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!).
The International Botanical Congress (IBC) is held once every six years, and this time it is being held in Melbourne, Australia in mid-July. I have visited Australia twice in recent years, most recently in 2009 in Western Australia, and in 2007 in Tasmania. Both of these trips were to attend field meetings of an Australia-New Zealand bryological group. My motivation to attend the Tasmanian meeting had been to better acquaint myself with another south temperate moss flora so that I could compare it to my study area in southernmost Chile. Despite the constant threat of leeches, I loved Tasmania and thought attending the IBC would be a good opportunity to return. I shamelessly wrote to the organizer of that 2007 meeting, my friend and colleague, Paddy Dalton, at the University of Tasmania, to see if he would be willing to host my visit there, even though it was only a week before the IBC. He generously agreed and so we planned a week-long collecting trip to Tasmania, along with my two graduate students, James Lendemer, working on a lichen genus for his Ph.D. through the City University of New York, and Mike Tessler, a beginning student in the graduate program at Fordham University.
Prior to the trip I had checked the Australian meteorological website to see what the weather might be in Tasmania (and Melbourne), knowing full well it was the middle of the austral winter. Temperature predictions ranged from a low of 3°C (ca. 35°F) to a high of 13-14°C (ca. 55°F), and so I warned the students to bring warm clothes. A few days prior to the trip I heard from Paddy that there had been snow in the hills around Hobart! Not to be deterred by a little cold weather, especially after my last research trip to southern Chile, when it was the austral summer, we all eagerly anticipated the upcoming trip.
After over 24 hours of travel time, it all became real when we boarded a flight from Sydney to Hobart and the Qantas pilot came on and announced that the weather in Hobart to be slightly above freezing with snow showers. But as we flew down the east coast of Tasmania (where we intended to do our field work), I didn’t see any snow on the ground and was hopeful that we might avoid it. I would soon learn otherwise! Paddy Dalton greeted us at the Hobart airport, a familiar face in a faraway land. We rented a car and I followed Paddy to our hotel, driving for my first time on the left side of the road. We then all went to dinner at a local seafood restaurant (local shrimp and scallops have just come into season), where we discussed the upcoming itinerary.
February 8, 2011; Punta Arenas, Chile; final entry
On the morning of February 6, we arrived in Seno Término, an appropriate name for our last day in the field. The weather mirrored our reluctance to finish such an amazing expedition. The skies were heavily overcast and a constant light rain fell. It seemed reasonable that our last day in the field would be a wet one, like so many before it. Seno Término runs, more or less, east-west, meaning that where we anchored was quite choppy. Across the sound, where there was a less substantial barrier to the wind, sheets of rain flew by one after another.
Despite (or maybe because of) the weather, no one wanted to stay out of the field today. I chose a small band of forest at the base of a granite mountain; at least in the forest the wind is much less. Time zoomed by as I worked back and forth through the forest, reaching and ascending the lower parts of the mountain whenever I could. Even at this late date, with so many sites under our belts, interesting mosses continue to be found. I realized that here, on this last day, I had finally gotten in shape so that climbing a hill didn’t make me out of breath. Talk about a day late and a dollar short!
At lunchtime we moved to our final collecting site, Seno Ocasión, opposite Isla Aguirre, where we had visited earlier. The cold rain persisted, but what was really dampening our spirits was the realization that our expedition was all but over. The ship was tied to a rock wall and we were able to just jump ashore and begin our collecting. The destination-oriented collectors ran ahead in an attempt to reach a nearby rocky peak. Apparently in these exposed areas the wind was fierce and prevented much progress. On the other hand, Kimmy and I hadn’t made it far from the ship when I spotted a steep ravine that ran right down the sea (which the others had run past). It was wet and slippery, but it’s always harder going down than climbing up, so we decided to chance it. At times I had to remove my collecting pack and leave it behind in order to fit onto narrow ledges that I wanted to access. In the end my efforts were rewarded with a moss no one on our ship recognized. Having to crawl backwards to get off the ledge was a small price to pay.
February 5, 2011; unnamed sound northwest of Isla Georgiana, 54°35’S, 71°49’W
As we awoke in Seno Aragay, at the isthmus of the Brecknock Peninsula, a steady, cold rain fell. At least it wasn’t windy.
After a hot breakfast of freshly fried bread, we suited up in our rain gear and headed into the field. Due to the weather we decided three hours in the morning would be about all we could tolerate. Jim and Matt headed in one direction while Blanka and I headed in another. As I came to the summit of a rise I saw Juan and Kimmy being dropped off near the base of a waterfall. As I wandered over the terrain, I desolately picked up the standard mosses just to document their distribution. I got wetter and wetter and colder. On this next to the last day in the field, as we get nearer and nearer to heading home, it was proving hard to get up much enthusiasm as my hand-lens became useless as it was constantly fogged up. When I realized I still had almost two hours left before being picked up, I headed to the base of a dripping cliff.
Upon arriving there, in no time at all I completely forgot about being cold and wet. Instead I was focused on the mosses that grew in sheltered areas under rock overhangs. Here they get less rain (even though, in addition to the rain I was continuously being dripped on from the water running off the cliff) and so i found a completely different suite of species. A couple of these were ones I had not seen before on this trip and I became completely oblivious to my physical discomforts.
I finally saw Blanka on a slope below me and I called to her to come up to where I was. Like me before her, she looked pretty miserable, at least until she got to the cliff base. Instantly her excitement grew as she found liverworts she hadn’t been seeing elsewhere. Quite quickly, Blanka’s promise of only staying there for 10 minutes grew to over 30 minutes. Ultimately, we had to leave to get down to the shore, far below, for our scheduled rendezvous with the zodiac. We were the last to get back to the ship and so the engine room, where we hang wet clothing to dry, was already packed. However, having this space to dry clothing is a godsend; in only a few hours the wettest piece of clothing is dry and warm.
February 4, 2011; unnamed sound directly east of Seno Mama, 54°35’S, 71°34’W
Yesterday was a busy day and I didn’t finish working on my specimens until 10:30 p.m., at which time I just wanted to hit my bunk, not my notebook! The day before yesterday we worked in a beautiful wet forest and we all collected lots of specimens, almost all of which were saturated with water. Not surprisingly, we’re baling in more collections than our drying system can handle, especially with five bryologists in the field. Most collections take about two days to dry on the lowest rack and longer on the upper shelves. At this point we all have wet specimens awaiting dryer space. And it certainly didn’t help that I made almost 100 collections yesterday.
After awhile I am sure that all these places are starting to sound the same to you, especially since you are not here. Quite honestly, at this point, many of our sites are even beginning to merge in my mind. I can distinctly remember the moment when I collected a moss and what the microhabitat looked like, but on which island or in which sound I found it is another story entirely. I assume that this will only get worse in the upcoming days because we are now hitting various sounds that go into the southern shore of Isla Grande (i.e., the large island) of Tierra del Fuego.
Yesterday afternoon we stopped at our final two small islands. We anchored in the canal separating Isla Brecknock from Isla Macías. The last time we divided our group between two islandsJim felt he got the less interesting island and so this time I let him pick first. He and Matt chose Isla Brecknock because it is the larger of the two islands and had a nice waterfall descending near where we were. Blanka, Kimmy, and I took Isla Macías.
February 2, 2011; Seno Courtenay, northern arm, 54°30’S, 71°20’W
With today came the realization that the days are racing by. Initially it seemed like we had lots of time, but now the calendar is creeping up on us. We have today and the next three days before we head back to Punta Arenas (about a 17 hour trip).
Today was a great collecting day, we all came back delighted with what we had found. Blanka has nicknamed this locality The Enchanted Forest. We are in an eastern arm of Seno Courtenay where several small rivers emerge from what looks like a floodplain forest. There is supposedly a glacier-fed lake upriver, but not one of us has made it that far! At the beginning of the morning I was disappointed when I entered the forest; it seemed like it contained only the standard mosses I have become used to seeing. However, as I worked through the forest, the humidity increased as did the number and biomass of epiphytes. The trunks and branches of most trees were sheathed in bryophytes, and even twig epiphytes increased in diversity.
The ship engines started about 6:30 a.m. By this point in our journey, this rouses no one from their bunks except the crew. However, as soon as the engines are cut off it means we have arrived at our next field site and everyone hurries up to breakfast. Every morning for breakfast there is fresh bread, sometimes baked, sometimes fried. It’s a great way to start the day.
Mornings are mostly proving to have reasonable weather, but usually by 1-2 p.m. it starts to rain harder and the winds pick up. This morning we arrived in Bahía Murray on the east side of Isla Basket. The island is named for Fuegia Basket, the name Charles Darwin’s expedition gave to an indigenous young woman that they essentially kidnapped and took to England to “civilize.” The weather–just light continuous drizzle–was not an issue, and we all went ashore to collect. We split into a few groups to cover more habitats. Juan decided to try and reach a peak that rises to about 1600-1700 feet and took our satellite modem with him in an attempt to send out my daily blogs. He got within 50 feet of the summit but couldn’t continue because the rocks were steep and crumbling. Needless to say, the modem still couldn’t find a satellite.
The engines started early and we only traveled about 1 1/2 hours before they stopped again. Because of the short time I assumed that we must have just headed north to the Brecknock Peninsula. However, much to my delight we were actually in a small sound on the northwest side of Isla Sidney. The gods must have been smiling on us, because for one of these barrier islands, the weather was great. The sun came and went, and only an occasional shower passed. This was particularly surprising because as we were getting into our rain gear before leaving the ship it had been sleeting.
We split into three groups and headed off in different directions. I went alone to a beautiful southern beech gallery forest along a small, rocky steam. As I worked up the stream it eventually opened up and the rocks in the stream changed from being liverwort-covered in the shade, to moss-covered in the sun. As much as I am enjoying the company of my colleagues, it was nice to be alone for a few hours, especially in such a beautiful place. When we returned to our pick-up point in the early afternoon, everyone was very pleased both with what they had found, as well as with the weather (especially after the previous day).
Early in the morning the crew moved the ship to a harbor on the northeast side of Isla London, one of the islands in direct contact with the weather from Antarctica. After two days of glorious weather, Matt was beginning to wonder if the weather I had told him to prepare for was just a myth. He soon found out how true my warnings had been. The morning started out a bit windy and overcast, but without rain. One group set out to with the intention of ascending Horatio Peak, while Blanka and I headed to a rocky outcrop in the opposite direction. As the zodiac neared the shore the wind started to pick up, and soon became a strong steady wind came out of the southwest, gusting so hard at times to literally blow me off my feet. Fortunately, as we worked up the slope the wind was at our backs and helped propel us as we scrambled over the vegetation, walking on top of the canopy of dwarf beeches as on the previous morning.
In short order, though, a heavy, horizontal, rain began. I had become separated from Blanka, all I could do was hope that she was able to find shelter. (I later discovered she had also tried to find me to let me know she was fine). On the side of a ridge I plopped down and sank into the shrubs; I was completely below the surface of the dwarf tree canopy, but could see out. The rain blew in sheets as spray from the sea was whipped up and blown ashore. The water dripping down my face tasted salty. Because of the high winds, it was too dangerous to walk around. For about a half an hour I remained immersed in the shrubs and watched as the rain and wind blasted the island. I was glad I was not up on an exposed ridge like the other group, and hoped they had found shelter. After some time, the winds became less gusty and died down, and the rain softened so that it no longer felt like pellets as it hit my skin.
