Field Trip to Kelleys Island

Monday we took a trip to Kelleys Island, which is about 20-30 minutes by boat from Gibraltar, depending on lake conditions. The primary reason was to hunt for fossils at the abandoned quarry on the island, but I wasn't complaining about getting to have lecture someplace new. This is one of the advantages of Stone Lab; you don't really spend a lot of time in the classroom, even in a classroom-oriented course such as EEOB 400. We may not be out there taking samples of lake water to study like the people in Limnology, but we still have opportunities to get our hands dirty (literally and figuratively).

Aside from fossil-hunting, we also examined and identified individual fossils and made an attempt at dating the quarry we were digging around in (probably not original research). Afterwards we visited grooves left behind when the glaciers receeded after the last ice age, and had a fine lecture by the beach.

You can see photos from the key points of the trip at my Picasa album for this field trip, located here. Each photo contains a small caption. I wanted to include more pictures from the trip back, but the weather was against us and as the winds picked up the lake grew progressively choppy. This made it too difficult to take any quality photos (I was too busy hanging on to keep from getting bucked off the boat).

Relaxing and Studying

The pace of five week courses at Stone Lab is pretty brisk. You have to keep on task just as you do in regular academic year courses at main campus. This means keeping up with your reading and homework assignments (yes, homework assignments). Fortunately, this is a really relaxed place to study. There are only about 30-40 people on the island at any given time so things aren't very crowded. Plus, you have some excellent places to sit and read. It isn't very hard to keep up on your reading when you can read by views like this, in a cool lake breeze, surrounded by the singing of families of birds and the occasional sigh of wake-waves tumbling against nearby rocks.

We Went Birding

I've been meaning to update this many times throughout the week. My only excuse is that time on the island seems to behave differently than time in the real world. I study from a spot that overlooks a lake and my lecture halls have been in a forest, a park and outside of a literal castle. My time keeping has shifted from days and hours to a simpler construct: day time, night time and meal time. If I didn't need to know when to show up to eat I wouldn't wear a watch.

That said, there have been some interesting events over the past week. Yesterday we sat in on a guest lecture from the Director of Ohio's Department of Agriculture. There were some power issues as a large storm coincided with dinner that evening and a good bulk of the lecture was in the dark. While this lecture was open to the public, as a student at Stone Lab I was able to attend with no complications, it was given on Gibraltar Island following the evening meal. Students here have access to not only high profile instructors, but there is opportunity to meet individuals from various fields that intersect with science, politics being one of them.

That said, the first really exciting day of class was today. On Monday our class went to look for salamanders in a forest on South Bass Island, but we found none. Otherwise I would have talked about those. The forest was nice, but pictures of overturned logs with no redback salamanders under them just weren't that interesting.

Today's lecture was much more interesting. For the first half of class, our lecture was entirely outdoors. As part of EEOB 400 at Stone Lab, we have a large lab component that involves capturing, banding and measuring red-winged blackbirds and cardinals to compare the two populations on Gibraltar and the surrounding islands. In the above photo our instructor, Dr. James Marshall, is holding a second year male red-winged blackbird that we had just put through the measurement gauntlet. Which is why he doesn't seem to be very happy with us.

The purpose of our major lab is to examine the differences in various measurements (wing length, leg length, beak size, etc.) between populations of red-wings, which are migratory between many islands on Lake Erie, and cardinals, which tend to be permanent residents of each island they live on. In theory, we should notice larger differences between the cardinal populations measured on each island and the red-wing population on each island, as the red-winged blackbirds will exchange genes with other populations, potentially mitigating any local adaptations that may occur. This is less likely to happen with cardinals as they have much less frequent gene exchange with populations on neighboring islands.

We don't know if the differences between each bird population will be significant, but not knowing something just means you have to do science to know that something. So we're going to do science.

Some Sights Around the Island

My first day up at Gibraltar, it was a bit of a drive and a long luggage haul, but I wanted to go around and snap a few quick pictures from some of the views available to island residents. Many thanks to my dad for helping me haul a bunch of heavy things on Father's Day and giving me a ride so I don't have to deal with parking up here for five weeks.

Here are a few quick photos I took from various points around the island.