You have to take the good news where you can, and I am pleased to report that Bradshaw's Desert Parsley is on the rebound after having been declared endangered. It exists in only a few scattered patches in the Willamette Valley here in Oregon and a bit to the north. But it's gone from 25,000 flowers in 1988 to over 11 million flowers today. Score one for whoever was in charge.Which leads to the obvious question. No, not "Who cares?" Here at Murrmurrs, Inc., we all care. But who the hell is in charge of counting 11 million Bradshaw's Desert Parsley plants, and does she have to start over when she's startled by a cow or something? Clearly there is some heroic botany happening here. As it happens, I have an idea how this is done. And no, they're not making hashmarks in groups of five until they get to 15 mil. There's some extrapolation going on.
I know this because I took a field botany course my junior year in college. I was pretty excited about botany, until I took a class. I blame my botany professor, who could bore mildew off a shower stall. He could bore the chirp out of a cricket. He could make army ants stop for coffee, mid-march.I was attending the Sir John Cass College of Science and Technology in northern London. We did a field course in the Midlands in mid-winter. This is sheep country. Rolling hills are shrouded in perpetual fog. It is some kind of foreign European temperature which is colder than anything in Fahrenheit. We are dressed in rain slickers and Wellies and the fog is thick enough to be observed traveling sideways at a crisp pace. Our professor lumbers through his instructions. Sheep are ordinarily resistant to boredom, but all available stock have swiftly retreated to the furthest point of the pasture. We are to lay out a transect and each of us put down a hula hoop at precisely determined points in the grid and count the numbers and species of grasses within the hoop.
We do this on our hands and knees, some of us with our noses directly above sheep dookie, because the Grid is sacrosanct. Fortunately, our noses are dripping too much to let an odor in sidewise. There are a thousand individual grasses within the hoop. In order to find out what kind they are, we need to tease apart the little blades with our fingers and look for the ligules where the sheath meets the blade and decide if they're pointy or not. Our fingers quit working about five minutes in. I know this because they still have "minutes" in England and haven't switched them out for farthings or nodules or something. Determining the species of grass in these conditions is like playing clarinet with boxing gloves on, but colder. From time to time, as one contemplates the sacredness of The Data and its relationship to the number of shits given about it, the wind kicks up and whispers to your brain that death might not be so bad if it involves being boiled in oil.But hey! Maybe this is just the sort of protocol you need to practice in order to tell if your efforts to encourage the spreading of Bradshaw's Desert Parsley are a success.
And I'm right. I looked it up. There's a whole paper on it from 1992 and it even includes a photograph of Dr. Rhoda Love's Botany Class from Lane Community College, everyone on their hands and knees. The caption refers to the group as "enthusiastic."Y'all aren't going to know this on your own, and it's a scholarly paper, so I'll just tell you: that is sarcasm. But hurray for the parsley.
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Is that you with the cigarette? And what's with the pandas?
ReplyDeleteJulia
I'm on the right with the colored hat, and I have no idea!
DeleteYay! I correctly identified you! Was what looks like a red "jumper" actually a waterproof garment of some sort?
DeleteI think it was a real crappy one.
DeleteI love citizen science and regular science and well, thank goodness for data collection.
ReplyDeleteYes'm.
DeleteI always like science field trips. Had a few good ornithological ones in college. I January. In Minnesota. So I understand the cold, too. Your British cold is the damp kind that penetrates your very skeleton. Stiff upper lip is an actual and pervasive winter condition there, while the Minnesota type of cold freezes you on the outside so that your brain, before it freezes solid, tells your body to move which it can't. Snot freezes and you can't blink, but you're not in real trouble until the pain starts to subside. Grasses are a distant memory covered in a solid sea of white, but I am glad Oregon's grasses are returning. I really am.
ReplyDeleteThe Minnesota mosquitos freeze solid too, right? Right?
DeleteThere was a Panda in your class?
ReplyDeleteI can't even remember if that's our college we're posed in front of. I don't think so. The panda was an exchange student.
DeleteUnlike Jono, my ornithological field trips were taken in high school days. I reserved freezing experiences in college to forays during plane surveying classes. Although, spelunking wasn't always cozy warm, either.
ReplyDeleteCop Car
I only ever spelunked once. It was wonderful. And if not warm, never really cold either. We did it in high school and then went to a Howard Johnson's en mass covered in mud. Gosh, we were funny!
DeleteI envy the field trips you took in HS. The only one I remember taking was to Niagara Falls with our Earth Science class to (ostensibly) study rock formations. This was mid winter and Niagara Falls was beautiful with all its ice, but the bus driver got lost on the way home in a snow storm (this was in the snow belt of WNY state and in the age before cell phones) and we returned home at 1AM instead of the scheduled 8PM. We had a blast, but the parents not so much.
DeleteMurr--As a test, while we were engaged, a friend and I included Hunky Husband in a group of newbies we were taking into a rather long cave in Missouri. It was actually two caves in which some of our friends had found the link that had eluded the Navy during WWII (when they were wont to prepare for all exigencies).
DeleteHalf-way through, one of the newbies spilled our can of carbide. Fortunately, we had already filled 3 lanterns; so, from then on my friend and I took turns leading/bringing up the rear with a lit lantern, keeping one in reserve. Part of our trek was a 10-minute crawl through 10-12 inches of water, with barely enough air clearance for us to keep heads up and breath. Nearing the end of our trek, friend took a couple of the guys while I stayed with the other two to allow a little rest time. When my group reached the mouth of the cave, the other group had not yet arrived.
After retrieving more carbide from my friend's car to fill 2 lanterns and preparing to re-enter the cave, I was relieved that the other group showed up. Inexplicably, they had passed the mouth of the cave their first time by.
Hunky Husband has, since then (1957), said that he would only go spelunking again to take a newbie through that icy crawl. (We never took him up on it.)
Cop Car
I'm afraid we are going to need a photo of Hunky Husband or otherwise we can't believe anything you say.
DeleteI'm in awe of the dedication that researchers have to grass counting, flower counting, jellyfish and buffalo and Texas bluebonnet counting. We watched a documentary once about a researcher trying to get photos of the snow leopard, and how he lived in a tiny hut or tent in the middle of what he hoped was snow leopard territory, and trying to blend into the scenery, never saw another human face for MONTHS at a time, just waiting for the leopards to come by. When his supplier did come to bring food and necessities, he couldn't bring himself to look the person in the eyes for fear he'd break down sobbing. Thank god, eventually, he DID get the opportunity to see the leopard and capture lots of pictures. He must have been an emotional wreck by the time he got home to his family.
ReplyDeleteGosh. I wonder how I'd do? I have no way of knowing.
DeleteAnd this is why I never went into biology of any kind. The absence of creature comforts, the outdoorsiness, the cold, the damp, and in the case of lab rats, the inability to harm little white mice. But I had several friends who majored in biology, and better people you could not find. Thank goodness there are those who actually like that stuff, and are keeping tabs on our world's species.
ReplyDeleteYou do NOT want to know what I've done to white lab mice. On the other hand, I'm now wishing I could do worse to the rat that's eating my dishwasher.
DeleteThis brings back memories of crawling around a wintry beach at Portobello (Dunedin, NZ), taking plaster molds of the solemya burrows...
ReplyDeleteClams?
DeleteIs this an edible parsley? or just an environmental plant that must not be allowed to die out?
ReplyDeleteI'm impressed that you survived a London fog.
We don't know that yet. It might have taken a few years off my life. Aaaaaand now I'm in an Oregon winter! The parsley is another wonder of life relegated to "useless" status in our weird, narrow perspective.
Deleteyou could always travel downunder for a bit of our summer heat to get you through the rest of your winter. A day or two of our 46C/114F should keep you warm for a while.
DeleteI love our winters. It's raining like mad now and I don't care if it keeps up for months. I love short days and gray skies. A day or two of your heat would turn me into pudding.
DeleteJust a general inquiry because I rarely get around to cleaning the shower stall in the basement bathroom; Is your professor still alive and able to travel? There's some mildew that needs boring off down there and as long as there's a 6' 2" son showering in that bathroom I'm not doing it! He can pay for it too. What's the going rate for college profs boring mildew off surfaces these days anyway?
ReplyDeleteGet that tall son a Roman helmet soaked with bleach!
DeleteYou post the damnest things! Love it . . . . .
ReplyDeleteI never know. I'll tell you this: I cannot create a blog post by sitting at the computer and thinking *blog post blog post blog post*. But if I get the GERM...I'm off and running.
DeleteIs it weird that your phrase "hashmarks in groups of five" made me feel slightly nostalgic?
ReplyDelete