Jump #2

Today was extremely productive. We set a goal and managed to reach it! We ended last week with five completed plots (3 along the border and 2 on Warren Farm). We went out today with the goal of completing at least 3 plots and we managed to do it! Initially we returned to our third plot on the Warren Farm side of the border, but we ran into an issue in the form of water. As it turns out, the location where our third plot is set is rather low lying and today had a few centimeters of water in it. Severe thunderstorms over the weekend dropped a lot of rain and as water tends to do, it settled to low areas, i.e. the location of our third plot.

While some might have been concerned or caught up in deliberations, we were psyched about the opportunity to jump across the border into Barrington Headwaters. Upon initial inspection, the property on Barrington Headwaters will almost certainly have a higher abundance of trees. We also expected that the Hemlocks would be much smaller and while we may find that to be true, there were still some large Hemlocks in the area. We saw some interesting snags and old stumps with red shelf fungus living on them and many copiced trees. Some of the stumps were obviously left from the time the area had been logged and looked like they had been there for a long time. The place where we found the most mossy old stumps was an very tree free area with lots of fern and blueberry growing in it instead. I (Dawn) think it was a very magical spot!

While the Hemlock size and abundance is interesting, we found some very cool things on the Barrington side of the boundary that we did not find on the Warren Farm side. The number of stems is much higher in each plot area. While we know that each area was logged, we believe that the higher number of stems on the Barrington side is owed to the fact that Barrington was last logged long before the logging stopped on the Warren property. We can also attribute the apparent lack of shrubs to this as well. We also found a large Blueberry patch and a large dragonfly that was taking shelter in the rain on the bark of a Hemlock.

Before we end, just a quick note. When we went up the hill into the Barrington property, we did hear something large in the woods near us, but we were unable to verify what it was. We believe that it was most likely a deer, but it could have been a moose as Randy did see one on his farm a few days ago.