Last night, as we rounded the west coast of Isla Hoste around dinnertime, we hit the roughest waters of the expedition, and our meal was delayed by several hours. Our destination had been a secluded sound on the west coast of Isla Hoste, but we ended up spending the night tied-in at Bahía San Jorge on Isla Whittlebury. I was told that we would be able to get to our desired destination, but it would have to wait until day because the waters were too shallow to navigate at night.
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I had previously explained our itinerary to the captain, so he suggested that we just flip-flop our intended destinations. The engines started up in the pre-dawn hours and we arrived in another spectacular site, at the end of (yet another) unnamed sound on the north side of Estero Webb. Once again we found ourselves surrounded by glaciers, and since it had been raining regularly for the last day or two, the number of waterfalls coming from the cliff tops had increased exponentially.
I was wrong about everyone getting up early to go into the field today; late nights and early mornings are catching up to all of us. I have told myself that I will be in bed by 10 p.m. tonight, but we’ll see.
Where we spent the night, at the extreme south end of Estero Fouque, is one of the most amazing places I have ever seen. From the ship’s deck you can see at least five glaciers and in the fleeting moments when the sun comes out, the reflection off the glaciers is almost blinding.
January 20, 2012; Isla Hoste, Estero Fouque, approximately 55º11’S, 69º35’W
After yesterday‘s late night, we were all slow to rise this morning. Which turned out to be okay, because at around 5:30 a.m. the crew decided to move to our next site; the movement of the ship was all the incentive we needed to sleep in.
When the ship stopped we got up for breakfast. Today’s first site is–like yesterday afternoon’s site–on Isla Gordon. From the map this site appears to have a glacier-fed stream that enters the sea near the end of a small sound, and this is indeed what we have found. But what we couldn’t see from the map is that the glacier is over the rise of a tall, steep slope, and after yesterday’s exhaustion, there wasn’t much enthusiasm for such a climb. So most of us chose to collect specimens on a relatively flat Magellanic tundra.
January 19, 2012; Chile, unnamed sound on north-central coast of Isla Hoste, approximately 55º00’S, 69º12’W
As the sky slowly darkened last night, we passed site after site that we all thought looked like great collecting localities. Today we begin finding out.
Isla Hoste
For our first collecting site, we have headed as far east as we will go on this leg of the trip. We are anchored in one of the innumerable, unnamed sounds that dot this area, on the north-central coast of Isla Hoste. Between Isla Hoste and Isla Gordon lies the Beagle Channel (named for Charles Darwin’s ship, the HMS Beagle), and we are planning to bounce back and forth across the southwest arm of the Channel.
January 18, 2012; Canal O’Brien, just south of Isla O’Brien, 54º55’S, 70º35’W
I first stepped out onto the deck of our ship around 5 a.m. today. The sun wasn’t quite up and the mountainous islands were dark shapes against a gray, cloud-choked sky. I love early mornings alone with nature. Unfortunately I was dressed only in my sleeping clothes, so the light rain and cold quickly drove me back to my warm bunk.
Barros Channel, West of Isla Gordon
We have a different ship this year, the Don José Miguel. It is relatively new and belongs to the same owner as our ship last year, the Don José Pelegrín. It is about a meter wider than the Pelegrín, making it seem much more spacious. On the Pelegrín the bunks were narrower and lower; the roomier bunks on the Miguel allow me to turn over without bumping into the bunk above me. But although the bunk room has more space, there is no place to put luggage except under the lower bunks, an inconvenient process which requires the removing of mattresses and the slats. As a consequence, most of our luggage is piled in the middle of the room, providing an obstacle course, especially in the middle of the night.
We have a large group this year, with eleven scientists and five crew. Out of the ten flying into Punta Arenas, only four made it on time. I arrived eight hours late due to mechanical problems in Atlanta causing me to miss my connection in Santiago. From Santiago I was scheduled to fly to Punta Arenas, on Sky, but when I arrived late, they told me that there was nothing they could do that day and that they had no responsibility to do so. So, I went to the larger airline, Lan, and was able to purchase a new ticket for later that same day; almost surely cheaper than a hotel and dinner in Santiago! When I arrived in Punta Arenas at around midnight, I found an empty airport completely devoid of taxis.
Our Chilean collaborator Juan Larraín, also had a Sky flight to Punta Arenas that was delayed–he was stranded at his layover in Puerto Montt and arrived four hours late. This is not an airline I intend to use again! Matt von Konrat, of the Field Museum in Chicago, also found himself delayed and had to spend the night in Dallas/Fort Worth. He arrived about eight hours late, finally landing in Punta Arenas around 3 a.m. After my late-night, taxi-less arrival, I knew Matt would have the same problem. Seeing as he speaks very little Spanish, Juan and I arranged for a taxi to pick us up at our hotel at 2:15 a.m., take us to the airport, wait, and bring us all back to the hotel. When Matt arrived in the baggage claim area, he looked very tired and weary, but his facial expression changed immediately to one of relief when he spotted us waiting for him.
The team en route to Isla Hoste
Returning for a second expedition is Blanka Shaw from Duke University, as well as Matt (who has made a really great project website), Juan, and our facilitator/scientist, Ernesto Davis. I don’t think I can count how many trips Ernesto made to the airport, especially with all the missed and canceled flights. He is our hero.
July 15, 2011; Hobart, Tasmania, Australia; final entry
Once again we awoke to a frost, this one so heavy that it almost looked as if it had snowed. We assumed that the frost would not be in the forest, and we were right. Our first scheduled stop was not too far away, along a trail leading to a view of St. Columba Falls. The falls are named for an Irish Catholic saint who copied the Psalms around 500 A.D., which started a war, and who was then exiled to Scotland. The falls were named by an Irish woman who discovered them and who had herself been exiled to Tasmania.
Echidna playing ostrich
On the way to the site we finally saw an echidna, a porcupine-like marsupial. We slammed on the brakes, only to have the only other car we saw all morning blow its horn at us. Nevertheless, we scrambled out of the car to get a better look at this strange little animal. Like an ostrich, it had buried its head in the leaf litter, presumably thinking that if it couldn’t see us then we couldn’t see him. It was great to see this odd Australian animal. The only animal we didn’t get to see that we really wanted to was a wombat.
St. Columba Falls
But duty called, and leaving our new friend behind, we headed up the road to the falls. Because St. Columba Falls is a popular tourist destination (just not first thing in the morning on a winter weekday), we were cautioned not to leave scars from our collecting along the trail. It’s just a short walk to the falls, which is one of the highest in Australia. Although I only found a single moss that I hadn’t seen previously on the trip, I found that many of the mosses I had seen sterile at other sites were fertile here. I collected these judiciously so as to have them as reference material in the herbarium.
Thursday, July 14, 2011; Pyengana, Tasmania, Australia
Bill Buck searching for bryophytes
Winter reared its ugly head again today. Sunrise was at about 7:00 a.m., and as soon as it became light, it was obvious that a heavy frost had whitened the landscape, including our car. So, after thawing out the car, we headed to our first site, the Weldborough Pass Rainforest Walk.
Under the canopy, the frost hadn’t covered everything, and since our primary stop that day would be at a much higher (and thus much chillier) elevation, checking out the forest, which is dominated by large southern beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii) with an understory of large tree ferns (Dicksonia), seemed like a good idea. The multitude of tree ferns at this locality was a special treat. We found a large number of bryophytes and lichens (as well as epiphytic ferns) that prefer the spongy, moist root mantles that comprise the tree fern trunks. We also found quite a large number of mosses that we had not seen before. It took a while for our fingers to thaw from the morning chill but the collecting helped keep us active and warm. In fact the collecting was so good that we ended up staying in the Weldborough Pass Rainforest an hour longer than we had scheduled. We decided to quit at a very good time, though, because as we were packing our collections into the car trunk, two other cars of tourists drove up to use the trail. We cleared out in a hurry before they could see the divots and scars we had left from our collecting!
The rental car travels under a novel underpass in the Blue Tier Nature Preserve
Today was mainly a travel day. Before leaving Hobart we ran by Paddy’s office to spread our still-wet specimens on his floor to dry while we are in the field. We headed north out of Hobart toward St. Helens. This town reminds me of some of the small coastal towns in Florida where I grew up, with touristy stores and lots of retirees. We lunched here and then turned inland to our collecting site of the day, the Blue Tier Forest Reserve.
We were a bit dismayed when we arrived at the road into the reserve only to find a “Road Closed” sign at the entrance. However, the road wasn’t blocked so we decided to chance it, which ended up being not nearly as bad a decision as it could have been; it seemed as if a road crew had preceded us! Many of the trees that appeared to have fallen across the road had already been cleared, and the one tree we found that was still over the road had amazingly fallen so that the large branches held the trunk off the ground and formed a kind of tree overpass.
Bill Buck and the Goblin Forest Walk Sign
Once under the tree, the road got narrower and began showing signs of erosion from previous heavy rains, but it was passable with only a minimal bottoming out of our rental car, though we did seem to be dragging branches under the car almost constantly. When the landscape leveled out, at about 700 meters, we came to a car park for the reserve. The air was decidedly cooler and the area around the parking lot was open, presumably kept so by grazing wallabies, based on the large number of droppings. There were several trail options for leaving the parking lot, and I just couldn’t resist the Goblin Forest Walk.
The rain forest earned its name today! You could tell from first thing in the morning that there would be a light, steady rain all day; and it lived up to expectations. We left Hobart after breakfast and headed south to the “Southern Forests” region on the northern edge of Hartz Mountains National Park. Our first stop was the Arve River Picnic Area. Here a short trail, billed as only a 10 minute walk, winds through an incredibly lush but open rain forest. Almost every surface is mossy: the forest floor is carpeted with particularly large mosses, and the fallen trees, many more than 6 feet in diameter, are covered in a diverse mantle of bryophytes. Even the smallest twigs host even tinier epiphytes. The filtered light, more hues of green than I ever knew existed, and the velvety texture of moss-covered surfaces make the forest almost surreal. It looks like a set from Lord of the Rings. For those who have never seen a Southern Hemisphere temperate rain forest, you couldn’t ask for a better introduction. There is something new at each turn of the trail and it was only the lure of additional sites, plus the sudden darkening of the skies and heavier rain that drove us back to the car.
From here we drove toward Hartz Mountains National Park. As we headed up the dirt road we started seeing patches of snow, and in no time at all, the snow was completely covering the ground, getting deeper and deeper as we headed into higher elevations. In fact, the only reason we even dared venture into the park itself is because some four-wheel drive vehicles had already blazed a track through the snow. Once inside the park, we parked our car in the middle of the road, and slogged through the nearly six inches of wet snow. All along the roadside small waterfalls cascaded down the rock walls, resulting in a rich moss diversity (and wet feet!).
