Day 2 Plus Phenology

 I'm rushing this post before I pass out for the night. So this morning, and for the rest of the week I am the meteorologist at Wolf Ridge! This means I get up super early check the weather, take some measurements outside, do a little forecasting and announce the weather to the dining hall at breakfast. It also means I get to spend some time this week doing phenology. To put it simply, phenology is the study of change in the environment marked by natural occurences. Birds migrating, leaves changing colors, crickets disappearing are all signs of change. So I get to go around and look for things changing, then I compare that to the  average date of the year this normally takes place. On the left is some high bush cranberry (different from the bog cranberries you eat at Christmas) and the namesake of the WR driveway - Cranberry Road. I tasted one today and the berries are mature/ripe. It's a little bit early for this, they usually ripen after 1st frost. 

So I spent about two hours out with our staff phenology expert as he showed me the ropes and what I should be looking for this week. There was tons and tons of stuff, but don't worry I won't bore you....too much. The paper birch tree leave moved on from flecking (starting to change color) to first solid color (a whole branch or whole tree has changed) but not peak color (all birch trees have changed). This is on time, but for a lot of individual trees it has been happening since a few weeks ago. This is due to some leaf miners! This is a generic term for insects that only eat the middle layer of a leaf. So you can see in the close up photo the part of the leaf that is dark brown. The brown is the top and bottom outside layers of the leaf, and the inside has been munched away.

Then this afternoon I taught Geology, which totally rocked :) Overall I think it went really well. It was a rowdy bunch and I struggled a lot with trying to keep them from jumping off a cliff, but most seemed to retain a lot of information. I was worried about content, but I think I was as great as I could have expected for a first time. I was worried about time, but got back even a little early from the hike. And like I said, when we reviewed at the end, they knew a lot more than they started out with. 

I'm getting up crazy early again tomorrow to check the weather than teaching Adventure Ropes! I'm being observed since it's my first time so let's hope I remember all that safety stuff and don't drop a fourth grader 30 feet :)