A Composition by Oolong
This summer, I played on a farm with ecologists--Blandy Experimental Farm, to be exact, home of Virginia's State Arboretum.
The "Slave Quarters" of Blandy, where the students lived. These did use to be slave quarters, since the farm was a plantation back in the day.
Things you could find at Blandy:
trees
cows (on the neighboring farm, which may actually have been a meth lab)
ticks (by the thousand)
It was against Blandy law to release a tick back into the wild, so instead we collected them in little vials full of alcohol.
Things we did at Blandy:
hung out at the Farmhouse (adjacent to the Barn, which had real barn owls)
picked flowers...well, at least I did
made wedding cakes
Oh, and did some research...
Counting flowers (yellow monkeyflower, or Mimulus guttatus).
Highlights of the summer included: being nerdy with all my fellow bio nerds, slumming around in men's underwear all summer (wifebeaters and boxer shorts. don't judge), and communing with nature.
More pictures:
Us in our hot waders, off to sample some pond life.
Transplanting some monkeyflower seedlings. I did 1392 of these bad boys. Took the better part of 5 days--I listened to a lot of NPR in the greenhouse.
My sweet rope burn from rope-swinging over the Shenandoah River. The rope had a thinner cord handle at the end, and when I swung out, the cord wrapped around my knee and made me flip in the air after I let go of the rope.
Us in our DinosaurLand finery. DinosaurLand: a magical collection of fiberglass dinosaurs, designed to teach the Winchesterians about prehistoric creatures.
At the Smithsonian's Division of Birds, where they keep a huge collection of specimens (lots of extinct species, stuffed birds and skeletons, and other bits like nests, eggs, and this harpy eagle claw).
Bumblebee in one of my fake flowers (made to test bee responses to pollen odors).
Oh Blandy. Definitely one of the best summers of my life.
