Fun at Kellogg Biological Station

One of the best thing about working with soil ecosystem is the field work portion. It will be great if the next lab I work will also have field work component. Hmm...*thinking of a sampling trip to the various ecosystem at Colorado* :)

This summer, I have been working a lot on experiments using soil samples from the Kellogg Biological Station. I have been driving to KBS to get samples almost every two weeks and will most likely continue to do so until shortly after harvest season. Here are all the fun stuff I get to see at KBS.
Ladybug on a soybean leaf. It is such a coincidence that the two water droplets on the beetle is right where two of its spots are, making it looks like baja hitam.

Some like it up, some like it down, some even like it by the side. :)
At each of the plots with different land management, sampling flags are placed to assist us in sampling. The position is determined based on global positioning system (GPS) and is moved every year. This particular one have become a habitat to a 'crawling plant' (argghhh!! I can't remember the correct term for it!
If I get there really early or when it just rained not too long ago, I wish I have a pair of boots!
But I love the freshness of early morning dews.
The native land plots will always have little creatures like this err...dragonfly (I think). It has become my new sampling friend. I saw it twice on two different sampling days, standing on the same sampling flag. Once on a cloudy day while another time on a nice sunny day. The first time, I managed to get a closer shot because I was sampling by that flag while the second time, I was over by another flag when I saw it landed there.
The not so fun part about sampling the native sites is this little thorny seeds. They will attach all over my shirt and pants that I always have to spend some time getting them off me before I go back.
This last trip, I almost got my first photo of a deer! I was walking through a corn field when I heard rustling. I knew at once that there are a bunch of deer in the corn field. The corn plants were already matured and were about my height. When I saw the deer through the plants, I knew it saw me too but it stayed really still. But clumsy me had to drop the soil coring tube when I tried to get my phone out of my pocket. Of course they ran away as fast as they could. There were 6 of them! I did get two of them running away though. One of them you can only see the top of its head.
Hopefully I'll get a bunch of wild animals photo during my trip to Colorado!!