Samples to data
9-11 Feb
Winter Study
notes from the field
9 Feb – The wind blew too hard to fly the Flagship. However the exchange flight, with Leah on board, arrived from Ely. She’ll spend most of the next couple weeks processing the samples that we’ve been collecting – balsam fir, moose pellets and urine, and wolf scats. Hundreds of samples in all. We collect them, but she leads the effort to transmute these samples into data, like an alchemist working lead into gold.
10 Feb – Trees rocked, loose snow formed miniature snow tornadoes on the harbor, and the Flagship tugged at the ropes that held her to the ice. The wind blew all day. I worked on a scientific manuscript, Rolf reviewed field notes, and Don counted his toes (practicing for the moose census).
The snow is only about a foot deep, but rock hard from the rain we had several weeks ago. In most places, wolves and people walk right on top, but not moose. Moose bleed from dragging their shins, day-after-day, through those crusts. George, while catching some video footage of a bull, noticed how he place his hooves into already existing hoof-prints.
11 Feb – Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the Gia’s skin groaned and left a series of north-south fault lines across the island. For several thousand years, these gashes have been filled with swamps. Yesterday, Middle Pack killed and ate a calf at the edge of a swamp lying in one of these earth fractures. While they ate, the moose they’d wounded 12 days ago, finally died at the edge of another swamp. Having gone without food for almost two weeks, each wolf in Middle pack will soon have consumed about 100 pounds of meat in a 4-day period, if they can eat it before the ravens do.
Don dropped me at Hatchet Lake. I hiked up the creek to conduct a necropsy. The bones were scattered throughout a cedar swamp, where fallen trees and upturned roots formed a confused tangle. I climbed and crawled to find the few bones that I could.
Although Chippewa Harbor Pack (CHP) had defended this kill site, we wonder if CHP had stolen it from Paduka Pack – if they even exist. Because that site was quite old, I found only five wolf scats. Perhaps, the DNA in these scats will tell us whether Paduka wolves had been here.
CHP toured their territory during the past couple days. They visited an old kill site, killed a moose in a small stand of conifers at the base of Minong Ridge, and wounded another moose south of Angleworm. While CHP fed, Romeo played the part of the prodigal son, managed to ingratiate himself to the pack he’s otherwise abandoned, and fed from the same carcass that fed his parents and siblings.
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Leah is pouring melted snow (with moose urine) into tubes. The urine will be re-frozen and later we’ll measure the ratio of urea and creatinine in the urine. That ratio is an index of a moose’s nutritional status (details).
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