Days 6&7&9: Homeward Bound (with Pictures!)

So, it's been almost a week since my last post. I apologize for that, it has been a long busy week, and I've been splitting my time between the greenhouse and helping Rebecca find an apartment in Durham (she's working at the Duke Lemur Center next year!) I'd like to complete the series about my trip. I've also gotten my pictures uploaded, so I can finally share with you all some of the places I've been. Click HERE for the whole Google album!!!

Image embedding seems to not work very well, so I'm just going to link to pictures. Click on them for a thousand extra words. For starters, here's Funaria in all its glory.That's from Tompkins, County New York, near West Danby, in the really interesting population I talked about here.

We were able to collect two populations on Friday, one in Charlestown, Rhode Island and another in Plainfield, Connecticut. Oddly enough, they were both along railroad tracks parallel to side streets each named "Railroad Avenue." We didn't do too much else on Friday, although we did collect mosses from around Rhode Island and visited Beavertail Lighthouse, at the southern tip of Conanicut Island (in the sound between Providence and Newport). It's the third-oldest lighthouse in the US, according to the signs. Here's me at the lighthouse, trying not to be cold.

After making it home on Friday night we enjoyed an excellent meal of Carolina-style BBQ. Piers seemed to enjoy it despite his preference for Memphis-style, and I've been eating the leftovers back in Durham all week. On Saturday morning, Piers and I got up and traveled to the exotic location of... about a mile from our house, in the Wallkill River Wildlife Refuge. The Duke Herbarium has only six collections from Sussex, County NJ, and most of the collections in the New York Botanical Garden are pre-1950 or even pre-1900. So everything we collected was useful for bryologists in general. We went over to Vernon to the railroad tracks and found a quite extensive population of Funaria there.

There was also a very nice older man from the shops across the street, Dan Børstad. At first
he thought we were trash collectors, but after I explained what we were doing, he was still happy to talk to me. He was from Norway and said he had studied Botany when there, and I told him about all of our Norwegian colleagues who study Sphagnum up in the massive peat bogs. He also seemed impressed that I had returned all the way home just to collect the moss.

In the afternoon, Dad wanted to join us to see how the whole moss collecting operates. We were mostly searching for Sphagnum, which is the only moss that has been collected from the county. Most of the habitats we were looking at, however, looked more like this, which is far too eutrophic for Sphagnum.

We found a decent sized Funaria population (where I put Dad to work) in Sparta and hunted around for some of the previous localities for Sphagnum. One place we visited was Edison Pond, which I did not know existed. It's about 2 miles SSE of Ogdensburg, and was a series of mines funded by Thomas Edison in the early 1900s. He poured $2 million of his own money into the site to mine for iron, and employed 500 men at the peak of construction. There was no iron there, however, as the Hamburg Mountains are made almost entirely out of zinc and lime. The pond, and presumably the Sphagnum collected in 1986, were also gone.

Leaving Edison Pond, we headed up to High Point, and passed on entering the park itself to visit a swampy area at the base of Steenykill Lake, and found copious amounts of Sphagnum! Sadly, there weren't any sporophytes, but I'm hoping to come home again sometime in July, and perhaps I will be luckier then. The grad student working on them, however, is less convinced, and she thinks these species of Sphagnum never enter the sexual stage. How sad.

We settled in for an evening of Lasagana and a moss show-and-tell for my parents. The next morning we left, laden with moss and bagels from New Jersey, headed back to Durham. We stopped back in Bethesda for lunch, and then once in Catlett, Virginia to make a final Funaria collection.

It's going to be a lengthy job to sort out and document all the Funaria I collected during this trip. I had a lot of fun though, learning not just about the species I'm focusing on, but also gaining more field experience with mosses by traveling with such a knowledgeable guide. Even five days after returning, I'm thinking back upon what a whirlwind trip it was. I've already discovered some very intruiging things about the plants I collected this week; I hope to share some of those discoveries with you soon. So, by all means do not think that the end of my trip signals the end of my blogging- there's many more Fun(aria) to come!

Total Miles Traveled: 1,987
Total Funaria Populations: 18
Oil Pans Replaced: 1
Clichéd Advertising Reference: Priceless.