Just my Luck

I'm the luckiest guy around. For me, a Land Rover with a kayak in front of my house to pick me up is a great sight to start a day.


Meet Holger (Kristi thinks he's a cutie), one of the field ecologists in the group who have a project site on the polish border. It is an old military site that is now a gated wildlife preserve. They are studying an endangered poplar species that lives on floodplain islands. Of course this sounded interesting to me, and he didn't mind a bit of cheap help and an extra driver.


The water is still high so the kayak is needed to ferry equipment to the island which is home to lots of deer, pigs and hares that wait until you just about step on them before they dart away.


There were 500 poplars on the island, many mapped, numbered and their sex already determined, but the beavers are taking more every year and without flooding there aren't any young trees.


This is ol' number 48, ain't she a beaut?


I find getting in the tree easier than wrestling a pole pruner.


We took a few hundred cuttings to start in the greenhouse, which will be used for caterpillar food. Feeding caterpillars cause the tree to release volatile signals that other trees and branches on the same tree are suspected to use to ready their caterpillar defenses.


Getting insect traps and volatile collection equipment, etc. into the trees is essential to the experiments this spring. I'm good with ropes, that is why I get to go along. Here we are practicing using the crossbow to shoot lines over branches. It would also be effective on unsavories. Since Poland joined the EU a year or so ago, anyone who has skills has left for the west, especially the women, so there is a disproportionate number of frustrated skinheads. We got dirty looks, but they didn't return with twenty friends a beat the crap out of us which is good, because the crossbow is a bit slow to fend off more than one.

Not a bad way to spend a day, eh?