Doing a bit of fieldwork at Gatineau Park

This morning, I helped my friend with her trout lily (Erythronium americanum) research at Gatineau Park (click here to read more about it from last year's post).  When we arrived at the park, the weather was not optimal to perform hand-pollination, so we grabbed coffee from the nearby Siberian Cat Café, where I took photos of these gorgeous cats.

Fauna/flora surveying at Gatineau Park (2016)

It is that time of the year again where I help out with the survey of spring ephemerals and emerging bees at Gatineau Park.  To read more about it, check out my previous posts from 2014 and 2015 (parts 1, 2, and 3).

It is always nice to be back out in nature (especially after a long winter), to step on foliage and into muddy puddles, and search for anything moving, making sounds, or just being attractive.   Since it is only early spring here in eastern Canada, we didn't see any bees constructing new nests in the nest boxes and saw only some hepatica flowers in the quadrats.

While I was checking the nest boxes, I noticed this Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) pecking a tree nearby.

Good start to June - flowers, insects, and birds.

Came to school today to do some work.  Along the way, I saw this single yellow iris among the grasses next to the Otonabee River.  Strange place for a garden plant to be.

Very pretty nonetheless.

Flowers of Ivvavik

Celebrated my 27th birthday yesterday with people in my lab and had dinner at Tim Horton's.  Nothing super interesting in my life at the moment - working on my thesis, teaching, and thinking about what I should do with my future.

I have to teach a lab this Friday that requires me to identify tree species on one of the surrounding drumlins here at Trent.  I spent some time last Saturday identifying the trees from a guide, but I still wasn't too comfortable with my skills.  So yesterday, the lab coordinator took us teaching assistants to the drumlin again to identify the trees together.  Hopefully, everything will work out fine on Friday.

Speaking on trees and plants, I have been wanting to share my flower photos from this past field season for some time now.  Here they are.

Dwarf Fireweed (Epilobium latifolium)

Flowers of Ivvavik National Park

I am back in Richmond now! The twelve-hour layover at Edmonton was extremely exhausting, especially when it only takes about 1.5 hours to fly to Vancouver. Anyways, I am home now and would like to relax for a bit for the next few days. Still, I would like to share some photos of the beautiful plants of Ivvavik National Park because flower identification (of the region) is a skill that I really improved this past summer.

Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis) male flowers