Botanizing at last!

The summer shifts at ABMI are mostly focused on plants, since most prairie plants go into flower later in summer (July-ish?). As a plant technologist, my job is to identify and/or collect as many plants as I can at each of our sites! It’s been an amazing learning experience, and I’ve definitely become a much much much better botanist than I was before summer. Although I had a bunch of help with the boreal plants from my wonderful supervisor, most of the prairie work has been independent, so I’ve gotten very intimate with all my plant books (the Common Plants of the Western Rangelands series, put out by the Government of Alberta, is my favourite go-to field guide, although the paper covers and first few pages have long since fallen off...).

The first few days of shift were in the Rocky Mountain House area, which I hadn’t really worked in before, so there were lots of new and exciting plants to learn! I definitely liked the shrubs the most. Fun species I found in the boreal:

• ·         Raspberry (Rubus idaeus)
• ·         Lowbush cranberry (Viburnum edule)
• ·         Spreading dogbane (Apocynum androsaemifolium)
• ·         Baneberry (Actaea rubra)
• ·         Blueberry (Vaccinium myrtilloides)
• ·         Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia)
• ·         Strawberry (Fragaria virginiana AND vesca)
• ·         Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana)
• ·         Lingonberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea)
• ·         Lots of gooseberries (Ribes hudsonianum, lacustre and oxyacanthoides)
• ·         Twinflower (Linnaea borealis)
• ·         Spotted coral-root (Corallorhiza maculata)

As you can probably tell, I really like berries… 

But as lovely and buggy as forest sites, are, it’s the prairie sites that I was really gunning for. We had a bunch of sites on the Suffield military base which I probably can’t say much about, except that there were a very concerning amount of weeds and disturbance species around. All of the tank and truck trails were just covered in crested wheatgrass and yellow sweet clover, yuck! But one site there was just amazing, it was super sandy and apparently very undervisited because there were barely any disturbance species or invasives. Just lots of fun fun sandy species! Here are some that I have only found at that site and one or two other sandy-soil sites:

• ·         Indian rice grass (Oryzopsis hymenoides)
• ·         Dropseed (Sporobulus heterolepis)
• ·         Sand reedgrass (Calamovilfa longifolia)
• ·         White evening primrose (Oenothera pallida)
• ·         Chamaerhodos (Chamaerhodos erecta)
• ·         Scurf pea (Psoralea esculenta)
• ·         Indian bread-root (Psoralidium lanceolatum)
• ·         Ground plum (Astragalus crassicarpa)
• ·         Purple prairie clover (Dalea purpurea)
• ·         White prairie clover (Dalea candida)
• ·         Drummond’s milkvetch (Astragalus drummondii)
• ·         White beardtongue (Penstemon albidus)

Sandy species are a bucket of fun :) We had another interesting site only a few kilometers from the Montana border, and also within easy view of the Canadian rocky mountains. More fun plants to be found there:

• ·         Shortawn foxtail (Alopecurus aequalis)
• ·         So many astragaluses! Agrestis, crassicarpus, drummondii, flexuosus, pectinatus, and one that I couldn’t ID
• ·         One-spike AND California oatgrasses (Danthonia unispicata and californica)
• ·         Alum root (Heuchera parvifolia)
• ·         Fernleaf biscuitroot (Lomatium dissectum)
• ·         False gromwell (Onosmodium molle)
• ·         Owl-clover (Orthocarpus luteus)
• ·         Sticky locoweed (Oxytropis borealis)
• ·         Woolly groundsel (Packera cana)
• ·         Scouler’s popcornflower (Plagiobothrys scouleri)

That one was probably my most diverse prairie site so far with 80 species J So it's been a fantastic two shifts of botanizing around the boreal and the prairies, keying out milkvetches and grasses to my heart's content. Kind of bummed that there are only two more days of surveying left... And I don't even have any good photos to show for it except for a cool elk skull that my partner found:

Elk!

Sport climbing, back-country camping and bighorn sheep stand-offs at Banff National Park!

I actually wrote this about a month ago but never had the time to post it apparently... field work really picked up and subsequent breaks have been very busy and very mountainy. But here's what I did at some point in June?? A Banff trip!

So on my last break (which was the longest one at a whopping 6 days!!) we made the trek out to Banff and Lake Louise. Initially the plan was to sport climb at Lake Louise for a couple days and then head down to Waterton National Park for some good old back-country camping, but a slough of road closures, floods and avalanche warnings seriously hindered that plan. And since front-country camping is just getting old and is totally not as adventurous or rewarding as back-country, and Waterton is far away anyways, my climbing partner and I (aka Team Lulu) hung out in and around Banff and just sport-climbed for several days and worked in a little back-country trip as well. So this post is all about Banff National Park and the sport climbing around the area.

Lulu (official spokesferret of Team Lulu) and squirrel-friend.

First off, climbing, because that’s obviously high priority.  The sport climbing around Banff is amazing! There are tons of crags around Banff area with a wide range of grades, and tons of campsites nearby which really facilitates multi-day climbing trips. The Lake Louise area was really good, we climbed at the Back of the Lake, which is a pretty easy hike in; you get to hike a couple km around scenic Lake Louise and up a little slope to several awesome walls. It’s a pretty popular spot so the routes we did were really well maintained, and has some good height which lead to great views over the Lake (tons of people visit Lake Louise, but very few get to see it from that angle - it’s quite spectacular!). Very interesting climbs too, a bunch of different styles. My favourite was a 5.9 (I'll dig up the name at some point), which started with normal face climbing and lead to a ton of sweet sandstonesque horizontal cracks. Super fun! Overall, Lake Louise is pretty great although not very wilderness-y. But it does have some very friendly ground squirrels and Clark's nutcrackers.

The next couple days of climbing were at Tunnel Mountain, very close to Banff. Tunnel Mountain has okay access, it's a bit easier to get lost heading in to Tunnel than Lake Louise, but you do get to climb up a fun little scramble. Lots of good climbs on the Scoop, did our first 5.10a there, it’s all well bolted and mostly 5.8 to 5.11 climbs, lots of slab. The view from there is a lot of scenic forest and mountains, and a big old classy hotel. The sunset bathed the mountains in warm gold light, and we climbed right up until it got dark (around 10:30pm at this time of year!). We were still on the wall when the hotel fully lit up, and it looked pretty damn good for being a big unnatural block of civilization in the middle of the mountains. Next day was the Industrial playground, which had a lot of missing bolt and anchors, so I definitely wouldn’t recommend it.

The last day of climbing was at Heart Creek, just east of Canmore. This one was probably the best out of them all. There are something like 260 routes in Heart Creek and around 8 different crags. The first one, aptly named First Rock, is only a 15min hike in and the belay area is luxuriously flat and clear. All the routes are well bolted and have solid anchors, although some holds have been smoothed out over time since it’s such a popular spot. A lot of easier climbs here, 5.6-5.9, and a couple higher grades. A bit past is this incredible face called Jupiter Rock, which boasts a ton of 5.10 and 5.11 climbs that are nice and high (20-30+m) that are involved pockets, cracks, arêtes, and caves. Very cool spot! The only downside is that a lot of the climbs on the left side of the rock start out right at the edge of the creek so your belayer will get very wet. But still a great spot! Callipso (5.10a) is probably the most fun sport climb I’ve done yet.

We only really checked out three climbing spots around Banff, but there are tons more. Super-hot-spot for sport climbs!

Banff itself was another little adventure. First off, my predisposition was against Banff since it’s known as the most touristy and over-commercialized of all the mountain parks. The hotels, the trans-canada highways, the railway… it just never sounded as wild and remote as the other parks like Yoho and Jasper. After actually going there, I did find a lot of this to be true. The townsite is pretty crowded with people and shops, everything is paved (heck, even some of the trails were paved for the first km!), there are manicured lawns and dozens of picnic tables on the big lakes, which is really weird to see in the middle of a mountain range. Not to mention tour boats with loudspeakers. So initially I still kind of thought Banff sucked compared to the other parks. But once we got through the popular first few km of the Lake Minnewanka trail and into the back-country, you could easily forget about all civilization. It was just like any other back-country trail, remote and rugged. Actually it was a pretty easy trail, mostly flat and no real obstacles. Still very scenic though, and we even saw a herd bighorn sheep (babies included!). 

Little bighorn sheep on the Lake Minnewanka trail in Banff, Alberta.

There are a few different campsites on the trail at 8, 9, and 11km. We picked the 11km site since a) it involved the most hiking and b) we got the whole campground all to ourselves! The back-country campsites on Lake Minnewanka are top notch; they’ve got bear poles, a group fire pit and cooking area, a couple picnic tables, and lots of nice little tent pads that are just a cleared patch of ground. And they’ve all got a rocky beach right next to them for endless water supply and  endless swimming! We watched the sun set over the mountains, had a beach fire at night, and got a tent pad nice and close to the lake and surrounded by trees for wind protection. We were greeted in the morning by bighorn rams on the beach, and had a morning dip in the lake, which was surprisingly not ice cold - couldn’t be better!  Lake Minnewanka back-country camping, A+.

Sunset hitting the mountains over Lake Minnewanka. 

Sunset, mountains and a rock beach at Lake Minnewanka. 

Ending our hike with a triple rainbow over the lake!

We also did a little side trip on the way back  a few km up the mountains to a lookout over the lake, which gave a gorgeous 360 degree view of the mountains around the Lake (there are a lot of them and they all look kind of different). But after about 5 minutes of appreciating the view we totally got chased off the mountain by two very territorial and unimpressed bighorn rams (possibly the same two that were on the beach that morning??). To be fair, I maybe could have kept more of a distance or backed off, but the ambitous little wildlife photographer in me just couldn’t give up such a kick-ass photo op… until Mr Ram started pawing the ground and whatnot. Then we kind of skedaddled off into the trees to try and get back down the mountains without infuriating them more (tricky since one was standing in the middle of the path we needed to take down…). So yeah, two hikers hiding in the trees from a couple of bighorn sheep, bear spray in one hand and a knife in the other (or in my case, camera in one hand and knife in the other). Back-country adventures at their finest? Wouldn't trade it for anything in the world :) 

Bighorn ram #1 beside Aylmer Lookout on Lake Minnewanka.

Bighorn ram #2 at Aylmer Lookout on Lake Minnewanka.

 As always, thanks for reading and feel free to explore my photography page at www.elainekennedyphotography.com for the best of the best wildlife shots!

xo
Elaine

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).

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!

·        

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:

Pronghorn are my favourite prairie animal.

Baby bird is hungry! I felt a little bad since the parents wouldn't feed it while I was shooting nearby...

Hoodoo holes at Writing on Stone Provincial Park.

Amazing hoodoo-filled landscape after a rain at Writing on Stone Provincial Park.

Grasslands National Park and a long awaited sharp-tailed grouse lek

Grasslands National Park is most definitely one of my favourite parks in Canada. It’s the only park that protects mixed-grass prairie, Canada’s most endangered ecosystem. Only ~19% of our country’s native prairie remains; most of it has been converted to cropland or tame pasture. Native prairie supports a very high biodiversity, including many species that are not found anywhere else in Canada. Grasslands National Park is home to several species at risk including the black-footed ferret, plains bison, sage grouse and burrowing owl. It’s also a very undeveloped park, with only a few gravel roads, one corralled campsite and virtually no buildings on site. This makes it a great spot for wildlife and hiking, and of course an incredibly important ecosystem.

My first trip to GNP was during the summer of 2013, camping with a couple of friends over a long weekend. Due to some slightly inaccurate time estimates, we didn’t arrive at the park until about 11:30pm and of course couldn’t find the campground in the dark (no lights at GNP! On the figuratively-speaking-bright side, this also makes it North America’s darkest dark sky preserve, phenomenal for star gazing) so we ended up sleeping in the truck bed at a turn-off from the main road. As soon as sunrise hit, I woke up to my camping buddy shaking me awake, excitedly whispering “Elaine Elaine! There’s a lek outside!!” And wouldn’t you know it, we unknowingly slept in the middle of a sharp-tailed grouse lek site! There were ten or twelve males dancing right outside the truck, all doing their best to impress one very picky female. We watched them for a good hour or two before falling back asleep, but it was definitely the best 5am surprise I’ve ever woken up to. The ultimate downside though: my camping buddy and I were both enthusiastic amateur photographers, but since we’d slept in the truck bed, we’d moved all out gear into the cab… Needless to say both of us were very frustrated at the missed photo op, but still crazy excited about waking up to a lek outside the truck.

Sleepy plains bison from my first visit to GNP

 On to more current events! Ever since that first lek, I’d been dying to find another one and try to catch some good shots of the birds dancing. This led me to my fourth trip to GNP! The second trip was later in 2013 for black-footed ferret monitoring (run around prairie dog colonies all night with a giant spotlight looking for ferret eyeshine) and third in spring of 2014 doing sage grouse surveys (run around historic lek sites just before sunrise with super-powerful microphones listening for sage grouse). But the fourth time was just for fun J Hiking, camping, and photography. The first night we spent in East block badlands hiking around, which was a great time, and then the second night we camped out at the lek from my first GNP trip. It’s a super popular site; the birds were even there in the evening beforehand – not dancing, just hanging out. After carefully positioning the car for best viewing, we bunkered down… and woke up to the sweet sweet sound of sharpies lekking! Music to my little ears and candy for my little camera. There were about nine males and one female this time. Most of the morning was overcast so the lighting was pretty dark for a while, but the sun really came out and created perfect  backlighting for a solid 15 minutes of photography gold! I snapped a bunch of shots as quick as I could (a car was also coming down the road so I knew my birds would all flush soon). Watching sharp-tailed grouse lek is definitely better than television; I watched them for three hours before going back to sleep. After a whole year of waiting, I got my sharpie photoshoot :D

The fight begins! 

I really like this shot, there's just something about the angle and symmetry :)

This proud grouse is looking for his next competitor.

I love the way that the dust around his feet is lit up by the sun.

Other highlights of the GNP trip were the first prairie crocuses, a couple long-billed curlews, a few pronghorn, a chestnut-collared longspur, a couple of owls (not sure of the ID, either GHOW or SEOW), several ring-necked pheasants, and getting chased by a herd of bison. Okay that last one was a bit of an exaggeration, but they just popped up running up over a hill towards us from about 400m away and they cover ground pretty darn fast so it was a bit scary. But all’s well that ends well J

Like these photos? Want to see more? Visit my photography website at www.elainekennedyphotography.com!

The start of something fun!

As my first blog post, I feel like this should be something of an introduction, so here goes nothing.

My name's Elaine Kennedy, I'm a recent graduate from the University of Guelph, and I've decided to create a blog to document my photography, hiking trips, work experiences, thoughts on the importance and management of native prairie, and progress on an edible plant field guide I'd like to make. I first came to the prairies last summer for a student position with the Canadian Wildlife Service in Saskatoon, which was so far probably the best summer I've had. I got to work outside almost every day with a wonderful partner, learning all about the history, ecology and beauty of the prairies. I got to learn prairie plants (shrubs, forbs, grasses, sedges and rushes!), birds, mammals, the ecological consequences of cultivation, and ways to manage and restore native grassland. Of course, I also learned about how friendly and fun the people are in Saskatchewan! After finishing my degree in Ontario, I took the first chance I could to move back, this time to Regina to work for the provincial government doing GIS work for a species at risk project. This summer I'll be working with the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute based out of Red Deer as a plant technologist, contributing to a province-wide species inventory and monitoring program. I aim to one day be a great botanist and help protect and restore the native prairie in Canada!

Apart from work, I do a lot of outdoor activities and take every opportunity I can to get outside and hike around. Some notable trips have been the Juan de Fuca trail in British Columbia, the Landmannalauger trail in Iceland, the Skyline trail in Alberta, and excursion in my favourite park: Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan.

Landmannalauger trail, Iceland

Mount Tekkara, Jasper National Park

Black-tailed prairie dog, Grasslands National Park

 I also enjoy photography, rock climbing, and playing the violin. I am currently making a photography web site that will hopefully be up and running soon! Another big project of mine is to create a field guide to edible plants in the Canadian Prairies. This started when I failed to find such a guide in print; most guides are to all of North America and I wanted something more specific to my new home. I'm hoping to organize it by season, and include some recipes and preparation methods. This might take a while but it'll get done eventually :)

Stay tuned for lots more photos and stories and fun stuff!