It's Hot!

Holy Heat Wave, Batman! Ok its hot. Real hot. Like a mile from the sun hot. What a difference 150 miles makes between the wilds of Kents Hill, Maine and Durham, NH. I'm sure its hot back home right now, but I'm also sure it's a bit direr. I'll adapt, I hope, or it'll be what I tell my bio students during my evolution unit: Adapt or Die! So heat aside, here is what we've done so far:

Monday, 6/7 we spent the morning doing introduction games and team building games. A bit like summer camp and pretty fun. The afternoon was spent on our first field outing to "College Woods" next to the main campus. I REALLY liked this because this woods was WAY different than the woods I use back at KHS. Sections of College Woods has not been harvested in over a hundred years due to different forestry experiments being run over the years. This has resulted in a wood lot of legit old growth trees, some of them massive. This woods is basically mostly overstory/canopy trees of hemlock and a few very old (well over 100 years) white pines. We dbh a white pine and it was 85cm (nearly 3 ft diameter). Pretty big for a pine these days. Anyway the wood lot is dominated by hemlock then beech then a big drop off in density to gray birch, maple and a basswodd or shagbark hickory here and there. This woods was a "gallery" forest with stately giants, loads of shade and virtually NO understory. Interesting to say the least. Pictures to come soon (hopefully).

Today, 6/8 we analyzed the data gathered Monday at College Woods. We recorded whole class stem (tree) numbers (w/ dbh over 2cm), relative density of each species and created a histogram to decide what classification this forest was. With the predominance of hemlock in the canopy and in the midstory it was decided that this forest is transitioning into a "invading/colonizing" forest where the old pines are dying off and are being replaced by hemlock and beech to a lesser extent.

Then we participated in a scavenger hunt which was designed to get us introduced to the Barrington Headwaters. We explored an old beaver dam, abandoned homesteads, and logging history. It was hot (see above) and a bit of a challenge for a bunch of super concientious grad students to follow the directions, but we all made it out alive and we got to know a small part of a forest that will be our base for the next few weeks as we dive into our research projects. More on that later!