Churchill Day 3: peat cores, black flies and baby chicks

Semipalmated plover


palsa

Yesterday (Sunday) was brutal yet productive. It was warm out and there was little wind, which means that there were lots of bugs on the attack. I had my first experience with black flies, which are tiny flies that look harmless, but they land on you and look for an opening in your clothes and crawl until they find your skin and take a chunk out of it. That's all the details I'll go into, but they're pretty terrible as you can imagine, especially if you're covered by them.

Anyway... despite being covered in black flies, mosquitoes, deer flies, horse flies... we set out to collect some peat cores. Our first site contained many hummocks and hollows, formed by ice wedges or palsas. This means that there are plateaus of peat, which have become so because of chunks of ice underneath the ground in certain areas. When these freeze in the winter, they expand causing separation between the peat plateaus and lower areas of ground in between where the ice layer is. I will add one of my pictures later to show this, it's much easier to see than to understand described! (Wikipedia picture of a palsa above)

When coring a peat bog, you can collect long cores and short cores. Since we are in the subarctic, about 30 cm down into the ground, you hit permafrost. (This number is not always 30cm, just an estimation for the sites here). The top, unfrozen layer can be cored easily with a hollow tube-like metal device (we use a box corer, or "bog beaver" - designed by Dave Beilman another peat scientist) basically being shoved into the ground. What comes out is called a short core. However, if there is frozen peat (permafrost) below, there is more to the core that has not been extracted by this. A long core is extracted by then getting the remaining, frozen peat by using a Russian auger, a drill-like device with a motor attached, to bore into the solid ground. Long cores are important because one can look at the formation of the bog from the beginning up until present by dating the 'basal peat' at the bottom and the top peat layer and several sections in between. These cores can be used to tell a more complete story of how the peatland stored carbon over a long period of time, and what the climate was like during this time period.

While collecting our first long core, the motor broke on our Russian auger. This means that the most important pieces of our research here will have to be left behind on this trip. Oh the joys of field work! Anyway, we collected 11 short cores along a 150 meter transect instead. These include cores from hummocks and hollows, and from the part of the peatland that was a bog, as well as a fen.

Note: A peatland is an area made of organic soil that accumulates faster than it decomposes so that it builds up over time. A bog is a peatland fed only by precipitation. A fen is a peatland fed by precipitation and by another water source, such as groundwater or an incoming stream.

After our long day in the buggy bog, we returned to the station to have a delicious spaghetti dinner. My roomate here is studying semipalmated plovers and killdeer - two plover species found in this area. Apparently the killdeer have been moving North due to climate warming and invading the plovers' territory, causing territorial issues. She said she has yet to find killdeer, but has recently found a new nest of plovers near the station. Last night I was lucky enough to help her tag two newborn plovers! We rode to the site on her scooter, with me (feeling pretty badass) carrying a large polar-bear rifle on my back. As we approached the nest, the father did a dance, held out his wing and puffed himself up. This is to distract predators: he holds out his wing to trick predators into believing that he is injured and to attack him instead of the babies. The two newborns fit in my hand, and were already feathered and walking around a bit. Apparently they only take 24 hours to leave their nest once they are hatched. Arctic and subarctic animals are some hearty creatures! When I put the babies back on their ground-nest, the father sat carefully on top of them. Plover parents share the duties of taking care of their young; the mom was off elsewhere - go plovers with their equal rights! On the ride back I weighed my options between spending my time studying the buggy, mucky peat bogs versus studying the cute baby plovers... hmm seems like a toss-up...

Anyway, it was a good end to a good day. We will see what today brings!