Stories of a Young Botanist and Adventurer of the Canadian Prairies: One month working for ABMI in Alberta

Well it's been just over a month of living in Alberta working for the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute, and what a month it's been! My current position in Alberta is all about monitoring all sorts of biodiversity: plants, moss, lichens, trees, birds, soil, water quality, water inverts, habitat habitat habitat, just about everything. Our job is to collect all of the data at a whole bunch of sites throughout Alberta during the summer field season. This data is made publically available for baseline data, research, and management purposes J It’s a really large scale monitoring project , and a really cool organization dedicated to providing high quality, unbiased, accessible biodiversity data.

We collect lots of lichen; this is a cool one I found in a forest.

So far my two-person crew has been to a good chunk of southern Alberta: sites near Hanna, Medicine Hat, Elkwater, Milk River, Drumheller and Pigeon Lake. Lots of driving, but lots of great places to see! The aspen forests of central AB are full of cool shrubs and fun birds, but I definitely like the open rangelands of the south the most. There’s nothing like open rolling prairie, clouds for miles, and sparrows flitting about the grass. Very thankful to cattle ranchers for keeping the native prairie alive (some say the only reason there is any native prairie left is cattle ranching).

native prairie, prairie, grass, grassland, alberta, sunrise, onefour research station

The sun rises over native prairie at Onefour Research Station.

Highlights of work have involved:

· A sweet little hobby farm run by the nicest couple; they introduced us to their chickens, rabbits, cats, dogs, and horses and even let us play with a month-old foal. It was pretty much the cutest little horse I’ve ever interacted with. They also tried to pawn off a baby kitten on me, which was incredibly hard to say no to since it was riding around on my shoulders for a good half hour as we toured the farm. To top it all off, they sent us away with three dozen fresh eggs of all colours and sizes. Really lovely farm! I still miss the kitten a bit.
· Many early early mornings (generally waking up between 3 and 3:30am) watching sunrises and listening to birds sing. After the first couple mornings you start to get used to it, and I even started to like it. You see the best wildlife on bird schedule!
· Getting about a pound of mud stuck to each boot on a rainy day in a very clayey crop field. Good workout, unpleasant life experience.
· Getting barked at by a pronghorn. She actually seemed really curious, since she hung around the site for most of the morning just watching us. She was a cutie!

pronghorn, antelope, alberta, prairie, onefour

THIS very friendly pronghorn, to be exact.

· Sitting on a cactus and not realizing it until later that night when I discovered a bunch of cactus spines in my bum while showering, and subsequently spending 20 minutes picking them out. Not exactly what I imagined I’d be doing on a Friday night, but made for a funny story.

Cacti. Nice to look at, but they are not my friends.
· Locking ourselves out of our hotel at 3am and trying to explain to the staff that yes, really, we just needed to get back into our room to get some stuff, and no, we weren’t trying to skip out on the hotel bill in the middle of the night. Not the best start to a morning... a morning which continued with me having to crawl through 3 tight fences and running-long-jump over a creek to get to my bird point inside a llama pen.
· Did I mention the stunning views? At our last site, which was really close to the Montana border near Milk River, listening to a plethora of birds binging as the sun rose in the east, casting a warm glow on the Rocky Mountains to the west, endless rolling lush native prairie, and a cool mist rising off of the wetlands. Probably one of the prettiest mornings I’ve ever seen. Also two Baird’s sparrows (no photos though, bummer)!!
· Finally, meeting a crew of older men at the motel who were hired specifically to shoot gophers for a week, since apparently some farms have been overrun by gophers that dig up the land and ruin the crop and break cows’ legs (although I have recently been told that studies have shown the broken-cow-leg thing to be a myth) . I will admit, there were a crap ton of gophers at our site in the area, I almost stepped on a few…But curiously didn’t see very many hawks around. Not a single FEHA! L

And that’s mostly the work I’ve been doing for the past month. Off days have all been spent in the Rockies, around Canmore and Kootenay Plains. I should probably be in bed right now since I have to be up at 2:45am for birds, but tomorrow (or sometime very soon) I'll write about ABMI's adventures during breaks, which have all involved camping, mountains and FUN (and also lots of pretty photos).

Extra photos from spring shift one: