hoping that I would be able to navigate through my sleep deprivation
for long enough to make it to my final destination at the Sevilleta
Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Field Station. That is to say, I
felt like a zombie, was in a foreign place and my intended destination
was in the middle of the desert, 50 miles from the city where I was.
Now that moment feels like a sliver of ancient history – not to
mention how far away finals and even the semester feels.
Out here, work and play are intermingled in ways that are hard to tell
apart. It feels like sometimes I am not doing any work but instead am
just involved with adventures of varying strenuousness. I get really
dirty, my shoes get caked in mud, I am religious about sunscreen
application and I chug water. I watch thunderstorms and I look at a
night sky full of more stars than I have seen in years. I talk to
people and walk in the desert for hours. I read scientific articles,
textbooks, send emails and call scientists (and farmers). I sift
through piles of dirt, I dig holes, I go hiking, I wade in rivers and
natural springs. There is no one thing that I am guaranteed to be
doing every day and how fun or tedious or tiring my day's
work/activities will be is always unknown.
That's the general overview. If you just want the feeling of what my
life is like right now, you may stop there.
Specifically, the Sevilleta (http://sev.lternet.edu/) is one part
nature park / wildlife refuge where families and children can come to
view a less altered patch of southwestern desert and one part giant
research laboratory. For the nature park portion, there is a visitors
headquarters with a couple park rangers, some brochures and a few
stuffed animals, but not much in the way of trails or truly catering
to the general public. From what I can tell, the research side of the
Sev is much more active. There are a bunch of long term projects set
up throughout the refuge that people here work to maintain as well as
shorter term research (such as the project that I am working on – more
on this later) that gets done in this area. Given the size of the
refuge, there is a decent amount of variation of landscape within it,
so scientists (mostly from the University of New Mexico) can have fun
in everything from streams to mountains to desert grasslands.
Given its distance from civilization, the field station is set up so
that people can live here and save some driving. As it is, many of the
field sites are 45+ minutes away over bumpy dirt roads through the
refuge. There are a bunch of comfy little houses, a brand new (and
strangely empty) lab building and some other buildings for seminar
talks, computer usage and storage etc. Fortunately, these comfy little
houses have air conditioning and everywhere the wireless internet is
satisfactory (there have been a few days that I have spent more time
on the couch researching, planning and emailing than anything else).
Six people live in each house, two people per room, which is just
enough to be cozy but there's still enough space.
My peers are the other 12 REU students who are here for the summer. It
is our charge to execute independent research projects over the span
of our 10 weeks here. The sheer variety of the projects that we are
working on must surely be one of the things that makes our boss kind
of loopy – but in good ways. Although we all have separate mentors, on
a day to day basis, one woman, Jennifer, is responsible for corralling
all 13 of us to make sure that no one has been lost in the desert and
that, ideally, progress is being made on our projects. Projects
include everything from tagging prairie dogs and tracking whether they
go to different communities to analyzing weathering/soil formation on
hill slopes to two art students who are collaborating on painting and
paper making projects.
I faced some difficulty with my project right from the beginning. My
mentor is a stream ecologist who works with this area of the Rio
Grande, which conveniently runs through the Sevilleta wildlife
reserve. I spent about a week trying to put together a project to look
at pollution in irrigation ditches in the area and try to measure
water quality. That, although still an interesting project, turns out
to be beyond my scope. I did talk to some very nice, friendly and
helpful farmers and give myself a crash course on all of the
pollutants of the Rio Grande, agrochemicals, measuring pesticide
content, and the extent of agriculture near the Rio Grande. But that
turns out to be a little ambitious for a summer project with a budget
of $500.
Instead, I will be looking at local variations of the Rio Grande as a
habitat. In particular, I am looking at invertebrates that live in the
river and how they may be affected by the junction of a stream that
flows only after monsoon season. Translation: I will be wading out
into the muddy Rio Grande, scooping up bugs, water samples and
sediment samples. I will then spend hundreds of hours (literally)
looking through what I've found and identifying the bugs, and bobbing
a meter in a slurry of mud to determine percentage silt, mud, pebble.
I'm excited.
As far as fundamentals go – eating is probably next on the list of
things to cover. We cook for ourselves out here; some nights are
potluck nights. I live in the vegetarian/vegan house. We talk about
how much we love vegetables. I've never heard of a tofu scramble, but
I've witnessed several since living here. When we went to Albuquerque
last weekend, we ate the most amazing New Mexican food. Green chili
sauce is amazing and needs to applied to many more things in my life.
[But as a note, I'm now certain food for my summer is not nearly going
to be as exciting and amazing as it was last summer.] I love peanut
butter and packing lunches for days in the field.
Oh there is so much more to write. I still haven't told specific
stories about adventures – especially the weekend trips (Grand Canyon,
Albuquerque) that we've taken so far. But almost every day starts
early here as it is best to get done with field work by noon and I, of
course, have more papers to read to make sure that my research methods
aren't total tomfoolery.
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