Every morning before dawn a biologist and two volunteers sweep the beach from one end to the other to find out if any turtles came in after the middle-of-the-night patrols have gone to bed.

We start at 5:30 AM, just as it’s starting to get light.

A giant leatherback turtle had come in and evidently did a couple of 360 degree loops on her way to her nesting spot.

She laid 68 eggs before returning.

I missed all that, but saw the tracks in the early morning light

Tonight I will be back on North Beach.

The beach in front of our Field Station is important.  Almost half of the leatherback turtles in the eastern Pacific nest here.  In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s nearly all the eggs were dug up by humans and eaten.  The beach was made into a national park in the mid-1990s and now volunteers and biologists patrol the beach every night from October through March when the turtles are nesting.  Our vigilance helps deter poachers.  It’s actually illegal for anyone to be on this beach at night, unless you’re an Earthwatch biologist, a professional guide or a park ranger or you are accompanied by one of those people.

There are three species that nest here:  Leatherbacks, Olive Ridleys, and Black Sea Turtles.  The leatherbacks are really huge.

We walk in teams of three; one staff biologist and two volunteers.  We wear red headlamps but keep them turned off unless we find a turtle.  We wear long pants to protect against sand fleas and athletic shoes to protect our feet from injury in the dark and carry water, bug repellant and scientific equipment.  We start three hours before high tide and continue until three hours after high tide, no matter what time of the night high tide is.

We are divided into several teams; last night I was doing the “north” portion of the beach.  We walk briskly down the beach for about twenty minutes on the wet sand.  Then we sit still for twenty minutes.  Then we walk briskly back the way we came.  Another break.  Back and forth, back and forth, we crisscross the same portion of beach for six hours in twenty minute sweeps.  At the ends of our segment we occasionally meet other groups.  It’s both strenuous and contemplative, because it’s very dark and the stars are really bright.  There is phosphorescence in the water; bright specks of it are lying on the sand like little glowing jewels.  During our breaks we look up at the sky and see shooting stars.  The surf never stops.

We are looking for turtle tracks.  When the turtles crawl out of the surf, they leave a big dark track in the sand.  If we cross one, we follow it up the beach and find the turtle.  If she is laying her eggs in a good spot somebody lies down on the sand just behind her and counts the eggs as they fall into the hole she has dug.  If she is new to this beach, she gets a flipper tag installed.  If she’s not new, we read the tags she is wearing.

Doesn’t she mind all the attention?  It doesn’t look that way.  The biologists I am with say that she is in a “trance”; her body is flooded with egg-laying hormones.  We stay behind her, speak in hushed voices and use only red light which she can’t see well.  She appears not to notice us.

If she is laying her eggs in a “doomed” spot, we catch them as they come out of her and move them to the Hatchery.  The hatchery is a fenced-off square of sand high up on a dark, quiet section of the beach.  A person is minding the hatchery at all times of the night.  During the day we check every half hour in case baby turtles start to hatch.  When they do we put them in a bucket and let them go at the water’s edge that evening.  At night the job is to protect the hatchery from raccoons, who are always trying to come in and dig up the nests.

What makes a spot “doomed”?  For one thing, if there are lights nearby the baby turtles will try to crawl towards them when they hatch instead of down the beach towards the water.  They are programmed to crawl towards light near the horizon, because in a state of nature this would be the line of surf lit up by starlight.  Obviously, if there are lights from development nearby the turtles try to go to them and they never make it to the water.

Besides night patrols and hatchery shifts, a team patrols the beach every morning, starting just before dawn, to see if the night patrols missed any nests.  So there is almost always someone working on the beach, around the clock.  We get together for two meals a day, at 11:00 AM and 6:00 PM; these are the only times that nobody is working (except whoever is on hatchery duty.)

This project is the Earthwatch Institute’s longest-running project that is still in operation – it’s 27 years old.  But, the work we do doesn’t photograph well.  You can’t use a flash on the beach at night.

I had three flights, each with a long layover, so it took almost a day to get here.  In the Los Angeles airport I met two other teachers who received Earthwatch Teach Earth Fellowships like me:  Justine Hochstaedter and Dean Lorenzo, both from the San Francisco Bay Area.

I got here in time for dinner.  At the Goldring-Gund Marine Biology Field Station, we work all night.  So there wasn’t time to post a blog, sleep, even shave!  I spent last night patrolling the beaches.  There is a lot to tell about that; and no time to tell it now.  But when I first arrived everyone was looking into a bucket of just-hatched Olive Ridley sea turtles.

Later on I got to carry them down to the beach and let them go.

So, enjoy these pictures until I have time to post more.

I’m going to Costa Rica to participate in the Earthwatch Institute’s Costa Rican Sea Turtles expedition http://earthwatch.org/expeditions/costa-rican-sea-turtles.  I’ll be patrolling the beach at night collecting data on nesting sea turtles; counting and marking nests and making temperature measurements.  Sea turtles have been around since the Triassic Period but with populations down 90% or more in recent years they need our help now.

What to bring?

Binoculars, waterproof field notebook and pencils, hand lens, digital camera with battery charger and cable, Dell laptop computer with power cord and ethernet cable, data stick, headlamp, Earthwatch documents, a good book, Panama hat, water shoes, bathing suit, sunglasses, day pack, rain poncho, sunscreen, insect repellant, lip balm, bandana, water bottle, watch, alarm clock, PASSPORT, cash, plane tickets…

Bighorn Sheep

It has become a tradition with us to wake up before dawn (4:30 AM!) and drive up to the Patriarch Grove to see the sun rise. Nobody has to do it, but nobody opted out either. The sunrise we saw was the best yet.

Changes are afoot at the White Mountain Research Center; positive ones. They have actually lowered the rates they charge us for using the facility. The director was on the mountain during our visit, and we met him.
before dawn
dawn

We found the cold frame in good shape; the pump, battery and window vents still work after all this time on the mountain. We fertilized with some more sheep manure, watered it, and planted radishes, nasturtiums, and herbs.

Now that we’re experts on spiral grain in bristlecone pines (we published a paper in a peer reviewed academic journal on it this year!), we wondered if we could tackle the question of why some trees have purple female cones and some have green ones. We did a quick preliminary survey on the cone color of 100 trees on the Timberline Ancients Nature Trail and 100 more on the Cottonwood Basin Overlook Trail, both of which are located in the Patriarch Grove. On both trails, 86% of the trees have purple cones; the purple pigment is obviously the dominant trait. So what, though? Unlike spiral gain, nobody is arguing that the color of the cones offers any selective advantage. Unless we find a very different proportion of purple/green in the Schulman Grove (and I don’t think we will) there may be nothing more to say about it. We’ll see next trip.

Twelve of us of us climbed 14,000′ White Mountain Peak. What made this climb special were all the bighorn sheep on the peak. They were all over the place – never have we seen so many.

What we learned:

• First-year female cones in bristlecone pines in the Patriarch Grove are purple on 86% of the trees. Trees with green ones are hard to find. The proportion of purple ones doesn’t vary within the grove.
• Bighorn sheep will let you get surprisingly close. They see you, of course, but they aren’t particularly afraid since they know they can outrun you.

The cold frame gets a reprieve

This trip it was just one person, yours truly. No students this time, although I was coming to the White Mountains directly from Yosemite National Park where I had spent three days with 54 tenth graders. To tell the truth, I was going to take the cold frame apart and haul it to a landfill. After five years, the project is beginning to feel routine. We’ve proved our point with it.
When I got there and saw how well everything was going, I began to have second thoughts. After years on the mountain, the electrical system’s battery was up to +14.7 volts! That’s actually the highest we’ve ever recorded. The pump still works, even when it is run dry. The growth chambers were more filled with foliage than they have ever been. The Barcroft caretaker said he had taken “lots” of radishes out of it and he seemed to appreciate them. The herbs were doing well too. The carrots were not. The coat of paint we put on it still looked good. Nobody is calling the project an eyesore yet.

Maybe we can keep it going another year or two! I turned off the timer, drained the water tank and left it for another year.

Taking stock of our projects here: The cold frame is probably down to its last year or two, the bristlecone pines spiral grain project is completed, and the artificial hypoliths need to sit undisturbed for a few more years. We need a new project to keep us busy here, and maybe we have an idea for one. Bristlecone pine female cones come in two colors: purple and green. Purple cones are more common than green. Nobody knows anything except that; it’s probably “just genetics.” Maybe we should do a survey on that – are the ratios of purple/green the same everywhere?

We’ll be back.

We plant again, for the fifth year in a row

Jordan woke us up with a loud yell at 5:00 AM so we could drive up to the Patriarch Grove to see the sun rise. It’s rare for teenagers to wake up their elders at this hour, but as you can see from the photos it was worth it.

There are some new staff members at the White Mountain Research Station. It changed hands from U. C. San Diego to U.C.L.A. last year. But our old friend Tim Forsell is still the cook and caretaker at Crooked Creek.

We found the cold frame in pretty good shape, but a marmot had evidently broken into the left hand chamber and vandalized it. We fixed it and tested the electrical and irrigation systems. The battery voltage was +14.6 volts. That’s better than last year at this time! The pump still works, so it didn’t take us long to set everything up. We fertilized with some sheep manure, watered it, and planted carrots, radishes, arugula and herbs.

Chris Kopp, a Ph.D. student at U. C. San Diego, took us out into the field to show us his climate change experiment on alpine plants. We also talked about bristlecone and whitebark pines with University of Montana student Colin Maher and talked geology with professor Allan Glazner of the University of North Carolina.

George found a number of arrowheads in the meadows below Barcroft.

We found our old array of artificial hypoliths. Some of the tiles were out of position. We are getting used to this sort of thing from the rodents. Elena photographed the bottoms of 59 tiles. Several of the tiles have some green on them.

While some of us climbed 14,000′ White Mountain Peak, a few of us rested at Barcroft. Everyone who started up the peak made it to the summit, but it sure was strenuous.

Our work done, we enjoyed telling scary stories around the fire.

What we learned:

• One of the benefits of coming here is learning from the graduate students and professors you meet,
• All three of our projects here are maturing, and we don’t have as much work to do as we used to have in past years. The bristlecone pines spiral grain project has been submitted to an academic journal and we are waiting on that. The artificial hypoliths won’t need to be checked again for several years. The cold frame project is getting to be routine. If we want to keep coming here (and we do!) we need to think of some new projects.

Peak Fall Foliage at Cottonwood Canyon!

There were only four of us on this trip We had to record what we grew and put the cold frame to bed for the winter. We got up before dawn to see the sun rise over the Patriarch Grove, as we often do. We also measured 100 more dead bristlecone pines on the slope above the Timberline Ancients Nature Trail to double-check whether or not the proportion of left- straight- and right-handed spiral grain is different in dead trees than in living trees. It is not.

We noted that these trees practically never have broken trunks. When they fall over, it is because the whole root ball is ripped out of the ground. This means the ” spiral grain strengthens the tree and keeps it from being broken by the wind” hypothesis doesn’t work for bristlecone pines.
We checked up on some of the artificial hypoliths we had deployed in June. All but one of the hypoliths we placed near the Sierra Overlook were missing. Somebody had found then and picked them up. But the ones at 11,800′ Sheep Pass are still there and some are already showing signs of colonization by cyanobacteria.

At the cold frame, we found some bolted lettuces. Alan (the Barcroft caretaker) told us that he had harvested radishes, lettuce and garlic on multiple occasions. That’s the problem when you plant crops that grow in two months (radishes and lettuce) but don’t come back to check on them for three months. Next year we’ll plant carrots, which take longer.

Alan said he had re-filled the rain barrel two and a half times. We had the drip irrigation timer set to run for 12 minutes per day, which was maybe too much. Next year we’ll try 8 minutes per day.

The calendula and sweet basil had not done well. The plants were stunted, and the calendula never flowered. We turned off the digital timer, drained the rain barrel and pump, and dug some sheep manure into the growth chambers. The battery voltage is still +14.4 volts!
Five miles down the road from Crooked Creek the quaking aspens in Cottonwood Canyon were in peak colors. Yellow, orange and green – it was spectacular! Sublime. Here are some pictures.

On the way home we stopped at Obsidian Dome and Panum Crater, near Mono Lake. These are well worth seeing.

What we learned:

• Dead bristlecones pines have the same proportion of left, straight, and right-handed grain as living ones,
• Bristlecone pines get uprooted by the wind, not broken,
• You have to place artificial hypoliths far from any parking lot if you don’t want people to find them,
• Three months on White Mountain Peak is enough time for the hypolith colonization process to start (soil grains clinging strongly due to exo-cellular polysaccharides, but no green film),
• Our irrigation system worked,
• Calendula and sweet basil do not do well in our cold frame,
• We should try carrots next year,
• Panum Crater and Obsidian Dome are just a few minutes out of our way and are very interesting and educational – especially Panum Crater, which is a miniature volcano that you can walk around and into,
• The fall foliage in Cottonwood Canyon is a must-see.

Basil, Garlic, Calendula

One of the first things we did was to go back to the Cottonwood Basin Overlook Trail and double-check seventeen bristlecone pines to see if last year’s team had recorded the spiral grain (right handed vs. left handed) backwards. They had. It’s easy to make mistakes at this altitude. The data from this section of this trail looked very different from the other 500+ trees we measured, and we had our suspicions. Now we know that the pattern of right handed, left handed and straight trees is remarkabley consistent everywhere on the mountain.

We are now ready to publish this research, in either of two journals: “Trees”, or “The Canadian Journal of Forest Research.”

A surprise awaited us when we got to the cold frame – who planted this? It seems the Barcroft caretaker, Dori Cann, had planted some cloves of garlic last October when she was cleaning out the kitchen for the season. The garlic cloves wintered over in the cold fame and sprouted this spring. We watered them and let them stay. We also fixed the irrigation system with a new bilge pump and planted sweet basil, salad greens, radishes and calendula.
The battery voltage was still +14.1 volts!

We found our old arrray of artificial hypoliths. A marmot or some other animal had flipped a lot of the tiles. We are getting used to this sort of thing from the rodents. We photographed the bottoms of 16 tiles that were still in position and replaced the rest. One of the tiles has some green on it!

While everyone else climbed 14,000′ White Mountain Peak, Anthony and Mike measured the transmittance of natural sunlight through 24 natural hypoliths. These cells can grow here with only 0.07% of the natural direct sunlight! We also placed six smaller arrays of artificial hypoliths down the mountainside, at elevations of 8,000 – 12,500 feet.

Our work done, we enjoyed toasting marshmallows around the fire and even did some blacksmithing and woodworking projects. Anna made a wooden spoon, burning out the bowl. A few of us also played pool on the continent’s highest pool table at Barcroft.
first green radiometer

What we learned:

• Garlic can over-winter in our cold frame, which probably means that onions and flower bulbs can too. We will consider these for a fall 2012 planting.
• Our electrical system is still good, and we have high hopes for our irrigation system this year.
• The anamolously twisted trees on the Cottonwood Basin Overlook Trail were really just bad data. The proportion of spiral grain that is left handed (< 20%), straight (~ 70%) or right-handed ( < 10%) is very consistent in every part of every grove.
• Al least one marble tile has a bit of green film after just one year.
• Marmots/rodents always disturb a densely spaced 6 x 10 array of artificial hypoliths. We need to use smaller arrays, with the tiles spaced a few feet apart from each other.
• About 0.05% of direct White Mountain sunlight is the cut-off for hypolithic cell growth. This is similar to but slightly less than hypoliths in Namibia (0.08% – 0.10%). It makes sense, because White Mountain is higher in elevation, brighter, wetter and cooler than the Namib desert.

Third harvest, and we finish measuring the Bristlecone Pines

The first thing we did was to get up at 5:00 AM to see the sun rise over the Patriarch Grove at an elevation of 11,300′.  It was dark, cold and early, but nobody wanted to stay in bed.

Even though our water pump developed a leak back in July, we had some radishes, lettuce and potatoes to harvest from the cold frame. Dori Cann, the Barcroft caretaker, had fixed our plumbing with a bit of wire. Thank you Dori!

The battery voltage was still +14.4 volts! Our electrical system works great when it’s not attended. We wish we could say the same about our plumbing.

Then we measured 250 trees in the Schuleman Grove. We now have a data set of 600 trees. Over the winter, Anna and Sarah will analyze the data to see if we can determine any relationship between spiral grain and the tree’s environment.

What we learned:

• We still haven’t worked out the best way to get water from our reservoir to the soil. We have tried a a gravity drip system, a submersible pup, and an in-line pump. The in-line pump was too strong. The submersible pump siphoned water even when it wasn’t on. We need to get a much smaller in-line pump, or go back to the gravity drip system.