![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/P1070286.jpg\" "\\"P1070286\\"")
<\/a>Western Wakerobin, Trillium ovatum<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/a>Snow Queen, Synthyris reniformis<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/a>Calypso Orchid, Calypso bulbosa<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/a>Stream Violet, Viola glabella<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/a>Spring Beauty, Cardamine nuttallii<\/p><\/div>\n
A new path…<\/p>\n
In a literal sense, I have been working for the past couple of weeks on clearing a path at the spot we call the Watershed Homestead.\u00a0 In the winter we mostly satisfied our need to experience the woods by walking up and down the road, but we were yearning for a longer route and a more immersive experience.\u00a0 First came the chainsawing, clearing old deadfall and a number of trees that came down beneath the recent snow and ice.\u00a0 Then last Friday Jesse and Eva helped me place two log bridges where the path crosses a spring-fed creek.\u00a0 It is a loop covering about 12 acres behind the house and crossing through a variety of plant communities.\u00a0 All of the flower photos above were taken along the path this morning.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Upper bridge<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/a>Housemate Basho on the lower bridge<\/p><\/div>\n
In a figurative sense, I am embarking on a new path in life.\u00a0 My graduate-school experience of 5 1\/2 years draws to a close this week as I submit my revised dissertation and grade the last assignments for the classes I am TAing.\u00a0 Before I spent my days in the lab manipulating nanometer-scale metabolic pathways inside micrometer-scale cyanobacterial cells, I spent days in the field identifying birds and plants, observing tropical beetles, cataloging marmot behavior, and delineating lynx habitat.\u00a0 There was a time when I thought ecology was too messy with too many confounding variables and I envied my molecular biologist friends for their simplified systems and concrete results.\u00a0 But after spending five years in a lab examining the very tiny, I have come to the conclusion that it is not my home.\u00a0 At first I thought I would get used to it, become comfortable there as I gained proficiency with protocols and techniques.\u00a0 Somehow that never happened.\u00a0 I learned, planned, struggled, succeeded, and ultimately defended my Ph.D. last month, but I never came to identify myself as a microbiologist or a molecular biologist.\u00a0 The lab always seemed too artificial, too isolated from the reality of organisms in context.<\/p>\n
I long now to return to the field, to the open road, to working with biological systems across geographic space.\u00a0 I have discovered in my time in an engineering program that I aspire to the engineering approach – to using science to solve pressing problems rather than simply to better understand the world.\u00a0 Honeybees in particular have become close to my heart over the past four years.\u00a0 They are an interesting intermediary between the wild and the domestic.\u00a0 They are ours:\u00a0 we keep them in hives that we build, select for traits that we prefer, ship them across the country to pollinate our crops.\u00a0 And yet they are wild:\u00a0 they go where they please with no regard to fences or property lines, they swarm into trees and survive on their own, the queens mate with drones from any hives within several miles.\u00a0 They depend for survival not only on their keepers’ lands, but also on the neighboring fields and wildlands, falling victim to neighbors’ sprays or collecting pollen and nectar from neighbors’ crops.\u00a0 They facilitate conflict, cooperation, and a growing sense of a need for collective action to ensure their health and survival.\u00a0 I have an interview this week for a university extension job working with commercial beekeepers to analyze colony health and to understand and ultimately reduce colony losses.\u00a0 It is definitely a change from where I have been, and I am excited by the prospect!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Spring has come early to Oregon this year, after a record-breaking February snow and ice storm.\u00a0 It has a been a strange winter in many ways, with the most snow in Corvallis in at least 20 years but very little … Continue reading