Wellington, 22 Aug.
I’m back in Wellington for a couple of days following our first week in the Tararuas; returning to Masterton this afternoon.
Our team was choppered into Dracophyllum Biv on Monday morning; three trips were required in order to get all our camp gear in as well. We had a base camp site organised in the headwaters of the Otaki River, so most of it was taken straight there. The biv was a good start point for the first days work, though. It was a great day; Mt Taranaki was clearly visable from our vantage point. While we were waiting, Mark and I checked out the bush line vegetation. It being my first time in the interior of the Tararuas, I was struck by the load of moss and lichens on the tree trunks. It’s usually a sign of a persistently cloudy climate around the tops.
The first day was unremarkable; I slipped going up a bank and smacked my head on a rock, just on the eyebrow, giving rise to a wee bit of blood. Nothing too serious. We managed to get two 10x10 plots finished, but it was quite slow going due to showing the two newbies (including myself on this project) the ropes. By the time we finished and reached our campsite, it was nearly dark, and just starting to rain.
It rained heavily all night. We rose at dawn to find the river flooding, and our campsite under threat. There was a mad (but organised) scramble to move our entire camp up into a clearing in the bush. Seven tents and a tarp in an area that turned out to be rather boggy, and getting boggier as the day went on. With the river flooding, we were more or less stuck until the rain stopped. I started reading my book. My eye was rather swollen, and was starting to bruise into a classic shiner.
Over the next two days, the rain came and went, but never went for long. All we could do was sit and wait, trying to keep warm. Everything was wet, including sleeping bags, ‘dry’ clothes, and food. I finished my book, all 700 odd pages of it. We played cards, told stories, snacked on our supplies. The river dropped marginally, but by the end of Wednesday evening, when the rain finally stopped, we were still uncertain as to the weather forecast, or even if there was one for the Tararuas. Fresh snow on the tops demonstrated how cold the weather had been. All in all, not a highlight of my fieldwork career.
To finish off the week, we got a good days work in on Thursday, and Friday looked promising, too, until we got a call from the chopper pilot that the weather forecast was looking bad for the weekend. We had a narrow window of opportunity for him to collect us before strengthening nor’ westers on the tops prevented flying, which would have stranded us in the wet for another three days. Needless to say, we were all only too pleased by that point to come back to base slightly earlier than scheduled.
Cheers
Matt
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Winter field-work
Masterton, August 15th
The team has convened at our base just out of Masterton, a converted woolshed attached to the helicopter hanger; no insulation, and big gaps underneath the doors. Gods, but it’s cold! We’ve just returned from doing the shopping, preparing to head into the hills first thing in the morning, and we’ve all immediately got wrapped up in sleeping bags to keep warm. There’s a heater in the corner, but it may as well be outside for all the good it’s doing; the space is just too big to heat.
Our team is a mixture of new and old. Apart from myself, there are two others that have backed up from last summer; Susan and Tony L (otherwise known as ‘Big T’). Kelly is an old hand at this business, but wasn’t with us last year; she was working on another project. It looks like she’s going to be my Team Leader later on in the South Island. Mark is ex-DoC (sort-of; he’s famous for having to be rescued from the Hooker Hut at Mt Cook), and Dan is in the middle of doing his Masters degree. Only Kelsey is brand new; she’s on a working holiday (? I think that’s the story) from the States. Iowa to be precise. I’ve yet to ask her if she knows Radar O’Rielly.
We’re being flown into the Dracophyllum Bivouac in the headwaters of the Otaki River tomorrow morning. We’ll be up there for six days, tenting, as there’s about twelve plots all in a five kilometre radius. It appears that all the plots for this project are arranged in similar clusters. I am so going to be looking forward to a shower by the time we get out next weekend.
Cheers
Matt
The team has convened at our base just out of Masterton, a converted woolshed attached to the helicopter hanger; no insulation, and big gaps underneath the doors. Gods, but it’s cold! We’ve just returned from doing the shopping, preparing to head into the hills first thing in the morning, and we’ve all immediately got wrapped up in sleeping bags to keep warm. There’s a heater in the corner, but it may as well be outside for all the good it’s doing; the space is just too big to heat.
Our team is a mixture of new and old. Apart from myself, there are two others that have backed up from last summer; Susan and Tony L (otherwise known as ‘Big T’). Kelly is an old hand at this business, but wasn’t with us last year; she was working on another project. It looks like she’s going to be my Team Leader later on in the South Island. Mark is ex-DoC (sort-of; he’s famous for having to be rescued from the Hooker Hut at Mt Cook), and Dan is in the middle of doing his Masters degree. Only Kelsey is brand new; she’s on a working holiday (? I think that’s the story) from the States. Iowa to be precise. I’ve yet to ask her if she knows Radar O’Rielly.
We’re being flown into the Dracophyllum Bivouac in the headwaters of the Otaki River tomorrow morning. We’ll be up there for six days, tenting, as there’s about twelve plots all in a five kilometre radius. It appears that all the plots for this project are arranged in similar clusters. I am so going to be looking forward to a shower by the time we get out next weekend.
Cheers
Matt
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Under way... again
Wellington, 8 August 2010
Welcome to my Oddyssey 2010/11! Well... I haven't gone anywhere just yet, but that'll change fairly soon. And, in the meantime, this'll bring you all up to speed. For those of you who recieved my updates last year, hey! welcome back, feel free to skip over the next paragraph, although do take a moment to appreciate the shiny new blog vehicle. For those who are new to my exploits in the back country, let me explain what's going on.
I work as a botanist for Wildlands, a consultancy company that specialises in ecological surveys and habitat restoration. As part of my job, I spend significant periods of time in the back-blocks around New Zealand, gathering information about the vegetation: hopefully in the pristine native environment, although I have found myself setting up quadrats in the middle of a dairy farm before now! The main part of this fieldwork is for the LUCAS (Land Use and Carbon Analysis System), a programme commissioned by the Ministry for the Environment in order to see how native vegetation across the country changes over time. Basically, there's an eight kilometre grid covering the entire country; wherever gridlines cross, a 20x20m vegetation plot has been established, and it's my job to measure (as part of a team) a variety of environmental parameters at each of these plots. The programme has been running since 2002, and it takes around seven years to measure all of them (we don't try to measure them all every year; that would just be totally impractical!). So this is the first re-measurement of these plots. The raw data we gather is crunched by MfE, and eventually released into the public domain, so I'm allowed to tell you about this. Other projects that I work on sometimes have confidentiality clauses built in, so please forgive me if I'm occasionally vague on certain details (either that, or I'm deliberately skating across across mind-numbingly boring stuff!). My specific job in the team is to survey the vegetation understory, compile species lists, count seedlings and measure their heights, and identify unknown plants. At least, it was last year. I guess I'll find out next week if methodologies have changed... This year, I'm scheduled to spend over seven months in the field (although I do get back to Wellington fairly regularly during this time), working firstly in the Tararuas, then heading down to the South Island, starting in Marlbrough, and working down to Stewart Island to finish around mid-March (all going well). The aim of this blog is not to describe the routine aspects of the job (Gods help us all, I have no desire to talk about each and every plot that I work on), but to showcase the cool and unusual stuff that I find in the hills, and to keep in touch with all you lovely people, so that you don't feel that I've just vanished into a big black hole :) My computer has a mobile modem, so I'll be able to upload posts and photos, and read comments (hint!) fairly regularly, so long as I've got cell-phone coverage.
My first stop thissummer field-season will be Masterton; I'm heading up there next Sunday night. I currently have only a vague idea who will be on my team; there are generally four people (including myself), but the roster may change occasionally during the summer (I'm going to use the term "summer" 'cos that's how I think of the field-season, but trust me, I'm fully aware that it ain't summer yet, and won't be for some time!) Masterton will be our base for Tararua work, we'll be there for around a month, although we'll probably be spending several nights in huts or tents, depending upon the remoteness of the plots. The weather tonight is foul; the southerly change came through about three hours ago, and it's not to hard to predict that field work will be cold, wet, and muddy for the next few months. Joy. In the mean-time, I'll still be based in the Porirua office for this week, writing reports like fury, hoping to tie up loose ends before I head out. I'll also be making sure that my field gear is up to scratch (I've had to buy a new pair of boots, for example), and that my camera and iPod (crucial to my sanity!) are working properly.
Cheers for now
Matt
Welcome to my Oddyssey 2010/11! Well... I haven't gone anywhere just yet, but that'll change fairly soon. And, in the meantime, this'll bring you all up to speed. For those of you who recieved my updates last year, hey! welcome back, feel free to skip over the next paragraph, although do take a moment to appreciate the shiny new blog vehicle. For those who are new to my exploits in the back country, let me explain what's going on.
I work as a botanist for Wildlands, a consultancy company that specialises in ecological surveys and habitat restoration. As part of my job, I spend significant periods of time in the back-blocks around New Zealand, gathering information about the vegetation: hopefully in the pristine native environment, although I have found myself setting up quadrats in the middle of a dairy farm before now! The main part of this fieldwork is for the LUCAS (Land Use and Carbon Analysis System), a programme commissioned by the Ministry for the Environment in order to see how native vegetation across the country changes over time. Basically, there's an eight kilometre grid covering the entire country; wherever gridlines cross, a 20x20m vegetation plot has been established, and it's my job to measure (as part of a team) a variety of environmental parameters at each of these plots. The programme has been running since 2002, and it takes around seven years to measure all of them (we don't try to measure them all every year; that would just be totally impractical!). So this is the first re-measurement of these plots. The raw data we gather is crunched by MfE, and eventually released into the public domain, so I'm allowed to tell you about this. Other projects that I work on sometimes have confidentiality clauses built in, so please forgive me if I'm occasionally vague on certain details (either that, or I'm deliberately skating across across mind-numbingly boring stuff!). My specific job in the team is to survey the vegetation understory, compile species lists, count seedlings and measure their heights, and identify unknown plants. At least, it was last year. I guess I'll find out next week if methodologies have changed... This year, I'm scheduled to spend over seven months in the field (although I do get back to Wellington fairly regularly during this time), working firstly in the Tararuas, then heading down to the South Island, starting in Marlbrough, and working down to Stewart Island to finish around mid-March (all going well). The aim of this blog is not to describe the routine aspects of the job (Gods help us all, I have no desire to talk about each and every plot that I work on), but to showcase the cool and unusual stuff that I find in the hills, and to keep in touch with all you lovely people, so that you don't feel that I've just vanished into a big black hole :) My computer has a mobile modem, so I'll be able to upload posts and photos, and read comments (hint!) fairly regularly, so long as I've got cell-phone coverage.
My first stop this
Cheers for now
Matt
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