The Summer of the Wet Feet
Here it is, mid March and it feels like summer already. While I’m not quite ready for the winter to end, the warm weather does have me wondering what new experiences will arise this summer. I’m also thinking about last summer - the summer of the wet feet.
The memories start with late April. It had already been an exciting year with daily visitors to see the birds coming to my feeders, finding a Yellow Rail at Sedge Wren Marsh in Carden and an owl survey where 21 owls were seen or heard including eight pairs of barred owls doing their spring routine. How could the summer months possibly beat these earlier months of 2011?
It turned out to be a good year. I remember doing plant surveys with the CKL Flora Project, I remember the Carden Nature Festival where I dared to actually lead an event and I remember working on trying to control the dreaded patch of Dog-Strangling Vine discovered near Cameron Ranch. But it seems my most vivid recollection is that of having wet feet. And that should be surprising because the summer was the dryest I’d experienced since moving to the area in 2008 and there were times when I had worried that my well would not hold up.
The first wet foot event was the Carden Blitz, the annual point counts carried out on Cameron and Windmill Ranches where we get to walk on land normally unavailable to the public, enumerating bird species along the way. This year I was signed up to do an area that was completely new to me. As we traversed across the fields behind the cabin on Wylie Road, I found myself hopping from one hummock of grass to another in an attempt to keep my boots dry. After a while, I realized it was pointless as my socks were drenched and the water had wicked up my pants right up to my thighs. As I slogged through water that was inches deep, I looked down and noticed that my boots looked a little unusual. Turns out that at the end of the previous year, I’d walked through poison ivy and, thinking to ensure that the oils would not remain on my boots, I had drenched them with dish soap. Now they were foaming. Sigh. I was wet and I was polluting the environment.
Next was my first ever plant inventory with the CKL Flora Project. One of the two leaders had announced at an earlier meeting that there was a very exciting location that was going to be inventoried. It was exciting because there were wetlands so lots of interesting plants were possible. I thought it could be fun. Who knew!
In the days leading up to the inventory, I asked Leader One what I should wear. Oh, rubber boots if you’ve got them (I didn’t) or you could just wear swamp shoes - old running shoes that you don’t mind getting dirty.
Dirty! We ended up in muck that went half way up my shins. I had a shoe pulled off by the mud. My pants were black with swamp slime.
To this day, Leader Two still chuckles (somewhat evilly, I might add) and says, I can’t believe you came back for another (survey) after that experience.
On the next survey, we were on dry land, walking through woods and former grazing pastures. But it was the swamp just a bit further down the trail where both Leaders were most alert. Without hesitation, they plowed into the water, shouting with glee (that may be a slight exaggeration but it became clearly evident that these two botanists live for wetlands). Fortunately, I was able to skirt the edges and managed to keep my feet dry but only barely.
Shortly after this event, I received an email from Leader One to see if I was interested in joining her for an unscheduled inventory. The location choices were: 1) return to the swamp of the previous location, 2) explore a swamp near Fenelon Falls or 3) explore the Rail Trail in Coboconk. I opted for location 3.
Wouldn’t you know it - there had been a big wind recently and much of the trail was blocked by trees that had blown down. The only way around was........walking through the swamp on either side.
So now it was time to try a Carden Field Naturalists outing - the stewardship walk on the Little Blue Stem property. This was on July 30, we’d had three weeks without rain and one of the characteristics of alvars is that they go into drought state in the summer. This was going to be a dry walk. At least it would have been if not for the eight hour downpour that happened on July 29. Did you know that alvars flood in spring because there’s no quick way for the melt water to seep into the ground? Did you also know that alvars flood after eight hour downpours for the very same reason? Again, I found myself walking in water that was up to my ankles.
A week later, it was another stewardship walk but this time it was on the Prospect Marsh property. Hmm, there’s that word Marsh and yup, we got wet.
And so the summer continued, and the snow fell in early November and the water became colder. More stewardship walks meant wet, and numb, feet.
In December, I finally found a pair of rubber boots that fit. And this past weekend I wore them, happily and comfortably tramping across muddy streams and dipping into flooded valleys.
Maybe wet isn’t so bad after all.
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