sheep myself.  Sheep shearing is a specialized skill that takes years of practice and is very physically challenging.  We are lucky to have an excellent on island sheep shearer Eric Shoemaker.  Thanks Eric!!

What do we do with the fleeces?  Some of the fleece we have processed into different yarns and roving at Twist of Fate Spinnery, a small family run spinnery in CT.

Those products you can purchase at Flock, The Cranberry Festival or through the NCF office – just give us a call (508) 228-2884.  Some of the yarn will be woven into blankets and sold at Nantucket Looms on Main St. The rest of the fleeces are purchased by the RH Lindsey Company, a wool merchant company in Boston.  The funds raised from selling the fleece help support the NCF sheep program, particularly expenses such as feed.

Spring is finally here!

Nothing says spring like evening choruses of spring peepers! With all the rain earlier this spring, these little trillers were reported peeping away on Nantucket in early March. But for me, spring doesn’t truly arrive until I find my first spotted turtle basking after a long winter hibernation. On Friday, March 29th, the weather finally broke on Nantucket and we had our first taste of spring! I’ve been waiting a long time for this day and I headed out in search of the season’s first spotted turtles! While it still felt cold to this warmblood, the sun was shining and it was a perfect day for this handsome old ectotherm to come out to breathe fresh air and soak up the sun’s rays:

Male spotted turtle

At this time of year, male spotted turtles are roaming in search of life’s basics: food and females! Later in the spring, the females will leave the wetlands in search of nesting sites.

On another sunny though blustery morning, Tuesday, April 2nd, I found my first garter snake basking in the sun and a red-backed salamander swimming for cover under dense sphagnum moss.

The following day at Eel Point, I heard the familiar alarm calls of Piping Plovers! They are already forming pairs and doing their amazing courtship dances for each other. The oystercatchers are being reunited with their mates as well and are already “scraping” in the sand in preparation for egg laying.

Spring..and love…is in the air for the birds and the turtles! Get outside and enjoy the sunshine folks, it’s been a long winter!

They’re Back!

An American Oystercatcher in Flight (photo courtesy of Vernon Laux).

In our last blog post, we discussed the many preparations currently underway in our Science and Stewardship Department for the arrival of our seasonal field assistants and the start of the 2013 field season. Although many of our vegetation-related projects do not get underway until plants begin to bloom and leaf out in late spring, our wildlife monitoring work often begins when it still feels like winter outside. One of the earliest projects we initiate every year is shorebird monitoring, and one of the first species to arrive on Nantucket to herald the beginning of the breeding season is the American oystercatcher (Haematopus palliates). The first oystercatcher to arrive on Nantucket in 2013 was observed by our colleague, Edie Ray, on March 3^rd on the rocks of the west jetties entrance to Nantucket Harbor. Since then, numerous additional birds have come back to our island from their wintering grounds in the southern United States. Let the season begin!

During the spring, summer, and fall, the American oystercatcher is a common sight on Nantucket’s beaches, tidal flats, and salt marshes. This large, conspicuous shorebird has a long, bright orange bill, bright yellow eyes, and sharply-contrasting brown, black and white plumage. Its preferred prey is mollusks, marine worms, and shellfish obtained while feeding along the shoreline and tidal flats. Oystercatchers begin laying eggs in late March. They nest directly on the open beach or in patches of sandy habitat within salt marshes. Both parents incubate 1-3 eggs, which hatch after about 3 weeks. The chicks learn to fly within 4 weeks of hatching, and family groups usually remain together long after the breeding season has ended. Oystercatchers often linger on Nantucket until late fall or early winter – in fact, it is not unheard of for them to be sighted on Nantucket’s Christmas Bird Count in late December.

An oystercatcher chick hiding in the marsh grass at Medouie Creek.

On NCF properties, American oystercatcher nesting sites are found at Coatue, The Haulover, Eel Point, Pocomo, and Medouie Creek. Our Science and Stewardship Department hires a seasonal field assistant each year to monitor and protect the oystercatchers, piping plovers, and least and common terns that nest on our beaches. This year, Mara Plato will be joining our seasonal staff to fill this important role, and will be working closely with Danielle O’Dell and Karen Beattie from our year-round staff. Our Coatue Ranger is a key participant in these efforts, and this year we are fortunate to have Jonathan Shuster, a former NCF shorebird monitor from 2011, coming back for this position. We also regularly communicate with numerous colleagues working on abutting conservation properties and town-owned beaches to gain information about the island-wide population of this species.

Jonathan Shuster monitors oystercatchers at Coatue Point.

Although American oystercatchers are not legally protected under either the Massachusetts or Federal Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Shorebird Conservation Plan (produced by Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences in 2001) identified oystercatchers as one of several species with declining populations in need of special attention. As a result, the American Oystercatcher Working Group (consisting of federal, state and non-governmental agencies and scientists responsible for managing this species) was formed to address research and management priorities. One of their first actions was to conduct a complete population estimate of wintering American oystercatchers in 2002-2003 using a combination of aerial surveys, photography, and ground counts along the contiguous coastline starting in New Jersey and ending in Texas. As a result of this work, the range-wide population of this species was estimated at only 11,000 birds. The survey was just repeated this winter to detect population changes, but results are not yet available.

American oystercatchers on their wintering grounds in Cedar Key, Florida.

For the past six years, our Department has been one of many partners participating in the American Oystercatcher Working Group’s mission “to develop, support and implement range-wide research and management efforts that promote the conservation of Atlantic coast American Oystercatchers and their habitats.” This includes collaborating with researchers along the Atlantic coast on a coordinated, widespread effort to band and re-sight oystercatchers to learn about their complex patterns of movement and dispersal. There are currently active color-banding and/or re-sight projects underway in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Texas. The color-bands used contain a unique 2-3 character code with a color combination specific to the state where the bird was banded (Massachusetts bands are yellow with black codes). Researchers are thus able to identify and track individual birds in the field without re-capturing them.

The two oystercatchers on the right in this photo are color banded                              (photo courtesy of Vernon Laux).

As a result of the hard work of many colleagues, a large percentage of Nantucket’s oystercatchers are now individually color banded: of the 21 pairs that nested on NCF’s beaches during the 2012 season, 22 adults and 7 chicks were banded. Oystercatchers can be extremely long-lived – it is not uncommon for birds to live at least 10 years, and there are records of banded individuals surviving up to age 17. Therefore, color banded individuals are often re-sighted for multiple years on both the breeding and wintering grounds. This data provides invaluable information about nest site fidelity (the tendency to return to the same breeding site), movement patterns between wintering and breeding ranges, and many other important population trends. Breeding birds banded in Massachusetts have been re-sighted in Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and the ocean and gulf coasts of Florida. Conversely, birds banded in New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia have subsequently been observed here in Massachusetts.

A specific, local example of how this research can reveal some very interesting and remarkable information came to light last year. “E2”, an oystercatcher that was banded in July of 2005 as an adult bird nesting on NCF property at Eel Point, has been observed for several years wintering in Cedar Key, Florida (on the Gulf coast just southwest of Gainesville). On Monday, March 19, 2012 at 12:30 PM, Charlie Muise (a researcher from Georgia visiting Cedar Key with his family) observed E2 feeding with a group of 24 oystercatchers. On Friday, March 23, 2012 at 11:30 AM, Danielle O’Dell observed E2 back on its nesting territory at Eel Point with several other oystercatchers. The straight line distance between these two sites is 1,109 miles; therefore, E2 travelled an average of 277 miles per day (at least) on its journey back to Nantucket! Needless to say, we are eagerly watching and waiting for E2’s arrival this spring.

This oystercatcher, C1, is one of several birds that nest on Nantucket and have been observed during the winter in Cedar Key, Florida (photo courtesy of Patrick Leary).

If you are out and about on Nantucket’s beaches this season and observe a color-banded American oystercatcher, please call us with the code and the date, time and location where you saw it. As demonstrated by Charlie’s re-sight report described in the paragraph above, this data can lead to some extremely valuable information. Check out the American Oystercatcher Working Group’s excellent website page, which contains all kinds of information about this species, including a detailed explanation about how to identify banded birds. This site also contains a recently-launched portal for entering color band re-sight information and finding out more about where each bird was banded and subsequent re-sightings. Massachusetts banding data has not yet been uploaded to this new website tool, but this is expected to happen within the next several months. However, NCF’s Science staff are familiar with most of our local banded birds and can likely provide you with information – so please call us (ask for Danielle or Karen) with your observations!

Can you find the oystercatcher chick in this photo? (photo courtesy of Amanda Swaller)

**Update!** Two of our banded oystercatchers have returned to our beaches! Danielle O’Dell saw E2 and its mate with black/yellow/silver bands at 10:30am on March 27th at Eel Point! Let the fun begin!

How to Plan a Successful Field Season

March always sneaks up on me each year.  In the Science and Stewardship Department at NCF, our work year is divided up into two very different parts: our Field Season (~April-October) when we are actively involved in collecting data and conducting our numerous research and monitoring projects, and the Off-Season(~November-March) which really isn’t an off-season because we spend most of our time analyzing all the data collected over the field season and writing internal reports, papers for publication and planning follow-up and new research for the coming Field Season.  In November, the winter months always seem to stretch out forever with plenty of time to get everything finished but suddenly the calendar turns to March and I realize that the busy, hectic and fun field season is right around the corner!   

Our seasonal field assistants start arriving in April, the shorebirds are starting to show up and the plants are going to start getting green very soon.  That means, March is time to start planning and preparing for the upcoming field season and that can be a little more complicated than you might think.  There is a lot of preparation that goes into planning a successful, less stressful field season!

The S&S Department has 4 full-time staff members with each of us in charge of overseeing many research projects centered around our different areas of expertise. This means, on any given week during the field season we probably have 4-5 different projects taking place on different NCF properties that can range from tracking turtles at Medouie Creek, to removing invasive plants to monitoring vegetation to a restoration site to monitoring shorebird populations.

With 4 full-time staff members and 3 seasonal field assistants and only a limited number of field vehicles and field equipment – planning and scheduling becomes key to having a successful and less stressful field season! We have a number of things we do in March that help us get ready for the upcoming field season.

Monthly Calendars

In March we make a list of all of the field work projects for the up-coming year.  So far, for 2013, we have about 30 different projects we need to implement in only 6 months! After we list all of the projects we  hope to accomplish,  we need to figure out timing.  Many projects are time limited by when plants are flowering, birds are nesting, turtles are moving, the best time to treat invasives, etc.  Then we plan out each month of the field season, strategizing the best weeks to implement each project – realizing that all of our planning needs to flexible to account for weather and unexpected surprises!

During the field season we have weekly meetings to plan the schedule for the following week so we can plan who is going where when and make sure we can effectively use our 3 field vehicles and various field supplies divided among 7 people!

Field Equipment

There is nothing worse than getting ready to start a new project and realizing you do not have all of the equipment you need!  So we spend the early spring reviewing what we need for each project and double checking that all of the field equipment is in good working order.  And then we usually submit a big order to Forestry Suppliers for Rite in the Rain paper, flags, pencils and measuring tapes.  We also check to make sure our field vehicles are in good shape and ready for the beating they get over the summer.

2012 FA Tyler Refsland with fencing equipment to protect rare plants.

 

                           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Danielle O’Dell surveying rare plants at our Head of the Plains property.

Protocols

While prepping for field season projects and checking over our field equipment we also revisit field protocols for each project.  Every year we have new seasonal field assistants; in order to make sure that data is collected in the same way each year,  we write out fairly extensive project protocols.  Our protocols lay out the history of a project and all of the steps needed to carry out the field sampling work.  From year to year we learn new things – revisiting protocols we can make sure they are up to date with any new maps and information and refresh our memory so we are ready to train our new field assistants.

All of these steps help set us up for a successful field season!  So as we  head into April and May – you will start seeing us out on the NCF properties more often.  If you are wondering what we are doing, please ask – we are always happy to take a minute or two to talk about our work!

So even though we know March means we will soon be busy and chaotic – we are excited and anticipating getting out from our desks and back out on the properties that make Nantucket so unique.  We have a lot of exciting projects coming up this year – keep an eye on this blog to see what we are doing!