Cottage in the late afternoon

Cottage in the late afternoon
Originally uploaded by umlud

Sometimes I stop and realize that I now live in a 80-acre piece of land with 50-odd acres of forest, and much of the remaining 30-odd acres being water. I don't know if it's because I tend to live inside my own head so often, and that the simple action of going outside is - strangely - not something that I am presently prone to do very often.

However, when I do go outside, I'm struck again and again by how amazing it is to live in Saginaw Forest. (I'm also struck again and again by mosquitoes, but that's a different issue all together.) The other day, I as I was mowing part of the lawn in front of the cabin, I turned around and looked up the lawn and saw an amazing little tableau: the cabin beyond a short expanse of grass, overhung and surrounded by trees. Since I wasn't mowing the entire lawn (just three paths to the water), tall flowering grasses were waving in the wind like short green wheat, their height masking the gravel road. In fact, if it wasn't for the mowing of the lawn (which I do mostly to give people a 'pathway' along which to walk so they don't trample through the entire area), the vista would have been a more naturalistic one with (somewhat) tall grasses carpeting the small rise.


This last Friday I was so taken by the scenery - sunny late afternoon with little wind - that I took one of the boats out on the lake. Very nice, indeed, and an activity that I'll have to do again during this summer, but with an eye out for where future biological monitoring of aquatic insect emergences might be conducted -- I saw several dragonflies, damselflies, mayflies, and water-striders during my boat ride. Furthermore, the type of near-shore habitat is different between the west bank and the east bank -- the east bank has more cattails than the west bank and (obviously) gets more light in the late afternoon than the forested western shore.

I'm thinking that I'll have to design some sort of floating sampler that can be tethered in different parts of the lake for night-time sampling. I know that I won't be able to have a good sampling of odonates, hemipterans, and aquatic coleopterans, but I'll likely get a good sampling of the aquatic trichopteran, ephemeropterans, plecopterans, and (of course) dipterans. (And if I can figure out how to make a good sampling device to be deployed on the lake, I should be able to minimize the number of terrestrial taxa I collect.)