Week 1 on the Ridge

Juvenile Cooper's Hawk (Accipiter cooperii)

Richmond, IN

I made it to Archbold Biological Station without major hitch, and I've spent the last week attempting to acquaint myself with the area and acclimate to the weather. It hasn't been too warm yet, but my body has definitely lost the high-temperature tolerance it developed on the lower Colorado River: a few minutes at 80 degrees and I was sweating my rear off. I'm hoping that going for runs at noon will speed up my adjustment (as well save me from running at 05:00, the only other time available).

Even though I'd heard several rave reviews for ABS before I left, I was still blown away the station on my arrival. The infrastructure alone sets it above and beyond any wildlife research station I've ever seen; Archbold comes fully equipped with its own research library, maintenance department, vehicle fleet, several field equipment stores, dormitory, cabins, industrial kitchen and dining room, chemistry laboratory, not to mention the amazing ornithology, herpetology, restoration ecology, entomology and botany labs, all of which successfully manage several short-term projects and long-term (as in 30+ year) studies. The quality and history of the research done here is unbelievable, and the quality of the researchers, technicians and interns (myself excluded) is awesome! I'm more than a little out of my

league–most of the people here started being published when they were undergraduates.

The Scrub is a great deal prettier than I expected it to be–I'll post pictures of it when I'm more familiar with the plant community. In a nutshell, three species of oak (Quercus myrtifolia, Q. champanii and Q. geminata), two palmettos (Serenoa repens and S. etonia) and two pines (Pinus elliottii and P. clausa) make up the dominant community 'round here. The palmettos' and oaks' life histories rely heavily on periodic burns, which ABS performs regularly. With any luck, I should be able to help out with such "pyro-conservation" in the next month or so. The whole host of plants only grow on sandy, well-drained soils. Most of what was historically Scrub in Florida has been used to plant citrus orchards or subdivisions. What patches do remain are girdle by ranches, orchards and barfaciously tacky retirement communities where the elderly eke out their last years in Florida warmth, instead of being killed of by winter cold as nature intended.

Almost all of my work here will be focused one species that depends on exclusively on the Scrub to survive: Aphelocoma coerulescens, the Florida Scrub-Jay. An understatedly handsome bird, it's endemic to Florida, its status differentiated from the Scrub-Jay species of the West by plumage, vocal repertoire and its unique social system. I'll get more into that as time goes on here, but for the moment, let me just introduce the birds with a picture of one demonstrating its most common behaviors: peanuts-whoring.

That's right: they pose for peanuts. To think we wasted all that time with bagels on Spring Break…