I finally got around to uploading some of the more interesting photos from my summer fieldwork. They were all taken during the second part of my project, when I was running experiments. Take a look and see what you think.

Maryland site, 4H plot

The two plots in Maryland (owned by 4H and the Nature Conservancy, respectively) are 30 miles west of the house, in Garrett County close to West Virginia. 4H is the smaller of the two and considerably easier to get to. Just down the dirt road...

...and forest path...

...is a wide marsh that's full of cattails in the front, alders to the side, and a variety of trees and vegetation toward the back.

One of the zillions of spider webs that are spun during the night. This one helpfully demonstrates the difficulty of navigating through the field without disturbing them.

Spider-webbed! At least it wasn't on my face this time...

Here's a picture of the back of the plot. That pine tree became a point of reference for me, since all the birds I recorded had territories behind it. The plants in the middle are the alders that I'm always complaining about, but they're not so dense here. The tree on the right is a serviceberry (see next pic).

I wish I'd eaten a couple before I left. They're supposed to taste like blueberries, but with seeds. A bunch of really pretty birds called cedar waxwings were pigging out on them (and every other type of berry) while I was there.

This is the cattail part of the plot some time after 6 a.m. The bird in the maple tree had started singing like crazy all of a sudden, so I decided to run a test on him. It went pretty well, except I think my measurements were dead wrong.

First attempt to take pics by holding the camera up to my binoculars and focusing through the viewfinder. They actually didn't turn out that badly, though I probably looked pretty stupid.

I didn't want all backlit pictures, so I went around to the other side. Pity I couldn't get closer to him.

Brian took this photo of a swamp sparrow with food in its bill, which means it's probably feeding fledglings at the nest. His super-high-tech camera has an insane zoom, eliminating the need for unwieldy binoculars.

A creek cuts through the west side of the plot, and the vegetation there is really dense and green and beautiful. Most parts of it are shallow, so you can see deer and raccoon and bear tracks around there a lot (the bear I saw here had wet fur when I spotted it). One bird sang from both sides of the creek, so I ended up crossing it a bunch of times too. The dark green plants are alders, and it's impossible to see birds when they're deep in the foliage.

(Next three photos by Brian) I was really excited to see pitcher plants hanging out here, being all carnivorous and weird-looking. Insects follow the red lines downward into the "pitcher" part but can't climb back out because of the stiff hairs lining the cup. They drown in the pool of water/enzymes at the bottom and are slowly digested. Yum.

This is a sundew, another type of carnivorous plant. The stalks are tipped with a combination of nectar, adhesives, and enzymes. They wrap around an insect that's landed for the nectar, trapping it even more, and eventually digest it tactfully out of sight. I was extremely mean and dropped an ant onto one just to see what would happen. It got very stuck, and I'm still feeling bad.

Black-winged damselfly.

Unidentified butterflies receiving their daily nitrogen requirement from unidentified poo in the road.

Crane fly love.

Everyone was just amazing at searching for nests. I followed Kate around one day and watched her check them (they're marked with blue flagging after they're found). Hidden underneath this patch of berries, grasses, alders and other plants was...

...a totally wonderful swamp sparrow nest! The eggs are normally a little bluer than this one, but it is lovely nevertheless.

More photos coming soon!