March in Maine! A photo update on what's been happening:
My supervisor lent me her son's cross country skis for the remainder of the winter, and since winter refuses to loosen its grip, I've had multiple opportunities to use them! This is a Thursday morning in Acadia. While quite lovely, the skiing was actually terrible because it was so warm out...sticky snow that, well, sticks to the bottom of your skis and builds up so you can't move. Due to this unfortunate situation, I fell over several times, but it was still gorgeous! The first time I went cross country skiing, my supervisor took me at sunset and we were out there long enough to ski by moonlight. It was clear enough that we didn't need headlamps to see, and we ran into some other night skiers. It was numbingly cold, though.
This is Sand Beach on a warmer Saturday. The past few times I've been there, it's been empty, but as soon as the temperature hits 40, the people come out. All that foam stuff is, in fact, sea foam! It was pretty neat to watch it roll on the sand like little tumbleweeds of the ocean. Sand Beach is the place where I inevitably end up when I'm exploring Acadia since a lot of the trails and areas are closed for the season. It's the only sandy beach in the area. The rest are all rocks and cliffs. The sand is actually tiny pieces of ground up shells which you can see if you look closely at a pinch of it.
Here is Sand Beach again! This time from the top of some hill or mountain, I'm not really sure which. My friend came to visit and we did a bit of impromptu hiking which was pretty slick in places. I was afraid we might have to slide all the way down the trail on our butts to avoid breaking our legs, but luckily our pants were spared and we made it down without much mishap.
On the shore of Frenchman Bay, right near the Bio Lab is where one might find this stone arch. Since it was low tide, my friend and I were able to walk along the shore among the hundreds of blue mussels, crabs, and rocks, and then we stumbled on this gem. I asked my supervisor if I could eat the blue mussels and she said for sure. I am getting over my first experience of lobster, which I wasn't actually that enamored by, so I might wait on mussels for awhile. The lobster creeped me out a lot more than I thought! Those eyes looking right at you, those antennae, the weird gross stuff (tamale) in the lobster's stomach (which is apparently where all the toxins gather)....I guess in the early to mid 1900s, they were actually considered a poor man's food, and something to hide if you had to eat them. A prison on the coast had to enforce a rule that lobster could only be served twice a week since the prisoners complained lobster was served too often.
These are the grids I'm working on for eelgrass restoration, the whole reason I'm here. We have to make hundreds of these grids for the summer when we'll tie eelgrass plants onto the grid with the green ties you see here, about 20/grid, and place them in areas where eelgrass should be growing. Since 1996, the eelgrass in the bay has declined 95%. Last year was a particularly bad year, though we still don't know why. Research is ongoing!
I just returned from doing something I never imagined myself doing: cutting down trees with a chainsaw! I felt pretty bad about felling perfectly healthy trees...one of the trees cut down was a 60 foot hemlock. My tree was also a hemlock, though not quite so large. I'm hugging it here, apologizing for what I'm about to do to it (didn't I go to school to save the trees??). Since I had the least experience (that is to say, none), I think the instructors gave me the easiest tree, which is fine by me! I was shaking after I felled it...everyone in the group watched each person fell their tree. It was a wonderful group, though. I trained with other Corps members and we had a great time all week, cooking, playing games, drinking coffee, sitting by the wood stove, and sawing, always sawing. Everyone had bright these bright orange hats and Kevlar chaps. The saws were actually smaller than I thought, about 12 pounds, but still pretty intimidating! Everyone was very supportive of each other, which is one of the reasons I love what I'm doing right now. Each member of the group has something to offer and people are forever competing to "take the most initiative" when something needs to be done (appropriate, since the motto is 'Getting Things Done'). We stretch together in the morning, before day in the field, each person leading a stretch and answering the "question of the day" which ranged from "what's your favorite smell" to "if you could be a fly on a wall, where would you want to be". It's a fantastic atmosphere, and furthermore, not a single person lacks a sense of humor. Sarcasm, "your momma" jokes, poking fun at each other...I laughed until I cried almost every night this week. That sounds overly idealized, but it really is wonderful to be part of such a community, where people hold similar ideals and values and are so willing to share stories, food, ideas, knowledge, and much more.
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