Bison or Bullets: What’s the Biggest Threat in Białowieża?(part 1)

October 8, 2023October 13, 2023 / ilexaquifoliumuk / Leave a comment

Our PhD student Emily had fieldwork to do in the UK, and our PI Hannah wouldn’t be able to stay for the whole trip due to family commitments which is how our student intern Lucia and I ended up going to Poland with Lais for the whole three weeks of Fundiv fieldwork. Lucia had only been working in the lab with me for about a month before the trip so it was a little bit of a gamble on our part, but she fit in fantastically with the team and was incredibly hard-working.

We don’t have any mammal exclusion plots in Poland, which are more intensive for us to set up and monitor. There we are just visiting the previously established Fundiv Europe plots to take samples. The plots are located in Białowieża Forest, near the border with Belarus. There are a lot of tracks through the forest but they’re not open to the public. You have to get a special permit to drive on them, which is tied to the vehicle. We also needed to have a local field assistant with us at all times for logistical and safety reasons. Białowieża Forest spans the border with Belarus which has made it the centre of an immigration crisis in the last few years. Consequently, the forest is teeming with soldiers, border guards, police, and forest guards. We tried and failed to find a car rental company that would let us pick a vehicle up at the airport and drop it in any city near Białowieża and it wasn’t financially sensible for us to rent a car for three whole weeks when we couldn’t use it most of that time. All of that is to explain how we came to be taking a train across Poland with our many suitcases.

Irek, one of our local field assistants met us at Hajnówka train station with the van to drive us the last 30 minutes to the small village of Białowieża. I say small as it has only a few thousand residents but it is actually spread over quite a large area and has two hotels because the forest and national park make it a tourist hot spot. Our accommodation was more like a guest house than a self-catering cottage this time.

We knew we’d be sharing with different people throughout the trip, but had not been able to find a place all to ourselves. There was a kitchen to make food but it was very small and clearly aimed at occasional meal prep, not normal day-to-day cooking. We had only two rooms booked so Lais and I took the larger to share and gave the other to Lucia, since we know each other. The bedroom was large but I could tell the blinds were rubbish straight away, and it made us giggle when we noticed the door to the ensuite had a row of intentional holes in the bottom of it.

The living room and “kitchen” we shared with other guests

The situation couldn’t have been more different to the hut in the Black Forest. There was a petrol station literally across the street from us, and a small supermarket a few minutes’ walk down the road. Of course, I missed the wildness and the seclusion, but it was nice to be able to pop out for a drink or a bar of chocolate when the mood took me. And while I didn’t have views over a lush meadow, I could see a nest of stalks getting ready to fledge on a pole outside the petrol station from my bed.

On the first fieldwork day, Irek picked us up and took us through the village to the University Field station so we could have a quick chat with Bogdan, our academic collaborator before we started. We also briefly met Paweł, the other field assistant who would help us on some days. All three impressed upon us the importance of always carrying our passports as they’d had instances before of field workers being detained by overzealous police or border guards. “we’ll get you back eventually” reassured Bodgan, “but it can take some time”.

We quickly understood why other collaborators had told us it would be no problem to do so many plots in Poland as almost all were within 20 meters of a track. Some we could literally back the van right up to the edge of the plot. The terrain was very flat, and in most of the plots, the soil was sandy and largely devoid of stones. We worked with Irek for the first three days and started to get into a good rhythm with the various tasks on each plot, and later with the cleaning of probes and other evening jobs (namely cooking and making lunch). The next day was a Sunday so neither of the field assistants could come with us meaning we had to take a day off. After lunch we went for a stroll into the village, passing through the park where a palace used to stand and the forest museum currently does. There were some characterful buildings to look at, plus a few cafes and a tiny shop. Despite its small population, the village is very long and we ended up abandoning the plan to visit the hotel at the far end after 40 minutes of walking. We stopped in a café instead and the others had some pirogue while I settled for some delicious homemade lemonade.

Monday was our first day working with Paweł who is apparently a fan of ripping off the band-aid. First thing in the morning he took us to the hardest plot of the trip. The whole forest has suffered mass spruce death since the plots were first established. This meant clambering over the odd fallen tree to access a few plots, or an occasional nightmare plot like this where trees were lying down layered on top of each other, inside the actual plot. The first thing we do at each plot is work out the nine subplot borders and give them a number. We use a flag about 40 cm tall to do this… no easy task in a plot of fallen 1 m+ diameter trunks where tall undergrowth has enthusiastically filled the now light space between them. Carrying the heavy Licor around such a plot was also quite trying. So many of the trees have died that there was very little canopy cover so we were also doing all of this in the blazing sun of a heatwave. Thanks to how easy access was to most plots we still managed to do three more that day and finish at the very reasonable hour of half five.

On Wednesday, Paweł took us to some of the furthest plots in an area with slightly different characteristics. We encountered our first stony hard soil where getting the 40 cm long ingrowth cores into the ground was tricky. Even in the easy plots, it required some hammering but here I was drenched in sweat after sinking the first one. Getting the corer into the ground was only half of the problem. Getting it back out, without the soil falling out was just as difficult. With the corer sunk so deep, and unable to get them made with a longer handle due to suitcase sizes, I found the easiest way to pull it out was to get on my knees and pull it a bit like a deadlift. Once it was half out, I’d switch to a squat. Paweł joked after watching us for a while that the various moves we used with the soil corer were like a full gym workout. He wasn’t wrong, and just carrying the heavy Licor around the plot was definitely working my traps.

We had seen a few piles of abandoned clothes and gum boots in the forest during the first week and a half. Irek and Paweł had explained that Białowieża is in the midst of a migrant crisis. The contiguous forest covering the border from Belarus to Poland had always made it a prime illegal immigration point but things had really kicked up a notch when the Belarusian government had flown a load of Syrian refugees into Belarus on the proviso that they couldn’t stay there. The Polish government, wanting to take a strong stance, had put up a controversial fence a few years previously, right through the middle of the forest. It would stop the bison but I think it only slowed the flow of desperate migrants who could climb it with a little planning. Aside from these quite haunting piles of discarded clothing, there were always plenty of soldiers walking or driving around the village but it hadn’t really impacted our fieldwork yet.

Thursday of our second week in Poland we crossed a little bridge on our way to the first plot. There were two soldiers stationed on it, who clearly spent a lot of time there as they had used wire to attach a couple of perpendicular sticks to the railing as a place to prop up their rifles. They flagged us down but were quickly satisfied by Paweł’s explanation and let us go on our way.

Twenty minutes later I noticed the back of the van is suddenly lighter, I turned and saw there was a big army truck behind us with its headlights on. The track was only really wide enough for one vehicle so we weren’t sure if they just happen to be behind us, if they wanted to overtake or if they wanted us to pull over. They didn’t beep but eventually started to flash the lights so we pulled in, even though the plot was not much further down the track. The truck screeched to a halt at an angle in front of us. Before it had even stopped moving, a soldier jumped out of the front seat, and three more dismounted from the canvas-covered back. They all readied their weapons. The one from the front seat who seemed to be in charge pulled a handgun out of his holster. The three young lads from the back take the rifles off their shoulders, tap the magazine and hold them at their sides. They never pointed their weapons at us, but they made it obvious that they were ready to. The lead soldier and Paweł engaged in a slightly heated debate for a few minutes in Polish. I didn’t understand much beyond him wanting to see our papers. I assumed I’d have to dig my passport out of my bag in the boot so I unclicked my seatbelt, which in hindsight might have looked slightly suspicious to them. We didn’t end up having to show them anything though as Paweł successfully argued that the army doesn’t have the legal right to demand to see identification (apparently only the police and border guards do). They let us continue on our way but watched us until we had parked up at our plot and started unloading our scientific equipment.

Lucia and Lais were understandably a bit shaken up by this. I felt my heart rate rise a little while it was happening, but I honestly found it more thrilling than scary. I’ve reflected on that since and suspect it comes from a mixture of life experience, privilege, and naivety. By which, I mean that I have grown up in a situation where I don’t have to fear the police or military, where I rarely have any interaction with them in fact. I had this innate sense that since we weren’t actually doing anything wrong, it would have worked out fine in the end. And it did, this time, but perhaps just a little more fear might be prudent in terms of survival.

One of the larger piles we came across. They change out of the clothes they have used in the forest to try and blend in better in the towns/villages.

The Joys of Staying in an Isolated 200-Year-Old Forest Hut

August 13, 2023August 17, 2023 / ilexaquifoliumuk / Leave a comment

German SAPlab Fieldwork 2023

Two short weeks after my trip to Amsterdam I was on my way back to Europe, for fieldwork this time. I flew to Germany to join Lais, Emily and Diego for the mammal plots. They had already been in Germany for a few weeks collecting samples from the Fundiv network plots in a different part of the country.

They collected me from Stuttgart airport on their way from the Hainich National Park in the centre of Germany to the Black Forest in the South. We had arranged to stay at a very conveniently located forest hut owned by our local partner university. We stopped off to do the big food shop, which always takes longer than you think, especially if you include the time trying to pack the food around the existing luggage in the car. We’ve developed little tricks along the way, like putting small items in the empty spare wheel well under the boot cover and opening the back electric windows to slide a few items into any tiny crevices (as we always have to put luggage on one of the rear seats).

Lais was driving, and using google maps to navigate as we generally do. It took us through the little village where we had stayed in 2022, then along the same track we used to access the forest about 30 times that year. A car coming the opposite way flagged us down and we just about understood that they were forest rangers and this track wasn’t for public use. They mentioned a gate ahead but seemed to be willing to let us continue this time since we explained that we had permission from the university to be here and would soon be meeting a contact with a key to the gate. We drove on only to find the gate they had mentioned was in fact a new gate, and not the one we had known from last year. We were stuck and had no idea how long our collaborator, Michael would be, or if he would even have the correct key for this new gate when he arrived. We mulled over the options for a few minutes before deciding to let Emily and Diego get out so they could walk the last km to the hut while Lais and I would drive back to the village since we needed petrol anyway. To get back to essentially the same spot but on the other side of the gate meant going a very long way around and took at least 25 minutes. It wasn’t helped by the fact that google maps just point blank refused to accept that there was any other way to get there, apart from the restricted road. Even though we could see the roads on the map and could get it to take us to places along the way, if we put the hut in as our goal it would try to take us back around. I had to navigate on the fly that first day but we discovered later that the Waze app worked fine.

By the time Lais and I got back to the hut, our collaborator from the University of Freiburg had arrived and was showing Emily and Diego around. Even though we had visited the mammal plots in Germany during the big fieldwork campaign last year, we had never seen the hut properly. It was an incredible old wooden building, with tonnes of character. Michael took us through the process of “opening” the house, since all the services are turned off when it won’t be used for a while. The house has many bunk beds and is often used for student field trips but is still very much a domestic house in terms of scale. Apart from the one large teaching space, the rooms were quite pokey and the ceiling height left a lot to be desired. As we were the only people using it, we did get to pick a bedroom each. Mine ended up being a strange space with bunk beds composed of three mattresses each. The mattresses were literally butt up against each other, so it looked a bit like a super-duper-queen-size bunkbed. I quickly realised while picking rooms that there was no bedding or pillows – something we had not been warned about. There was, however, a huge stack of grubby old-school felt blankets stacked up in the teaching room. None of us are strangers to roughing it so we shrugged, laughed, and accepted the situation. Michael was less accepting and very kindly offered to lend us some of his own personal bed linen and towels. The only catch, he lived 40 minutes’ drive away. Lais, Emily and Diego were understandably quite tired so I wanted to offer to do the drive on my own but I hadn’t driven on the right since returning from our fieldwork campaign in 2022. Added to the fact that google maps wasn’t working and it would soon be dark, I wasn’t feeling too confident. In the end, I drove but Lais came with me to navigate. I needn’t have worried, driving on the other side felt normal again after a few minutes.

The house didn’t have wifi and only occasional moments of phone signal but did have multiple warm powerful showers which is arguably more important for fieldwork. It also had central heating although the boiler had been replaced a year before but the instructions were still for the old system (and in German) so we were left a little uncertain if it was working. One of the things I love about this site in Germany is that the elevation is so high, there are very few mosquitoes. It does also mean that even in the height of summer it can get quite cold. As the evening cooled, I tried to turn the heating up a few times. A radiator downstairs started to feel warm but as I was lying in bed trying to sleep later I could feel the cold seeping into my bones. I eventually dragged myself back out of bed to retrieve another 3 blankets from downstairs (making 7 in total). They were so heavy that I think anymore might have restricted my breathing or pushed me through the bed!

The next morning was an absolute joy – opening up the small creaky windows and wooden shutters and seeing the meadow outside, bordered by forest on all sides. Hearing the birdsong, running water and absolutely nothing else. For unknown reasons we weren’t allowed to keep the car outside the hut overnight, we had to leave it half a kilometre up the track by the gate (the one we had wrongly thought the rangers were referring to). Meaning each morning also started with Lais or I (the only drivers) power strolling through the forest to retrieve it. There are a lot of tracks in this section of forest, as it is open to the public for recreational purposes, but we found our way back to the plots with ease. The pollen on that first day was like nothing I have ever seen before. It was so thick in the air I was surprised we weren’t all sneezing constantly and it quickly blanketed everything – vegetation, us, our equipment, and the Licor collars we had sunk into the ground last year making them even harder to find amongst the moss.

The work itself went quite well, although certain variables were more difficult on some plots. For instance, trying to get the corer or our plastic mesofauna collars into stony soil. We also had to do another seedling count so I know we were all dreading going back to plot 9 which had almost broken us the year before. We visited 5 plots a day, and each plot on two days as Emily had split the variables into two groups. We did the harder variables during the first two days, so those were quite long though still very manageable, and we were back at the hut by 6. We had a few rain showers, but the weather was generally quite kind. In the evenings we often went for little walks on our own, to find the signal to call loved ones or just decompress from the day.

The only real downside of living in a literal hut in the forest (apart from having to boil the drinking water) was that we started to get nighttime visitors. On the second morning in the house, I came downstairs to find evidence of food and packaging being munched. I was able to identify the culprit from the size of a perfectly curled poop they left in our pack of rice. We had edible dormice! We had to get rid of quite a few half-eaten things and kept all our food inside an enormous cooking pot from then on. Carefully cleaning the kitchen counter became my morning routine. Thankfully we worked out how to make the heating work after the first night, essentially by chance. It seemed radiators were on a set of loops where having one earlier in the loop turned off would mean later radiators didn’t get any hot water. So Lais happening to turn a radiator in the bathroom on meant the whole of the upstairs got warm. Well, apart from Emily’s room which we never figured out so she decamped into Lais’ bedroom to sleep for the rest of the trip.

On day three we started the second set of variables and were relieved to find that they went much quicker than the first. We made the tactical decision to leave a little bit extra of the work for the next day so we could finish early allowing Lais and I to drive to the city. We needed to get a few things, do laundry for the other three, and most urgently we needed good internet so we could buy some flights and sort out some university admin. It was a warm sunny day so even the drive was a pleasure, getting to see some of Baden-Württemberg in its best light. We found a laundrette with free wifi although we had to venture to a nearby café and buy a drink first to get some change. Lais threw all their clothing into the big machine together and joined me back at the café to finish the drinks. We popped to the nearest food shop then settled into the laundrette. The wifi was surprisingly good but the room was absolutely sweltering. Lais managed to buy the flights and transferred the clothes to the dryer. I was deep into researching Polish car rental companies when I noticed the time and realised our parking ticket was about to expire. I power walked back to the car while Lais sorted out the clothing. I swung by to pick her up and we headed back to the hut.

The last day of fieldwork went so well that even with the extras tasks we had left over from the week, we finished in the early afternoon. Diego and I went along with Emily to the nearby lake while Lais drove the car back to the hut. I had intended to swim with her, but the lakeside was so busy that there weren’t any easy places to get in. We had to walk to the side of the water that was in shadow so when I stepped in I knew straight away that was as far as I was going. Emily and Diego both went for a quick paddle around before we walked back to the hut together. I promised I would go in the next morning though if we went first thing, before the general public turned up. After putting the fieldwork equipment away there were still lots of hours left in the day so I went for a wander up the track and found a nice spot to sit on the hill behind the hut. I listened to music in the sunshine, enjoying the view and feeling so content and lucky to lead the life that I do.

The next day was a planned day off. Of course, it felt like a bit of a cheat for me since I had been there for less than a week, but the others really needed to rest their bodies. I naturally woke up early and found Emily also up. I silently nodded to her that I was still up for the swimming plan and we both gathered our things, trying not to wake the others. As expected, there wasn’t another soul in sight, so we had free access to the tiny beach section. The water was still quite cold, but I took the plunge and we swam for a few minutes.

For the main activity that day Lais, Emily and Diego opted to visit the nearby village of Hinterzarten to find a café with wifi so I planned a walk that started there. I found the 10 km Hinterzarten Ravenna Gorge walk on AllTrails and went for it. It was a beautiful day, mostly clear and sunny but with enough cloud to not burn during the open sections of the walk. The route took me through a little tourist attraction village with a cuckoo-clock house, some historic buildings and a hotel. Soon after that, I walked under the impressive Ravenna Bridge (or Viadukt Ravennaschlucht) and up into the gorge. The small trail wound up for a while, passing some lovely waterfalls and interesting geology. I rounded a corner and was surprised to see a wooden shed set up as a stall selling cake and beer in a section of wider path. There was a building a little further along that turned out to be a working demonstration of how they used the rivers flow to grind flour. I was amazed to find that the stall did have one gluten free cake, a truly delicious chocolate courgette loaf. I sat at one of the tables sprinkled around the mill house to eat my cake before popping inside to look at the millstone mechanism. This main section of the gorge was quite busy with other walkers, but they thinned out as I continued. By the time I had left the gorge and was walking through a mix of woodland fragments and open fields, I was alone. I gained a little more elevation cresting a sweeping grassy hill and found myself at the highest point for miles around with stunning views as my reward. I had a lunch of Huel on a bench overlooking Hinterzarten and the dry ski slopes that inhabit the opposite side of a hill to our plots.

I checked in with the team, thinking they would have long since returned to the house and fully expecting to walk a few extra miles back to the hut, but they were still in the village. I got a stomp on and ended up getting back with time to spare, buying a coke and sitting on a bench by the car park while they finished up. I think this is also the day that we tried to do most of our recycling only to find very few public recycling bins. Emily ventured into a café to ask, where she was told that it wasn’t possible today because it was a public holiday… the person didn’t speak much English so that’s as much explanation as we got. We eventually found a few collection bins near the train station, but only for glass not tins.

We gave a few hours that afternoon to the big job of packing up and cleaning the house. In classic German style, the use of the house came with a long list of rules and conditions for leaving it which we had to check off. We had to bring the car down the track to load up anyway, so I hatched a plan to see the elusive beavers that lived in the small lake next to the meadow. The track went alongside the water’s edge so at sunset I parked up and settled in with a podcast and a blanket. After around 40 minutes it had gone quite dark but I could still make out the shape of something moving in the water. It swam up and down the length of the lake, giving me ample time to recognise it as a beaver. I was thrilled but still wanted a closer look so when it swam passed a third time I thought I could maybe just roll down the window. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that the car beeped and the headlights came on automatically when you turned the key! I didn’t see it swim back, and unsurprisingly it didn’t come out again. Now cold from having the window open I gave up after another 20 minutes.

The next day we were up early to do the very last bits of packing, and to close the house (turning the gas and water off etc). We had to return the sheets and duvet covers we had borrowed from Michael to a colleague of his that lived in Hinterzarten. It was very early so we just left them in a neat pile outside her door before starting our journey to Memmingen. Despite being a tiny airport, Memmingen was the only place that had direct flights for Lais, Emily and Diego to get to Succeava in Romania. I dropped them off then continued to Munich with the rental car and the samples. I entertained the idea of stopping off somewhere en route since I had a few hours. But by the time I had gotten through a traffic jam and tried to look up places to eat on Google, I had less time than I thought. I ended up buying some disappointing food from a supermarket and going straight to the airport. The rental car drop was pleasingly close to the terminal, but the airport itself was a little weird. It’s a big city and a decent-sized airport but it was very quiet. There seemed to be few staff or travellers, and many closed shops. I got to the British Airlines desk early because I wanted to check their policy on baggage allowance pooling, only I couldn’t find anyone. With a very heavily laden trolley, I wasn’t super mobile so I couldn’t wander endlessly around the airport. I settled onto a bench and listened to podcasts for over an hour until a member of staff finally showed up. I was close to the front of the queue which quickly filled in behind me.

When it was my turn, I learned they do not allow pooling (so each piece can only be 22, even if your total allowance is 44 you can’t have a 30 and a 14 for instance) which meant I needed to repack some of my cases. Problem number two is that we only had one luggage scale, and I had sent it with the team since they would need it more. I had assumed that Munich airport would have a repacking station or at least some belts that I could use. The member of staff informed me politely but unsympathetically that the belts there only worked once a member of staff puts their key in and there were no other scales. “So I’m going to have to do it here? Everyone is going to hate me” I said. He shrugged, so that’s what I did. I moved over so he could serve other people while I re-sorted but without removing myself from the vicinity of his desk so I wouldn’t lose my spot in the queue. I lay the cases down and started opening them all, digging out the now mostly melted ice packs and chucking them in a large pile on the floor where they landed with a satisfying wet slap. I imagine I was probably getting a lot of weird looks, but I very intentionally avoided making eye contact and was a little surprised that no one commented on my weird luggage now on show for all to see. I redistributed the soil and my personal items to try and balance the weight, but it was all guesswork. When a family had finished at his desk, I loudly exclaimed that I was ready to reweigh them, to reclaim my position. I started lugging the heavy cases back onto the scale. The very first one was still overweight but it was only 1 kg this time, so he said it was ok, probably also not eager for me to go through the whole process again.

At Heathrow, I was waiting a little while for Hannah because she had to drive over from Luton where she had just dropped someone else that was flying to meet the team in Romania. There are two lifts that everyone wanting to get to the car parks and pick up area have to take from this terminal. I had to wait quite a few lifts because they were full. Even when I should have been able to go, it takes a moment to get such a heavy trolley moving and people with one little suitcase kept whipping into the spaces. Eventually, another woman with a big trolley was next to me, blocking out the sneaksters, and she said “you should go, you’ve been waiting ages”. I thanked her and started moving, but the tiniest edge of one of the suitcases caught on the doors to the lift and seemingly in slow motion and in defiance of physics, every single one of the cases fell off the trolley – even the big ones on the bottom that hadn’t touched the doors, because the ones above were so heavy and unbalanced them as they fell. I swore and turned to apologise to the queue of waiting people, but they were quite sympathetic and rushed (probably eager to get the lift moving but either way I was grateful) to help me restack them. Hannah pulled into the pick-up zone car park about ten minutes after I got there. We set off back to Bristol only to have one final spanner thrown in the works when it transpired that a big section of the motorway was closed. It took us nearly double the time we expected to get back to the lab so we were very late dropping the samples and even later crawling into bed.

Sample rescue in Wageningen and sightseeing in Amsterdam

July 23, 2023October 8, 2023 / ilexaquifoliumuk / Leave a comment

The curse of having the most practical experience of soil science within my new lab group, is that this year I was needed more in the laboratory than in the field. At one point it looked like I would only go to one country for a week to help with fieldwork which was a little disappointing for me on a personal level (but the decision made complete sense for the project).

But no plan survives contact with the enemy (the enemy in this case just being the rigours of fieldwork I guess). The team were in Italy, and were joined by the PI, Hannah for the last few days. She then flew back to the UK with the samples while the others went straight to the next country, Germany. One of the things she brought back were mesofauna samples to put on a Tullgren system. These are small plastic collars that we hammer into the ground then remove and bag up. They contain the living small to medium size fauna from the soil. The Tullgren system is just racks of sieves, funnels and a heat source that causes the fauna to crawl down away from the warmth eventually falling through the sieve, down the funnel and into a waiting pot of ethanol. We had been given a very detailed design for a Tullgren system by researchers from the Netherlands but unfortunately, ours was very behind schedule. We realised once the samples were back in the UK that our system wasn’t going to be finished and installed before the samples passed their viability date.

Cue, Thursday morning as I was walking to work my boss rang and floated the idea of me taking the samples to the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW). Since we had based our system exactly on theirs we could treat the results as comparable and coincidentally, some work of theirs was behind schedule so there was space on their racks. Less than 12 hours later I was touching down in Amsterdam! I had one large and one small roller suitcase with me, containing the 38kg of samples plus my personal luggage. In the grand scheme of luggage on this project, it was positively light but it was still an effort to get to Wageningen as I had to take two trains and a rail replacement bus before kindly being collected by a fellow technician, Freddy. By the time he’d given me a whistlestop tour of the impressive NIOO building and facilities it was already late afternoon. It took over an hour to transfer the samples into the racks, and we were pleased to see plenty of fauna still moving around. Small suitcase now inside the larger one, and both much lighter I got yet another bus into the centre of Wageningen and went in search of my hotel.

It was a budget room but I have no complaints. Well, except that the cheaper of the two restaurants in the hotel was being used for a private event that night and the other was well out of the project’s price range. I went for a wander around the town but didn’t have much luck finding restaurants with GF marked on their menus. I was tired and didn’t fancy the now familiar dance of going into each establishment to try and convey my question to the waiting staff. I had seen a Dominoes pizza near the bus station and a quick look online showed that they did indeed have the same GF base available as in the UK. I ordered it online and walked it back to the hotel to eat in bed. I felt a little guilty for ordering the same food I could get at home but at least I could trust it wouldn’t make me ill.

The next day was heavy on public transport again. I took a bus to another town (to avoid the closed section of railway that had necessitated a rail replacement the day before). Next was a train back into Amsterdam, then a metro out of the city centre to my hotel on the outskirts. I was far too early to check in, but they let me leave my suitcase. I got the metro back into the centre, now thankfully unencumbered. That morning I had downloaded a new app to find gluten-free food and I put it to the test in Amsterdam, ending up at a lovely lunch spot. I was already tired from all the travelling, so I decided to do the classic tourist thing of going on a boat tour to give my feet a rest. It was a warm sunny day so I opted for an open-top boat but covered myself in suncream before we set off. The tour was interesting and we got to see the city from a different perspective, although I sometimes couldn’t hear the guide over the group of cackling middle-aged women that had situated themselves either side of me.

I popped into the Sex Museum next since it was nearby but found it less informative than I’d hoped – more full of novelties to make groups of idiots laugh. It was also sweltering hot, so I didn’t stay very long. While wandering around considering my next move I stumbled upon a church that’s now an exhibition space. It was showing the world press photo contest winners, and it happened to be the big event when all the photographers were there to give talks. Unfortunately, I’d missed most of them but caught the keynote speaker, an incredible photojournalist from Bangladesh who spoke passionately about why the freedom of the press matters. I just about had time to read the captions and look at the rest of the winners before the security guard shooed me out at closing time.

I returned to the well-known Amsterdam Pancakes for tea. I had walked past earlier in the day but been put off by the 25-person deep queue out of the door. It was quieter now and they had space for a loner like me. After my tasty GF cheese and ham pancake, I considered calling it a night. It had been a tiring couple of days after-all. I’d asked Freddy’s advice about what to do in Amsterdam the day before and he had mentioned that it happened to be Eurovision final day. I had told him about our disappointing attempt to find a bar showing it the year before at the conference in Marseille. He seemed to think my chances would be better in Amsterdam so I decided to try and eek every bit of new experience out of Amsterdam that I could (since I was only there for two days) and instead of returning to the hotel, I googled gay bars. There was one famous gay pub not far from me, so I wandered over. They even had posters advertising that they would be showing Eurovision. Great, I thought except when I went inside it was already rammed. I felt awkward being there on my own so I decided to see if I could find somewhere a bit more spacious. A short walk didn’t turn up any better options so I went back to The Queen’s Head. It is a long thin bar with the screen on one of the long walls. They had set out rows of seats but they were already taken. I got a drink and tried to find any spot to stand where I wasn’t in the way of the flow of people or the TV. As luck would have it, the spot I picked was next to a table of fellow Brits who soon adopted me into their group and into their booth.

We watched the whole thing together and it was a surprise highlight to my whole trip. They were fans in the same way as I am, it turns out, in that we don’t take it too seriously. We enjoyed the commentary (the Queens Head was somehow showing the BBC version with good old Graham Norton) and rated each act, with the occasional discussion of our lives sprinkled throughout. Towards the end of the night we were also joined by a pair of very enthusiastic Aussies who had maybe had one pint too many. I decided to duck out when it came to the scoring although yet another metro later I was back at my hotel in time to see the winner being announced.

On Sunday I walked around a park near my hotel which is home to a few sculptures and artworks. Amstelpark also happened to have an artisan food fair on that day, so I sat in the shade to eat some lunch before hopping on yet another metro to go to Micropia. It’s basically a museum of microbes. While it was interesting, perhaps I already know a little too much to be the true target audience. I took the metro back to my hotel to pick up the suitcase then jumped on a train to the airport. The travel itself was fairly smooth although I was pretty exhausted by the time I got off the airport shuttle bus in the centre of Bristol and still had to get another normal bus back to my house. I think I stepped through the door at about half-eight that night.

Blister on my palm from rolling the heavy suitcase aside, I thoroughly enjoyed the trip. I also love that I now lead a life where an impromptu trip to a research institute in another country can happen.

Transport used during the trip:

2 planes
5 trains
5 metros
4 buses
1 rail replacement
1 boat
2 lifts
2 taxis

International Bivvy Bag Day – A Very Cold Night

April 8, 2023 / ilexaquifoliumuk / 1 Comment

I’m always looking for ways to inject a bit more adventure into my life, so when a friend asked me to participate in international bivvy bag day, I said yes (even though I hate being cold and it happens at the end of February). The first event last year was planned to coincide with Russell Moorhouse completing his yearlong challenge to wild camp on all 214 Wainwrights. There were 1387 participants but if they really want to push the world record, I’d suggest moving it to the summer! The idea is basically to sleep outdoors with just a tarp, hammock or bivvy bags (no tents).

I drove back to Manchester from Bristol to stay at my mum’s and collect my camping gear. I hadn’t taken it to Bristol yet because I had no intention to go camping so early in the year. The drive was once again horrendous, taking two hours longer than it should have. A car had crashed and caught fire on the opposite side of the motorway causing a massive rubbernecking jam northbound. Then, 11 miles from my mum’s house, my engine warning light came on!

After a morning spent trying to find a garage to look at my car, I met Debbie and Adam (the same accomplices from the Yorkshire three peaks) out in the Peak District in the mid-afternoon. It was dry but overcast when we set off, and mild enough that I stopped to take my coat off a few minutes into the walk. It was the first time I’d carried a full load since the Southern Upland Way. It’s hard to know for sure since we only hiked for an hour and a half, but it seemed like the super comfy Hoka boots I got for fieldwork were a massive improvement on the Salomon ones that left me with a blister 5 skin layers deep in Scotland. Debbie and I had scoffed at Adam claiming Kinder Woods would be busy and pushing for more remote locations, but as we approached the small segment of woodland that would be home for the night, I had to rescind my skepticism. There were at least 6 other groups of Bivvy-baggers and we had to walk the length of the wood and back again on higher ground to find somewhere a bit private. Debbie and Adam were sleeping in hammocks but a flat spot was important for me since I was borrowing a bivvy bag from Adam and sleeping on the ground.

We picked our spot and were just setting up camp as it went dark. The bivvy went out quicker than the hammocks, and once Adam showed me the technique, the Thermarest I was also borrowing from him was soon inflated. I own two camping mats: a thicker but heavier one good for side sleeping, and a lighter but thinner one that wasn’t really designed for winter. Adam offered me one of his that was supposedly a nice middle-ground. While digging out my camping stuff I found my brother’s foam roll mat. I decided to bring it with me since it added barely any weight and might provide some added protection from the dreaded cold floor. I put the foam mat down first and Adams Thermarest on top, both inside the bivvy. Now in darkness and with our breath clearly visible in the cooling evening, I turned my attention to starting a fire and neglected to actually test my sleeping situation, which would prove to be a mistake.

We built a fire (safely) and started to put on our extra layers as the night-time chill really set in. Adam had a thermometer so we know it got down to about 2 degrees C by midnight. I boiled up some water and had an instant meal, while Debbie and Adam cooked real sausages or burgers. We were in a sparse mature woodland so could make out some of the stars through the largely leafless trees above although I was kind of glad when they faded out due to a blanket of cloud cover that I hoped would keep us warmer.

We chatted and foraged for a little more wood when our supply was quickly eaten up, but ultimately turned in around midnight. I had brought a hot water bottle with me, so I boiled up a pot of water first. The promise of the water bottle definitely helped with my mental state in the run-up to bedtime! I awkwardly shimmied into my sleeping bag and tried to zip up the bivvy. It was surprisingly tight! I’m not sure if it just wasn’t designed for a curvier person in five layers of clothing, or if I had pegged it out badly, or if it was due to having both a foam mat and generous Thermarest inside with me (or most likely a combination of all three) but it was so tight I could barely roll onto my side. In fact, it felt like the bivvy was so tight over my hips that it was compacting all the loft of the sleeping bag and making me quite cold. I tried to lie on my back, but due to my scoliosis, found that intolerably uncomfortable. Eventually, I slowly wiggled onto my front and placed the hot water bottle on my chilly bum.

I actually did manage to fall asleep in that position but woke up again a few hours later. I couldn’t see anything, even when I turned to try and look out of the mesh to the night sky beyond. I realised eventually that I was facing into the hood of the sleeping bag and the zip was almost in the centre of my back. I managed to check the time on my backlit GPS watch, so I can tell you it took literally 15 minutes to extricate myself. It felt like trying to escape from a straitjacket and I considered giving up or shouting for help more than once. When I had managed to squeeze one arm out of the face hole of the sleeping bag and shuffle the bag around so I could unzip it far enough to get the other arm out (to unzip the bivvy which fastened on the opposite side to my sleeping bag), I realised that the bivvy bag had come away from its pegs and rolled down the hill slightly, so the entrance was now facing the ground. I tried to sit up and knocked my head against something firm. I felt around for my headtorch and discovered it was the foam mat that was now twisted up and over me.

I accepted that I was going to have to let the cold in and unzipped the bivvy bag so I could take the foam mat out and get everything else straightened out. I laid the foam mat on the ground next to me and tried to bum shuffle the bivvy onto it. I sealed myself back up and let some of the air out of the Thermarest, so I could lie on my side more comfortably. The water bottle was cold by now, although the effort of untwisting had warmed me up a little. I dosed in and out for the rest of the night but didn’t get any more solid sleep. When I checked my watch later it said I’d got 6 minutes of deep sleep, and 2 hours 35 minutes of light sleep! I gave up on sleep at 7:25 and emerged from my hellish cocoon to see Adam and Debbie already up. I had some warm porridge before sluggishly packing up.

Debbie and Adam confirmed that neither of them had been warm enough or slept well either, and it turned out that Debbie had already been awake during my escape artist act, and had wondered why I was shuffling around so much. We left the wood via a different route and passed an ugly pile of rubbish from someone else’s wild camp some time ago. We were all frustrated by the laziness of these irresponsible campers who give us all a bad name, so Debbie decided to finish bagging up the abandoned burnt tent inner and protein powder and we took it out with us. Once you’ve started picking up rubbish, it’s quite hard to stop. We filled the rest of the bin bag on the walk back to the car. We passed a lot of people walking in and were overtaken by most of the other bivvy bag groups since they weren’t slowed down by hunting for trash but only one person commented on our impromptu litter pick. Despite the total lack of sleep and the cold which had seeped into my bones, I still dropped in on my dad before heading back to Manchester. Amazingly, I didn’t crash until the late afternoon when I was tucked up in bed in front of Netflix. Even then, I only had one short nap and found myself feeling quite normal in the evening. I worked from home on Monday as the garage needed to order a part, which they fitted on Tuesday. After dropping the car off, I popped into my old UoM lab to test if a standard size vacuum stopcock would fit a desiccator lid I had brought with me from Bristol. The day already felt a little hectic after I collected my car but I ended up having to drive home via Chester to collect some seedlings that Hannah had bought that day. We’d been really struggling to find seedlings small enough to fit inside the experimental cages already made by a student, as most companies don’t like to sell them until they are more established and less likely to die. Someone at the nursery had actually stayed late so that I could collect them, and was amused when Holly turned up to get the holly. The rest of the drive back to Bristol was mercifully easy so I wasn’t too tired for fieldwork the next day.

Settling back into normal life… and moving that life to Bristol

March 25, 2023 / ilexaquifoliumuk / Leave a comment

I took a few weeks off work after we got back from our big fieldwork campaign. It was nice to have a break from the physical grind, but I immediately missed every other aspect of it. Stepping back into my familiar, easy, but dull life felt like moving backwards. I had accrued a crazy amount of TOIL hours during the summer, probably too many to ever take back to be honest. But I did burn through some of it while I finished packing up my Manchester room and started looking for a place in Bristol.

I ended up moving to Bedminster in mid-November, to share a house with two other people. The rental market in Bristol is so lively I ended up rushing it a bit, but thankfully it has proven to be a decent house with lovely people. I got a short tenancy so I would have the option of moving again once I know the city better or when fieldwork plans for 2023 are finalised. I like Bedminster, it reminds me of Chorlton but the 45-minute walk to work is not ideal.

In fact, Bristol generally reminds me of Chorlton. It definitely has an independent, vegan vibe. I may not be the most active social butterfly, but I’ve enjoyed the odd night out and explored some of the activities the city has to offer. I’ve also enjoyed spending some more time with my eldest cousin, who coincidentally moved to the city for a job around the same time I started mine.

With a lot of TOIL still in my back pocket, I went back up to Manchester for an extended Christmas break. We had three separate large family gatherings, with about 14 people and two dogs in our house at one point. I didn’t manage to go for as many hikes as I’d hoped, but I did have a lovely restful time. Knowing I’d be back for Christmas, I hadn’t brought all my belongings down in November. I managed to pack almost everything else I wanted into my little Yaris when I came back from Christmas, apart from my bike which had to wait another month to be collected. Once I did finally manage to bring my bike to Bristol though, it was a game changer! I had been getting a bit tired of how difficult it is to get around Bristol because the public transport isn’t great and it’s hellish to drive in the city. I enjoy walking, but not when it eats up an hour and a half of every day. My poor hybrid bike had been languishing in a shed for most of the pandemic so she needed a service before she could return to duty. There are at least three bike places in Bedminster so that was easily accomplished. The building I work in is right at the top of a very steep hill. There is an alternative slightly less steep, but consequently longer hill to come up around the back but I honestly wasn’t confident I’d be able to make it up that one either after years of rarely cycling. To my surprise, I made it up the hill on the very first day I cycled to work, although I was barely faster than the pedestrians and had pink cheeks for an hour.

I’ve been in Bristol for nearly four months now and my impressions are that it does seem to rain less than in Manchester. Also, for a supposedly lefty/green city, it is pretty bad for pedestrians and cyclists. The pavements and road surfaces are a mess, and I am surprised the council hasn’t been sued into oblivion. I have to walk up about six flights of steps to get to work, and none of them are even or particularly well-lit after dark. There are a decent number of cycle paths, but they often still follow the messed up road system so you end up getting funneled through one-way streets or trapped in the wrong lane. Or there are some that occupy shared space with pedestrians where the cycle path is almost indistinguishable from the pavement, so you have to dodge people or watch out for unexpected breaking from the cyclist in front. Which reminds me, I really need to get a bell for my bike – the last one fell off when the screw vibrated itself free a while back.

I found I immediately missed the peaks of the north. I may be closer to the countryside here, in fact I can see a bit of greenery from my bedroom window, but it is all small rolling hills. I miss the drama and wild scenery of the Peak District. To find a hike with any kind of challenging ascent within two hours drive of Bristol, I literally have to go to another country. Even then, the Brecon Beacons have got nothing on the Lake District. Lack of mountains aside, I am enjoying Bristol, my job and the people I am getting to know down here.

ForestSAP big trip – Italy

November 9, 2022 / ilexaquifoliumuk / Leave a comment

Bologna airport was much smaller than Frankfurt so was easier to roll our cases through without forking out for a trolley. Just as we got to the exit, I saw James from the Manchester lab stroll in through the doors. I shouted out to him and we exchanged the briefest of salutations as he disappeared up the escalator. Emily and I, unable to collect the hire car without the booker Lais being present, got a short taxi to our hotel.

The room wasn’t quite ready so we hung around enjoying the heat outside. The hotel was quite nice and had a particularly attractive terrace and garden that was clearly being set up for a wedding that night. The restaurant was well out of our budget so we didn’t bother asking if it was still open to the public. Emily and I changed then went for an unplanned walk around the area. We headed in the direction that looked more built up and found a few streets with shops on. We located the closest supermarket and kept walking, crossing a bridge and reaching the next small set of shops where we found two places that sold gluten free sweet things (but nothing savoury) and a bakery with vegan brioche. We headed back the other way and having found nothing easy for me to eat, walked to a Lidl. I picked up a tortilla and some sushi for tea that night. The room itself was not huge and the window looked onto a tall hedge but it did have a decent shower and very quiet fridge that came in handy. I spent the evening making the remaining ingrowth cores. I initially thought I might sit outside to enjoy a can of coke but Italian mosquitos descended on me and I knew instantly I was going to react really strongly to bites in Italy.

The next morning Emily and I found out the special food they’d bought for our breakfast were tiny individually packed gluten free muffins for me and a small bowl of chocolate flavoured biscuits for Emily. We got advice on buses from one of the staff and headed into Bologna. We visited MAMBO first, the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. It wasn’t cheap to enter and was honestly quite disappointing. There were more photos of art and previous performance art than actual pieces, and the descriptions were too flowery by half for my personal taste. We walked towards the centre, passing a museum of medieval history but it didn’t seem worth the entry price either. We arrived into the impressive main square just as some trumpets sounded. We followed the small amassing crowd to find a short parade of soldiers in interesting black feather hats walking through the square. There were long pauses of inactivity interspersed with them inexplicably running for a few minutes, but never travelling very far. We couldn’t go into any of the religious buildings as Emily was wearing shorts that didn’t satisfy their modesty policy. We spent the next few hours looking around, getting tired of walking, and sitting in cafes to get off our feet. We did get photos of some of the undeniably beautiful architecture. We ended up in the university district and paid a few euros to look around the uni museum. It contained some of the strangest historical models I’ve ever seen. There were two rooms full of models of different birth complications including descriptions of real times they happened (and frequently ending with “they both died”). Still, I preferred it to MAMBO.

After that, we found one of the restaurants we’d researched online that did good gluten free pizza. I accidentally ordered one without tomato sauce which was a shame, but it was still very tasty. On the way to the bus stop we popped into a pharmacy and bought some new insect repellent. I picked up some gluten free biscuits there too and was helped out by an English speaking security guard who saw my utter confusion at the numbered ticket system they had to just to pay for items. We got the bus back to the hotel and decided neither of us were city people. It had been an occasionally interesting but mostly overwhelming and taxing day.

The terrace outside our hotel. We didn’t feel like we could really hang out since they were clearly setting up for a wedding.

The next day I went for a walk to the basilica we’d seen on the hill looking over Bologna. Emily’s leg was playing up a little after our day of city walking so I was on my own. I got a short bus to the start of the walk. I’d found the directions online and there were a lot of paths in the area so I knew I could find a decent walk even if I didn’t follow the exact prescribed route. The walk was enjoyable, and I didn’t suffer many mosquito bites despite not wearing repellent. I saw a few nice views but also had to walk on a road with no verge for longer than I’d hoped. I did see a very interesting green brain shaped fruit that I still don’t know what it is. I also walked up the portico de San Luca, the longest covered walkway in the world. It leads from the edge of the built up area, up a long hill all the way to the basilica with periodic religious sculptures or frescos.

The basilica was very impressive to look at but I only popped inside for a moment and took a few photos of the outside before continuing my hike. I made it back down to the town I’d left from to find the gluten free paradise shop I’d spotted on my way up was now closed. I hopped on the same bus back to the hotel but this one didn’t have a cash box like the others. I didn’t have a card to use so just decided to risk it since it was such a short journey. I got off by the hotel because being a freeloader was stressing me out but decided to walk beyond the hotel and back to the gluten free bakery as it was still early. Disappointingly it wasn’t open that day so it was a wasted trip. Emily and I had the warm Huel for tea again that night. The hotel rooms didn’t have kettles so we had to go into the bar and request some cups of hot water from the barman which seemed to really confuse the staff.

The next morning Lais flew into Bologna and finally collected the rental car. Emily and I waited in the garden of the hotel after we’d checked out, trying in vain to dry some clothes I’d washed at a laundrette that morning. When she eventually pulled up, I couldn’t believe my eyes – it was a Fiat 500! To be precise, it was a Fiat 500 X which is their approximation of a mini 4×4 (but with zero offroad capabilities). I honestly didn’t think we’d be able to fit everything in, since we’d struggled to even get ourselves and a bag each into a Fiat 500 when we’d taken one to our first fieldwork in Devon. We spent so long trying to pack it, having to take items back out to spin them around or try them in a different part of the car that the hotel staff asked us to move out of their driveway. We opened the boxes and squeezed anything extra into one and collapsed the other. Eventually, to my great surprise, everything just about fit. Poor Emily was squashed in the back and they both had stuff on their laps and in their footwells. I even had things stuffed into the driver door pocket. We knew we didn’t have space for a weekly shop so instead picked up one easy meal for that night and breakfast for the following morning. We had discussed starting fieldwork the very next day but since we needed to do a shop anyway, we pushed it back a day. It ended up being good that we didn’t shop until the next day when we knew the accommodation didn’t have an oven, just a stove and microwave.

I attempted to go for a run the next morning but a mix of hills, slippy wet clay paths and eventually entirely losing the path meant it was probably more walking than running. I was never lost, in that I knew where I was and I knew where the house was, I just couldn’t easily get between the two because I found myself on the wrong side of some cliffs 40 minutes into my “short run”. Worried that I was making us late for our planned trip back to the nearest supermarket, I decided to find a cross country route instead of backtracking through the streambed and warren of hunters paths. I made it back to the house quicker but after a pretty difficult scramble was covered in mud and scratches.

The accommodation was at an organic olive farm that also acts as a hotel and has a few self-catering apartments like ours. Places like this are known as Agriturismos in Italy and ours also ran a few activities, like horse riding. Our apartment had a veranda front with a picnic bench under it. In front of that was a large gravel area with a few chairs encircling a small boulder. In front of that was the start of a grass hill leading down to the pool area, all of it with an incredible view out over the valley. The house itself was quite rustic and a little grubby, there were plenty of insects inside and we couldn’t use the heating so it was occasionally a little cold. I had a good sized room with a double bed but again the sheet wasn’t well fitting and I was tangled in it by the mornings. The house seemed to be perpetually moist so things we hand-washed and our towels didn’t dry unless we put them in the sun during the day. Once we’d opened the two fieldwork suitcases in the kitchen/lounge/dining room, there wasn’t much space left and we spent days stepping over or moving things.

The Fiat 500 packed with just enough space for Emily to squeeze in

We headed to the field the next morning. The forest seemed quite dry but once I starting looking for them I could see mushrooms everywhere. We got started in the plot closest to the main carpark. Our partner from a local university was in the area to do some of her own fieldwork with a colleague and met us with the student she’d arranged to help us for three days. The first plot had a lot of seedlings to count so even with the student Leens help, we couldn’t finish the seedling count in the second plot of the day. Leen had only recently arrived in Italy, after finishing her undergraduate degree mostly during the pandemic so had little experience of actual fieldwork. I felt bad for her when she told me this, as she was definitely thrown in the deep (intense) end with our fieldwork but she was eager and willing. Despite covering myself with insect repellent the first day, I had gotten quite a few very itchy bites from the strong Italian mosquitoes so spent the rest of the trip in full waterproofs and mosquito net hat. It was warm and uncomfortable but better than being bitten.

Fieldwork progressed fairly well, although we did start to worry that we were going to run out of the small yellow cable ties we used for seedling regeneration counts as so many plots had a lot. Leen helped for three days and then Lais planned to drive her back to the nearest city that evening. First she called me from part way down the drive saying the car was making a funny noise but the call dropped. She didn’t ring back for 40 minutes when her and Leen discovered the last bus had already gone. Thankfully our accommodation owners were still up and Leen was able to have her room for another night. The next day Lais drove her to a different town and she was able to get a train back to the city. I went for a walk but didn’t have enough internet to follow the route I’d found online, so just used google maps to follow tracks that looked like they’d eventually take me passed an old castle across the valley then back to the Agriturismo. I found that as long as I was walking at a decent pace, the mosquitos weren’t too bad so I didn’t have to walk in my stifling waterproofs and hat.

Over the next few days in the field, the whole area seemed to be swarming with mushroom pickers and the number of enormous parasol mushrooms left dwindled. The hordes of (generally) older similarly clad fungi foragers (sometimes in apparently organised groups) occasionally smiled or enquired about our work but more often than not just glared disapprovingly as we drove down the tracks that are normally closed to vehicles. We also started to run out of the large cable ties we used to put the litter traps together so had to resort to using the smaller colourful ones normally set aside for marking the hyphal bag or ingrowth core. Thankfully both the tiny yellow seedling regeneration cable ties and the mesh litter trap cable ties lasted. Soil collection went well even though driving the various long dicey tracks took up some time. The only problem came when we tried to fit it into our little fridge with the last of the food – it really was a tiny fridge! We managed to finish all the outstanding tasks on one buffer day so I was free to go for another run on the second buffer day. I stuck to the drive this time, not wanting to repeat my scramble through a heavily vegetated slope. We also drove to Volterra, a nearby town perched on a hill that had been recommended to us. It was a lovely town, and much more enjoyable to visit than Bologna. We walked around some of the old fort remains, looked in a few shops, had a celebratory meal in a vegetarian restaurant and found some delicious vegan gelato. We did most of the packing that night and set off fairly early the next morning.

We were flying out of Pisa and even had time to visit the tower. Pisa is actually quite small, and we found a cheap carpark incredibly close to the tower. We walked a few minutes to the big public square that houses the tower, cathedral and a few other beautifully ornate buildings. We couldn’t do much walking as Emily’s leg was still playing up, so we did one gentle circuit of the buildings then found a pizzeria for lunch. We drove to Pisa airport and had an annoyingly difficult time getting ourselves with all of our bags from the rental car drop off to the actual terminal. We had to wait for a shuttle bus as there were no trolleys and Emily couldn’t walk with any heavy cases (of which we had many). For the first time in the trip, I was a little concerned we wouldn’t get through security in time. Thankfully, they weren’t particularly strict and only a few bags needed checking this time, so we got to the gate about ten minutes before it opened.

We stopped into a supermarket on the drive from London to Bristol and I found myself unexpectedly happy that I could read and understand all of the packaging and had a reasonable expectation of being understood when I had to interact with other shoppers. Lais did the driving but we both felt a little bit weird the first time she did a roundabout. Thankfully my car started no problem despite sitting outside Lais’ house for two months, although it felt extra crappy to drive. That may just have been by comparison to the relatively new hire cars I’d been driving around Europe. I stayed at a B&B on the outskirts of Bristol that night so I could go into the university the next day (a Sunday, but days of the week had lost all meaning to me at this point) to start organising the lab and packing away the field equipment before driving back to Manchester that evening.

A very old church built over the ruins of an old roman bath in Volterra

ForestSAP big trip – Germany

October 31, 2022November 9, 2022 / ilexaquifoliumuk / Leave a comment

Despite being hungry when we reached Frankfurt airport, I was also exhausted and just wanted the travelling to be over. I did have a cursory look over the food on offer but could only see bread based fare as far as I could see. Earlier research said our hotel had a restaurant bar and was next to a shopping centre so I decided to wait and get food there. We followed the satnav into an increasingly dark and sparse neighbourhood and found our hotel hiding behind some roadworks. Mein Palace was also apparently undergoing renovation, but a woman emerged from the bar, which was dark apart from the light of her laptop, to help us check in. I asked, in my limited German, if there was anywhere nearby to get food and she confirmed what I feared, that I’d have to drive at least ten minutes back to a shop. I was too tired for that and just wanted to shower and lie down. My hangriness was temporarily placated by enjoying how ridiculously tacky and faux fancy the landing of the grand stairs at the hotel was. Clearly this space, and hotel generally, was geared towards weddings not travel weary scientists. A banana and single snack bar was all we had left that I could eat so I retired to my room with a rumbly tummy but slept ok in the end.

We had told them in an email the day before that we needed a vegan and a gluten free breakfast but the message hadn’t reached the cook. We just about managed to communicate our needs and he tried very hard to still bring us some food. For me, he brought a plate of meat and quite a lot of cheese. Emily and Lais were given some olives and an enormous portion of grapes each, seriously it looked like we had two punnets on the table by the end.

We set out to drive most of the way down the country to the Black Forest. Personally, I quite enjoyed the autobahn which felt safer than many slower roads. We stopped at a service station and I finally got to eat a proper meal, well, sausage and chips. Food shopping was definitely easier than in Romania, and we were all impressed with the amount and variety of vegan options. There were enough gluten-free options but still not as many as in Finland. We discovered later that there was a Lidl very close to our accommodation but I’m glad we’d already shopped. Lidl is decent for vegans but terrible for allergies.

We were staying in an attic apartment in a shared occupation house. The owners lived on the floor below us and there was at least one more flat on the ground floor below that. They returned just as we were unpacking which felt slightly awkward as I worried our carrying of heavy suitcases and shopping up two flights might somehow go against one of the MANY rules included in the welcome binder. It was a family with two children who were all very nice and spoke good English. The flat was lovely, probably the best looking accommodation we’d had so far. There was a fireplace in the middle of the living room, which had a large sofa, a table and a nook we could use for yoga. The kitchen was small but the best appointed so far, with an oven, stove, microwave and dishwasher although the eaves meant we all bumped our heads a few times. My bedroom was just a wooden box and the slanting roof meant I couldn’t sit up in bed, but I had plenty of space and a radiator I could control myself. For the first time we had two toilets which was handy, but the only shower was a hose attached to the bath taps. There was a cradle for it on the wall, but at about waist height as the bath was also under the eaves. Even holding the shower head we couldn’t stand up straight, there literally wasn’t the headroom. That made showering after a long day of fieldwork a bit of a tricky hybrid bath/shower affair.

More fruit for Emily when business class failed to provide a vegan meal

It was still dark when we left for fieldwork the next day and the temperature was a shock. We hadn’t realised before getting to Germany just how high the site was and I instantly regretted not bringing a woolly hat or scarf – which might seem like an insane choice but space in my luggage was at a premium. Our local partner, Micheal, met us at the site and showed Lais around while Emily and I started on the two plot days. Michael speaks excellent English and had made us some very clear maps.

Fieldwork went well apart from running out of twine and not being able to find it in the local shops. We did have to change insect hoovering to afternoons because it was too cold for anything to be active first thing in the morning. Either the cooler temp, the altitude itself or some other factor also meant there were very few biting insects around the forest so I didn’t have to wear bug spray. I would say Germany was the least difficult country in terms of getting around the site because we could park so close, and in terms of passing through a town with shops including a Lidl and a Landmarkt between the field and our accommodation. It maybe also felt easier because I understood more of the language. I don’t know how much of that is because German is somewhat similar to English and how much is thanks to the 6 years of German I did in school but I enjoyed feeling more capable linguistically. Setting up litter traps again after a few countries off felt like a big drag. Even though we mostly finished everything in both plots each day, and at a reasonable hour, the traps just made the days feels longer.

The first few days of fieldwork were at least dry but the weather started to turn in the middle of the week. I went for a slightly soggy run in the black forest on my day off and finished my book Llama Drama which I thoroughly enjoyed even if it made our own adventure feel very tame by comparison. One plot had very dense young spruce trees in the middle 5 x 5 metre square which were very hard to measure. The needles scratched and irritated our skin and we ended up wearing the safety glasses as the stubby branches poked at us. It took a very long time especially as Lais was doing something else to start with. It was the most demoralising task we’d done so far and I think we gave up on doing leaves that evening.

We finished everything we set out to and managed to fit the soil in our little fridge. Packing wasn’t as straight forward as normal because Lais was flying back to the UK with the samples, and to stay a few days to see a friend and vote. She had to take some of the bags so remaining fieldwork kit and some of Lais’ belongings had to be spread between mine and Emily’s personal suitcases. We also still had a country worth of leaf litter to take with us to Italy, which couldn’t be crushed. It had been in the boxes during the flight from Romania and wasn’t heavy but took up a lot of space.

The habitat looked similar to the UK except with taller trees than you generally get here

We had to set off very early to get Lais to Frankfurt Hahn in time for her flight to London. By the time we dropped her off, she didn’t have that long to get through security which was the busiest of any airport yet. Emily and I drove to a nearby recycling centre while she was texting us updates. We also went to a few shops hunting for lunch for ourselves. Then drove across to the other side of the city to our hotel for the night which was very close to the other airport where we’d fly from next day. The recycling and shopping had taken so long that we got a text from Lais as we were checking in to our hotel saying she’d arrived in the UK. I walked to a nearby Thai massage place that I’d found online a few days before and had a very long relaxing massage. It was a little weird though, as only a curtain separated me from a very vocal and expressive German man getting a more strenuous massage next door.

I walked back to the hotel stopping off in the only shop I’d seen that might sell fizzy drinks. It felt like I’d walked in on something I shouldn’t though, and three men quickly ungrouped and stopped talking. I bought a few snacks, thankfully, as it turned out when I walked back through the hotel lobby that the restaurant wasn’t opening that night. Soon after, Emily and I got together to break open the Huel hot meal chilli we had. It was awkward making it with the limited facilities in the hotel but the meal itself was surprisingly nice. We made ourselves a second small batch but we failed to shake the contents as well so the second batch was a bit tasteless.

I was trying to get an early night because our flight was reasonably early the next morning and was just dropping off to sleep when the hotel phone rang. It was so loud I couldn’t possibly ignore it. I answered to be told by the hotel reception that someone had noticed the door to our vehicle was open. I sleepily thanked them and hung up before reaslising I didn’t have the car key. I’d given it to Emily earlier in the day so she could retrieve her yoga mat. I tried texting her, then calling her, then banging on her door but I couldn’t rouse her. I knew she was a deep sleeper but suspected even she couldn’t sleep through the hotel phone siren so I called reception back and asked them to ring her instead. It worked and she text me to confirm she was going down to check. Thankfully nothing was amiss, the car hadn’t been broken into and nothing was missing, it was likely it had just been left open by accident. It took a long time to get back to sleep that night so we were both tired for our flight to Italy.

ForestSAP big trip – Romania

October 9, 2022November 9, 2022 / ilexaquifoliumuk / Leave a comment

Part 2 – The Party House

Our incredibly nice Airbnb owners lived a few minutes away and regularly popped over to drop off enormous amounts of fresh produce they’d grown, to chop wood for the heating or to solve little niggles we had. The house seemed like a great place for a stag-do (if monks chanting can be considered night life) or a serviced hostel perhaps, but it was quite rough around the edges. The tiny house next to the Airbnb was also for us to use, but it didn’t have hot water or heating so we stuck to the main house. All of the water came from a well so we couldn’t drink it and washing in it made my hair feel like straw.

Our first day driving from the village up to the plot we parked up near the bottom of the drive to Cabana Şipoţel. We didn’t have Ewan with us that day and there were no loggers to be seen either, so the gate to the muddy forest track was locked. We clambered over but within a few steps I had noticed something on the ground. It was a bear print! In fact, there were bear prints everywhere, extending down the track from just 100m away from the place we had been sleeping a few nights before. Suddenly the caretaker’s insistence that we keep the doors locked made sense. After a week of seeing the area buzzing with human activity and noise, we’d gotten used to the idea that there couldn’t possibly be any bears here. In fact, two days before I had sat on a log for 40 minutes on my own by the track because it seemed silly for us all to clamber back up the hill just to finish off a one-person task and it made more sense for me to stay with all the bags at the bottom. As we walked and saw more and more prints, including perfectly clear imprints of the longer more distinctive back foot, and any initial scepticism vanished. It was exhilarating and scary to think such a big, impressive animal had been occupying the same space as us probably just a few hours before. We all walked with our spray in hand that day and made extra noise, sometimes shouting or whooping at random intervals, or even playing music or podcasts out loud from a phone. Our luck with the weather continued, and it was a bright warm day. However, one of our plots had stony soil and many seedlings so it took a long time. We were stood in our second plot of the day, the wildest feeling of them all, in the late afternoon deliberating whether to push on and finish or to leave the last task for another day when we heard something rustling in the bushes. It wasn’t close but it sounded like something big, and the rustling continued for a few minutes. We managed to freak ourselves out thinking about what it could be and decided to make a quick exit. We returned to finish the plot another day and never heard or saw any other signs of bears (besides fresh prints some mornings).

The first load of tomatoes they brought round

On our first real day off in Romania, we went to the closest supermarket but had to get back in the car and drive further afield because the gluten free and vegan options were very limited. I enjoyed driving around the small villages that seemed to mostly comprise a row of houses on either side of the road. The variety and unique design of each house was fascinating. They weren’t just different to anything you’d see in the UK, but also so different to each other. Many seemed to have a barn on the top floor, or at least a wooden structure the same footprint as the house but with no glass in the windows. Every town we passed had a deep concrete drainage ditch on one side of the road. Many houses had little bridges over this ditch with integrated benches on either side and we often saw neighbours meeting for a chat on them.

On our last day in the forest, and the last day we were allowed in the forest because the hunting season would start the next day, Ewan came back to help us. We had to visit each plot to collect the soil nutrient and eDNA samples. I don’t know if Ewan had been to the forest during the week or somehow heard about the bear prints but on this day, he brought his shotgun with him. He didn’t speak enough English to explain why but when I tried to engage in conversation about it he was happy to show me the different kinds of cartridges he had on his belt. He carried it always unloaded and broken open so it was very safe. With his help digging to collect the soil nutrients, we finished at a very reasonable time. After taking a triumphant end of fieldwork photo, we started to leave the forest for the last time. Ewan held up the shotgun with a wry smile and blew down the barrel making a most unexpected horn sound. He had some car troubles when we got back to the parking spot but after taking a fuse out and blowing on it he seemed satisfied and sped off. We returned to the accommodation and repacked the fridge so we could get all of the samples in too. Then Emily and Lais had showers before heading off to Suceava to meet up with their partners who had flown in earlier that day. I cleaned most of our tools before spending a relaxed, quiet evening pottering around the house on my own.

Our field assistant casually watching a video on his phone while walking around with his shotgun

The next day was the start of a few days of holiday for us. Emily and Lais would spend some time in the city with Charlie and Filipe before returning in the evening. The weather wasn’t particularly good and I felt like I would be able to relax better once I’d gotten some chores and organisation done. I did some cleaning and packing, plus labelled some sample bags for Italy and organised items that should go back to the UK with the boys instead of coming on to Germany with us. The others came back in the afternoon and it felt right to have the house more full since it was such a big communal space.

The next day we set out to do a walk that Emily had found online. My body was tired and worn out from the fieldwork and particularly the gradient in Romania, but I didn’t want to miss out on this chance to do a big Carpathian Mountain. After a long and sometimes unnervingly wiggly drive, we managed to find free parking in a town that looks like it must be a ski resort in winter. When we set off the top of the mountain was completely shrouded in cloud. I had the good sense to take my walking poles which helped me drag my tired body up 1000 metres of vertical ascent, but I was always the slowest and the others had to stop and wait for me from time to time. I questioned if I’d even be able to get to the top when we arrived at the Cabana a third of the way up and worried that I was slowing the group down, but I was determined to try and the others were always encouraging. The weather was good and we could see the cloud lifting as we slowly progressed towards the top.

The walk ends with 500 steps up to the weather station perched on top of the peak. We reached the staircase and I stowed my poles away. Local people coming down laughed and told us to hold on tight through mime and broken English. The steps were steep, often different sizes and sometimes uneven so hold on tight we did. I decided not to look back in case it triggered my fear of heights and I froze. I also didn’t stop to rest, just plodded up slowly step by step. My legs were exhausted when I reached the top but it was worth every drop of sweat it had cost. The view was incredible, and I felt really proud of myself – after all, this was easily the tallest mountain I had ever climbed, and the highest point on earth I have ever stood on. We had a snack and took some photos of the stunning view. Filipe is a natural people person and engaged us in a few conversations with other walkers on the peak. Most seemed surprised and impressed that we, as foreign tourists, had heard of this place. On the way down we stopped at the Cabana again and actually had a drink this time although we were plagued by wasps. Still, it has an incredible panoramic view over the landscape and we could now look back at Toaca Peak no longer obscured by cloud.

Toaca peak hidden by cloud, as viewed from a well known Cabana on our route up

The next day was a bit grey and soggy so we didn’t do much besides packing up the samples to take to Suceava. I did go for a quick walk around the monastery that was right behind our house. It seemed a waste not to after listening to their bells or chanting for days. It is listed as one of the big attractions of the area but a ten-minute stroll through was enough for us. We all headed into Suceava to stay at the same hotel the others had slept at the night the boys arrived. I was thrilled to have wifi finally and downloaded quite a lot of TV shows to watch. We also went for a meal to celebrate officially finishing our Romanian fieldwork which marked the middle of the European part of the trip and was expected to be the hardest of the countries. The food was lovely but as we hadn’t booked we had to sit outside so I was quite cold.

The next day Lais and Emily took Charlie, Filipe (with our samples) back to Suceava airport while I had a lazy morning in the hotel room. They were through security within five minutes so then just had to hang around the “airport” for two hours before flying back to the UK. We returned to our accommodation and did some more tidying and started to pack what we could in advance of driving to a different airport the next day. The drive to Cluj Napoca was long and took us back passed the town near Toaca Peak. Cluj Napoca has a much bigger airport, although still just one terminal. Despite that it was tricky to know where to leave the car and I think we ended up unloading in the arrivals taxi rank although the airport police didn’t seem to care. We had to wait for a few hours in a busy lounge that smelled like cigarette smoke. There was also a distinct lack of gluten free food options. Lais had booked us business class flights to Germany because it worked out cheaper with the baggage we had so I hoped there would be a nice meal on the plane. We excitedly took our seats at the front of the plane, each with an unused chair next to us with a little additional table fitted into it. There was indeed a meal but they had not received our dietary requests so Emily couldn’t eat any of it, and I could only pick out a small piece of smoked salmon and two cold cauliflower fronds. We landed at Frankfurt airport in the late evening – as one of the biggest airports in Europe it was quite a contrast to Romania!

ForestSAP big trip – Romania

September 24, 2022November 9, 2022 / ilexaquifoliumuk / Leave a comment

Part 1 – The Forest Lodge

We arrived in Suceava to find that the airport was essentially just two rooms. One for leaving, one for arriving. There was one runway and only one other plane in sight, which was a private jet tucked away in a corner. There were a total of three passport control booths, and one luggage collection belt that was about six metres long. Being a smaller airport, maybe the staff had less to do though, because for the first time, someone made us open up our boxes. We got out each thing and tried to explain what it was, but I’m not sure me saying “it’s sand” really answers any questions when he held up our Ziploc bag of tiny mesh bags filled with very fine perfectly white sand. We mostly just said that it was science stuff while he poked around. Eventually he was satisfied that we weren’t trying to sneak anything of great value into the country to be sold and let us on our way. Without any trolleys at the airport, that way was to slide the heavy boxes the 10 metres to the main exit.

At the exit we looked around for any sign of an Enterprise but it immediately seemed insane that they would have a permanent location at such a small airport. We read and reread the booking confirmation email and walked around the whole airport. At this point we had been on the go for about 28 hours. We weren’t especially keen on the wait and see if someone shows up plan as we were all already exhausted. Lais and I both made phone calls, some of which wouldn’t even go through, others were unanswered or reached someone with no idea about Suceava. Seemingly, one of our phone calls had eventually got the information through that we were waiting at the airport and the car turned up. It was a Dacia Jogger which has an impressively sized boot (much to my relief). The cost of including me as a second driver on the rental put it 5 euro over the maximum single transaction of Lais’ work credit card and he wouldn’t let us split the payment. After he called his boss a few times and us essentially begging, he threw the extra driver in for free.

We went to a large retail park where I failed to find bear spray in any of the sports related shops (one shop assistant said he’d never even heard of it). There was a big Carrefour supermarket so despite discussing only buying the essentials that day, we ended up doing a big shop again. With a vegan, a vegetarian and a gluten intolerant in our group, buying food can be tricky. I think we shaved some time off this trip, but it still took a while. The vegan options were a lot better than we had expected from the information we’d read online, perhaps because it is a large international supermarket chain.

I drove us from Suceava to a tiny village called Râșca where google maps runs out. Even in that hour and a half drive I had got a feeling for the driving style in Romania which seems to be always faster than the signposted speed limit, and with impatience that leads to very risky overtaking. From Râșca we headed down a gravel track into the forest covered foothills of the Carpathian mountains. Phone signal and internet both drop out completely here, but the track is quite easy to follow. We passed a little farmstead that the track seems to inexplicably cut through the middle of (despite there being a large flat field behind it) and then a huge fancy looking white building which we later established is a monastery. The track became a little more rugged after the monastery and it took a good 20 minutes before we reached our destination. It’s a forest lodge owned by the local university that our project is in collaboration with. There are no other cars and no signs of activity. We got out and walked around the building trying every door handle. It’s fully locked up and knocking or shouting doesn’t elicit a response. There was a dog hanging around and a pan full of relatively fresh meat tossed in the bushes for him to eat, but no notes or indication of where the people are.

View from the drive out to the Forest we worked in

We had hoped to stay at this lodge for our whole time in Romania, but as our plans had changed they’d said it was full on some of the new dates. Therefore, we had to move to an Airbnb halfway through the trip. They’d made it sound like it was a busy place, and we had all sort of assumed there’d be other researchers or perhaps university students staying there but it was completely deserted when we arrived. We waited and weighed up our options for about 20 minutes before deciding we needed to drive back to where there was signal. So, we did the 20-minute drive back down the track to the closest village and slightly further even, until Lais and Emily had good signal.

We did eventually manage to get hold of the project partner in country who called the person in charge of the lodge who called the day-to-day caretakers of the lodge. It turned out that we had failed to give them an exact time that we would be arriving, and they had failed to ask for one. With no one else currently staying at the lodge, the caretakers had no reason to be there all day so they were at home but thankfully, they live in Râșca and were willing to drive to the lodge to let us in.

The caretakers were a married couple. They seemed lovely and had brought us a plate of meat and cheese and some crackers. They did not, however, speak any English. Both spoke a decent amount of Spanish though, which Lais was able to partially understand (as she is Brazilian). They showed us around and told us to turn off the gas every time we cook, and not to use too many lights or too much electricity as it was all from batteries charged during the day with solar panels, and to always, always lock the door. They let us pick whichever rooms we wanted so we each had a twin bunkbed room – all ensuite. As we unloaded the car we noticed it had a flat tyre on the back, and we could even hear the air escaping. Apparently that third time on the forest track was a killer! The husband revealed that he was a mechanic and said he would come back the next morning to help us. We unloaded the car, even dragging out the heavy boxes of licor collars so there was no additional weight on the flat tyre.

The kitchen couldn’t have been more different to the tiny one in Finland. We were now in an industrial scale kitchen spread over two rooms, with a dishwasher and multiple sinks. I was relieved to see that there was a microwave not just for quick meals that night but because it meant we could make meals to last multiple nights. The strange thing is by the evening I almost felt like it had been a normal day. I wasn’t much more tired than average and still watched most of a film before falling asleep at about 11, 39 hours after I’d gotten up in Finland.

The next day was supposed to be a day off but turned into more of a prep day. Nicholas turned up as promised to help me change the tyre while his wife tried to give Emily and Lais some more details about staying in the lodge. The only information we could glean about other guests is that there was supposed to be a very large party of ninos (children) coming soon. We put the spare on with no problem but as we drove to Suceava, I felt acutely aware that everyone wanted me to be going faster than the 70 kph the spare was limited to. We were going into the city anyway to look for bear spray and just pulled into the first garage with tyres outside that we could find. With almost no communication just the word tyre typed into google translate, he repaired the tyre and put it back on for us. A few doors down was a hunting and fishing shop that had been recommended to me by the Decathlon employee the day before. They still didn’t stock actual bear spray but they did sell pepper spray so we bought three. Our project partner in country had scoffed at the idea of us getting bear spray, claiming we’d never see any in that area as there was too much human activity and that we’d be more likely to harm ourselves with the spray anyway. He may have a point but coming from a country with no big animals, we didn’t feel comfortable going into the forest completely defenceless.

We went for a quick walk down the forest track and immediately saw why Olivier had said we didn’t need to worry about bears, there were signs of major forestry work everywhere. Still, we wore our bells and carried the pepper spray with us on the walk. Back at the lodge we started to prep for fieldwork. Lais was organising the boxes that had been sent to the lodge ahead of us and stuffed in a dark corner in the pantry. She came through after a few minutes and said there was a surprise for us – there was no alcohol, but there were baskets instead! We thought these baskets had been put out months ago, to protect the data loggers from disturbance by boar and other large animals. They are heavy to carry around the site and it takes longer than you think to hammer the pegs in when the ground is very rocky or so lose and organic that the peg gets no purchase. Given all the issues we had already faced, we had remained remarkably positive and chilled but it was a blow to discover we needed to try and fit the baskets in to our already full schedule too. This was especially the case because we needed to finish all the work before the hunting season started in a weeks time.

The lodge was very quiet at night, and we never heard any sign of bears or wolves. They had impressed upon us the need to not use electricity and only use lights we needed. It would have been easier if the light switches were in sensible places, or on either side of a room for instance, but we stuck to it anyway. Which meant you found yourself walking around a dark, silent building by the light of your phone while you fumbled for switches. The first night I had gone downstairs while the others were asleep to get a yogurt and had jumped out of my skin when I heard a whooshing sound behind me but it was just a door that had been propped open with a stopper coming loose.

When Lais had spoken to our project partner about the lodge they had also arranged for a local field assistant to come with us on some of the days although his rate seemed to have increased from the last time it was discussed. Olivier had said he understood English and knew the plots well so we felt confident… until we met him and discovered that he understands a little English but speaks none. And while he knows the Romania Fundiv plots very well, he wasn’t part of the team that established our mammal plots and our plot numbers meant nothing to him so the first hour of the first day was spent in confusion. Olivier had also said we couldn’t drive any closer to the plots than the lodge, but the assistant told us to follow him in our car. Our rental car makes no 4X4 or offroad capability claims but handled the mud incredibly well, and it saved us at least a 20 minute walk carrying 34 kg between us. Then he walked us up a steep path and into the forest. We had to cross a valley and I found myself on my hands and knees huffing and puffing. He proudly declared that we were at a plot only for us to notice there were no data loggers to be seen. It was marked as a Fundiv plot, but was not one of ours. I got up a picture of our data loggers from another country and tried to explain that our plots would have these and had he seen any? He had not. Lais showed him the GPS with our plots marked on, but it doesn’t have a baselayer map so it’s very difficult to read out of context. He took us all the way back to the cars, then drove us halfway back to the lodge to take a different track. We got out again but looking at the GPS it was clear we were now even further away. We eventually convinced him to go back to the first parking spot and we just followed the GPS without his input. We walked up a different track and eventually found plot 10 not quite where it was marked. It took us a long time to find the corners, which either weren’t marked or the sticks they used to mark had fallen over or been pulled out so we basically had to make up our own edges based on where the dataloggers are. We found the next plot just slightly further up the track, right after where it joined the original track we had walked up first – turns out we had walked right passed one of our plots but not noticed! Again, we struggled to find all of the corners. Some were marked with proper thin planks of wood, some were marked with chunky sticks just stuck in the ground, some didn’t seem to be marked at all!

We left the forest by about six. Given how much had gone wrong in the morning, that wasn’t too late. We showered, ate and went to bed. For a single bunkbed, I slept surprisingly well at the lodge. The heating wasn’t on at all while we were there, so I occasionally got the second duvet down from the top bunk, but I was never uncomfortably cold.

The next day we did the plots on the other side of the valley. We parked in the same spot but had to cross a stream and clamber up a very steep loose incline. It was very hard work with our big bulky bags and we all slipped at various points but it at least felt a little more wild and further from the logging. I was using walking poles to help with the terrain but it meant I didn’t have hands free to easily protect my face so I essentially got slapped in the face by branches over and over as we walked through a dense patch of young trees to one plot. I also had to become comfortable with the sensation of walking through webs and accept that I couldn’t always wipe them away immediately. As we drove home I scratched a slight itch on my forehead to find I had a big bump. I assumed it was my body having another ridiculous overreaction to a mosquito bite. We dreaded getting back to the lodge full of school children, but they weren’t there. We assumed we’d got the day wrong and perhaps they would arrive the next day, the same day we’d been told we had to leave due to the lodge being full. I realised it probably wasn’t a mosquito bite when it doubled in size but didn’t get particularly itchy. By the next day the swelling had moved down and across my face, leaving me mostly unable to open the eye and with a very prominent forehead. It was an odd sensation but not painful so I still went into the field, although Lais drove the car that day. Within an hour I was able to open it enough to at least see what I was doing and not bump into anything. After another day of hard but uneventful fieldwork we returned to the lodge to a continuation of the now running joke that there were no ninos to be found! We picked up the luggage we had left already packed, and headed to our next accommodation. As the caretakers weren’t there and they’d been very clear about leaving the door locked we thought it best to take the key with us.

Not long after we got back to civilisation and phone signal, Lais got a call from our collaborator to discuss how the fieldwork was going but he also said the caretakers were insistent that we returned the key the next day. This was only annoying because the next day was a day off, so someone would have to drive at least 40 minutes round trip just to drop the key at a place we would literally be parking right next to the day after anyway!

This bump appeared after a day walking around a plot with very dense understory, having to push past many wet trees

We arrived at our new accommodation thoroughly worn out and a bit grubby. The owners of the Airbnb met us, and again apart from Romanian spoke mostly Spanish although with a little more English this time. It was still a big place, but not compared to the lodge which had given off slight The Shining vibes. There was a fairly small kitchen, entrance area with a bar and a very large dining room. A covered seating area wrapped around three sides of the building and provided access to a separate door with stairs to the bedrooms upstairs. I managed to get stuck in the downstairs toilet within a few minutes so we had to call the owners back to set me free. There was still no WIFI but we did at least have phone signal although the power to the house wasn’t good enough to have high energy appliances like a microwave or washing machine. The incredibly nice owner offered to do a load of washing for us at her house and since she said there were no laundrettes nearby we took her up on the offer, now all beyond caring if a stranger handled our stinky clothes. Despite being memory foam, the bed disagreed with me quite strongly, so I had the first of many broken nights of sleep.

ForestSAP big trip – Finland

September 9, 2022November 9, 2022 / ilexaquifoliumuk / Leave a comment

We got up extra early to make sure Lais had time to return the rental car and to get our additional luggage. We couldn’t buy it in advance because of some ridiculousness around the flight being operated and run by two different companies. We sleepily unloaded the rental car at the £5 terminal drop-off point. Emily and I tried to load it on to a trolley each while Lais returned the car. We were making a terrible job of it and were talking out loud about the possibility of having to do multiple trips, so a taxi driver who had just dropped someone off actually pulled back in and got out to help us load everything onto just two trolleys. We needn’t have rushed. Once we got inside, we discovered the bag drop desk for our flight wouldn’t open for another 35 minutes. We had no problems buying the extra luggage, but it wasn’t cheap. We also had to go with a member of staff to a different area to drop off the boxes which apparently can’t go down the normal belt.

The line for security was fine but we did get stopped. First because Emily had accidentally left a (completely blunt) camping butter knife in her lunch bag, and then because the penetrometer was too dense for the scanner to penetrate (a joke that security guy tried to make). He was happy to let us on with it once we unpacked it and he took a cursory glance at the outside though. I would argue that the 4.5 kg metal penetrometer head, which has a handle on either side, would make a much more deadly weapon than the butter knife, but I did not say that to him! Lais’ has access to a special lounge through a credit card company, and in Heathrow they allow two guests. It was quite a revelation! We raided it for food and drinks. We boarded quickly and the plane had a lot of space on it. So much in fact, that Lais jumped back to an empty row and slept most of the flight fully horizontal. Helsinki Airport was every bit as lovely as I remembered it, although the exit felt further this time with even more weight. We had to queue to pick up the rental car, which in a surprise to me, was in fact a van! I was so thrilled that I hugged the side of it when we found it in the carpark. I’m already so sick of trying to load too much stuff into too small a vehicle – sliding our cases and all the boxes into the back was such a joy. Lais and I shared an uneventful 5 hour drive to Savonranta.

It was after nine (local time) when we arrived at the accommodation. It was an easier track than the last time we were in Finland, and I would say a much nicer place all around. This cabin was on just one level but had a nice covered porch looking out to the lake. It also had a sauna accessed through the bathroom. The shower was at least a separate cubicle this time though, and the bathroom had lovely views into the forest. The cabin also had a boot/drying room with a heated drying cabinet for outdoor clothing (that was used for our bulk soil samples). A small entrance lobby opened into the main living space, with a large sofa, dining table and tiny kitchen in one corner. The two bedrooms led off this main room at the back of the house facing some trees and the track. There were about 8 holiday rentals on the site, but of varying sizes and designs, and all spread throughout the forest so you felt totally secluded. This place also had a small play/amenities area with a trampoline, play house, some sports equipment and wood stocks.

I was a little nervous driving the van still fully laden with all the field equipment for the next week (but minus our personal suitcases) up the long track from the road to near our plots in the forest but it handled it really well. We had decent weather and compared to Devon, the soil was a dream. OK, there are still occasional rocks and probably even more big roots, but overall, the soil on most days was much easier to work with. We went straight into the two-plot days. I kept my full waterproofs and mosquito net hat on all day because I was so scarred by my experience the last time we were here in spring. I got so many bites on the last day of our first trip that my histamine response must have gone into overdrive and my knees itched so much I wanted to rip my skin off and never do fieldwork again. Some cheeky bugger still managed to get me on the first day of this trip, sneaking four bites on to my lower back when my coat momentarily rode us as I bent down. Thankfully, it wasn’t like last time and I haven’t had many more since.

The evening of the second day I suddenly started feeling quite ill. Perhaps it had been creeping up on me all day and I had dismissed it as just being worn out but as I sat on the sofa that night my whole body started to ache and my head got a big foggy. I still set my alarm and got up the next morning but by the time I’d walked around making breakfast my head was swimming. Emily and Lais both said they could manage in the field without me so I stayed in the cabin and it was definitely the right choice. It was enormous, achey effort just to get up off the sofa and I was coughing a bit too.

The next day was a scheduled day off anyway. The body aches had subsided to be replaced mainly by a headache and general tiredness but I felt better than the previous day so I went into Savonranta with the others. Our accommodation owner had said there was a laundrette, but we could only find a laundry service associated with some kind of holiday cottage park. There was no one manning it but the signs indicated that it took five days to get the laundry back so we opted to handwash the essentials and try a bigger town on the next day off. We took a gentle walk around the town, which is perfectly pleasant but so devoid of activity that it’s almost creepy. Despite its sleepy vibe, Savonranta has a Ukrainian café, fire station, two large churches and a very big well-kept cemetery. After seeing the sights we went into the Sale (a chain of supermarkets). It isn’t a massive shop but was quite well stocked and had a huge range of gluten and lactose free ready meals. We managed to find everything we wanted and I grabbed a covid test by the till just in case. I accidentally bought strawberry soup thinking it was juice, but it was still pleasant enough to drink.

Back at the cabin I did the COVID test and was so used to them being negative that I nearly missed the incredibly faint positive line. After all this time, COVID had finally got me! I suspect I caught it in the airport or on the plane, and that Emily and Lais were also exposed but it hit me harder because I’ve never had it before. Given that we are away for two months and doing a lot of hard work and travel in that time, it was always likely the someone would get sick, but I hadn’t expected it to happen right away. On reflection, it’s probably quite a good thing to get it out of the way in Finland, where the site is reasonably easy to get around and the accommodation is relatively luxurious. I basically sat on a comfortable sofa with my feet up watching Netflix all day – not that different from how I’d handle being sick at home. Of course, I felt guilty that I couldn’t be out helping with the fieldwork, but I also didn’t want to risk prolonging it or getting long covid by not resting enough. I ended up having to take another two days off because it got worse again after the activity of going into Savonranta. On day four, my energy was a lot better but I had a very sore throat and quite bad earache and stuffy nose. It basically felt like a new illness each day, which made it hard to tell if I was actually improving or not.

On the last of the two-plot days, Lais and Emily arrived back at a decent hour but didn’t get out of the van for a few minutes. It turned out they’d had a nightmare day and just couldn’t face moving. The soil had been so full of roots and rocks that everything had taken twice as long as it should. Given that they were also working a person down for the third day and perhaps starting to feel the effects of COVID on their own systems, I think they made the right call to abandon some of the measures for another day. Torrential rain started just after they called to say they were leaving the site, which was accompanied by thunder and the occasional distant diffused flashes of lightning. The power flickered and failed before we’d had a chance to cook or charge anything. The old fuse system seemed to be trying to reset itself, just occasionally making a loud clicking noise from the boot room. We tried unplugging all our science stuff but then the owner let us know the power cut was over a larger area so we just had to wait. We weren’t too panicked since we only had samples in the freezer and it should stay cold for a long time if you don’t open it. But equally, we were all already fed-up to various degrees, so lights, the option of heating, ability to cook and to watch TV were desirable. The longest cut only lasted about 15 minutes I think, although we had a few more shorter ones throughout the evening, even after the rain had stopped.

We decided to take the next day off early so Lais and Emily could have a proper rest – that’s how horrific plots three and four are! I was starting to feel better but still happy to give my body more time to recover. I ended up sleeping better and for longer than I have since arriving and waking up with energy for the first time since getting ill. Perhaps too much energy even… I had awoken in the early hours of the morning and fantasized about just running through the cabin straight out of the front door and into the lake. I didn’t do that, but later I did put my wireless earphones in and go outside to dance in the soft rain while Emily and Lais drove to Savonranta for more paracetamol. I’m not a big dancer, but on that morning I just found something irresistible about being able to dance out in the open, in such a beautiful setting without the judgement of anyone’s eyes – or perhaps it was COVID delirium, who can say.

After lunch I was still quite full of energy, so I finally went for a dip in the lake even on my own. It was a warm day, but not as sunny as the first few. The water was beautifully clear at the edge, and easy to walk into with a few big stones then fine sandy silt. I had to wade in because the water wasn’t deep by the jetty. Eventually I took the plunge and swam, and soon felt perfectly warm again. I paddled around, never going too far from the jetty. The sun came out for a few minutes and made the scene so picturesque I couldn’t believe my luck. I could have stayed in longer, but I didn’t want to over do it since I was still recovering.

The next day was a buffer day. It had always been set aside to finish off any outstanding tasks, and was very useful this time, since Lais and Emily had reached their limit halfway through a plot. As the plot had very few seedlings, we had finished by lunch time. Since I had already spent quite a few days hanging around our cabin I decided to go for a little drive to Savonranta. I spent ages using google translate to try and work out what various ready meals were. Even this fairly small supermarket had loads of gluten and lactose free options and I ended up going for some kind of trout and potato pie. I also went for a walk near our cabin just to stretch my legs as we hadn’t spent much time in the forest. I didn’t go far but ventured across the road to a patch of trees and lake that somehow felt more wild, perhaps because there weren’t any buildings nearby. I still didn’t see any signs of moose but I did find a tree with very unusual holes. I think it must have been made by a very big and determined woodpecker although the issue was slightly confused by some flagging tape I found nearby in the forest. Was the tape there to help people find the tree to carve out wood in some kind of sampling I have never heard of? Or was the tape to help bird enthusiasts find the tree to glimpse the woodpecker or measure the size of the holes? Or was the tape completely unrelated?! – I will probably never know but I enjoyed the mystery.

The next day was soil nutrient collection day. As we have to get all of these samples on the same day, this is always a big effort. The first wrinkle was when I tried to get the icepacks out of the freezer and they wouldn’t budge. I think they were both frozen to the sides because they were slightly damp when they went in, and frozen in place because I had really squashed them in there. I’d done it on one of my COVID days off, and had been so proud of myself that I noticed them sitting out on the side and put them in, but clearly I didn’t have the brain power at that time to think about them expanding when frozen. We left Emily to rest and keep an eye on the ice while Lais and I headed to the field and got started on the soil collection.

The plots were going well so we decided to just finish them all and let Emily spend more time recuperating. It wasn’t sunny and the temperature had dropped a little but that seemed to mean there were fewer bugs around so I actually felt ok working with just my hood up and no mosquito net. As we could drive very close to each plot, we didn’t have to lug the heavy soil far. We got back to the accommodation soon after three I believe. I had a shower but didn’t feel right going straight to personal time since this was a workday and I could see both of the others were working. So, I had a look through my emails and had a cursory glance at some of the data that Diego and Monica had sent from the Devon extractions. Some of our variables are six, some are five depending on what is practical to achieve. I noticed there was an extraction value for every single data logger, but I’d just spent the day only collecting soil for nutrients at five of the six dataloggers per site. I mused out loud that how could there be six values for each plot. I was trying to work out how Diego could possibly have made an error that meant they had more values… my brain just couldn’t compute that it was us who’d made the mistake but then I caught sight of Emily’s face and the penny dropped – we were supposed to have collected soil from each datalogger! For a moment we all just looked at each other. The idea of dragging myself back out did not appeal, even though it was only a little after 4 in the afternoon. Thankfully, Emily volunteered to go with Lais. I felt bad… but not bad enough to also go! At least she’d had most of the day off. My guilt led to me being productive while they were out though, going through and organising unused Ziploc bags, stirring the bulk density soil to help it dry, and cutting most of the vegetables for their tea (not mine, I still had half of my trout pie from the day before). They returned at about half six and were tired but not in terrible spirits. They’d met a few random mushroom foragers and a dog while they were out.

The next day was posting day so we got up early and headed to Joensuu which is just over an hour drive from Savonranta. We had to collect the ethanol from our collaborator Timo at the LUKE institute first though. Despite Joensuu being the 12^th largest city in Finland, we found ourselves driving on an unpaved track for quite a while. We found the institute and collected the ethanol with no problem then followed google maps to what was supposed to be a post-office. It turned out to be a drop-off point based within a bus company. The man inside was very helpful and spoke excellent English of course. He said that he couldn’t send anything next day for us because that service is only offered by DHL, and while this was an approved DHL drop-off point, you had to organise and pay for the service online beforehand. We returned to the van and looked it up on our phones, finding a quote indicating it was possible (but expensive). I couldn’t finish the quote without knowing the weight of both parcels though so we needed to fill up the pitfall samples with the ethanol we had just collected. The weather in Finland had suddenly changed that day, and the outside temperature had dropped about 10 degrees. So, we huddled in the front of the van making a little assembly line of opening the bags, pouring in ethanol, then removing the air and sealing them again. With 70 samples to do, it did take some time. Once it was done, we sealed up the box and weighed it. I jumped back on my phone to finish the quote but at a certain point it told me I needed to ring them. The first time I rang and eventually got through to a person (after listening to all the prompts in Finnish first), we somehow got disconnected and I had to go through it all again. The woman I spoke to in the end was very helpful and tried her best for us, but it turned out that the collection time in that area of Finland is 11, she told me this at 11.03 – we missed the cut-off by three minutes! There was a later cut-off in some areas of Finland, but the closest drop-off point was four and a half hours drive away. I think Lais briefly entertained the idea of driving it, then staying overnight and driving back the next day, but thankfully a better option presented itself when she called Hannah to inform her of the issue. The drama of the day had taken it out of us a bit (plus, still recovering from being ill) so we abandoned any vague plans of going into the city itself and just drove to the nearby Prisma with a laundrette in it.

The next day we had our final Finnish fieldwork, laying out the litter decomposition bags we had also picked up from Timo in Joensuu. These are just mesh bags with a given amount of dried leaf litter in them. It was a simple task to lay them on the soil within each basket but required walking to every single plot again. Still, we were finished very early and returned to the cabin to pack and organise for the next day.

On our last day in Finland (and the longest day of my life) we packed everything up and finally weighed the bags of soil and other samples to see how much extra baggage we needed to buy. Despite using our luggage scale, we still had to move a couple of items around at the check-in desk that night! We stopped off in the same Prisma as always, halfway between our sites and Helsinki. We bought Tupperware boxes to help protect the ethanol samples in transit and had some lunch. We had a little time to spare before our flight so decided to take a very quick jaunt into Helsinki. Emily and I were interested to see what a Finnish city looked like, since this was the end of our second trip and it still felt like I had never seen one. We didn’t have an end location in mind so just pulled into the first carpark we saw signposted once we reached the city centre. It turned out to be a cavernous underground multistorey associated with an enormous shopping centre/bus and metro station. It felt like we were trying to find our way out of the bat cave as we looked for the lift. We walked around a few streets and had a quick look at food options before eventually deciding to just get snacks at the airport. We were all already feeling tired but knew we had much worse to come so the giggles started to set in at around the point we almost forgot to remove the icepacks from mine and Lais’ rucksacks (which were filled with soil). Lais had been worrying all day about us flying with the soil. We absolutely weren’t doing anything wrong as I had checked and double checked the regulations and you are allowed to bring EU soil into the UK as long as it isn’t contaminated or hazardous – but this is a slightly difficult thing to prove. Essentially, if questioned, we’d just have to hope they took our word for it that it wasn’t hazardous. But as I reassured Lais as we queued, airport security aren’t customs, their job is to make sure we can’t blow up or hijack a plane. Four out of our six bags got selected for extra checks. Mostly because they were so dense with either soil or with three laptops on top of each other. To our relief, after the guy working security opened my bag to find a silver insulation wrap full of bags of brown material and I matter of factly said “it’s soil” and nothing more, he just sort of shrugged at the women checking Lais’ bag and after wiping it down for explosives they let us through.

We flew out of Finland at about 10:30 at night and arrived at Stansted just before midnight. Our day did not end there though, oh no. We eventually found the driver of the taxi we had prebooked, who helped us load all of our baggage into his van cab. It had flashing multicoloured strip lights in the back but Lais asked him to turn them off, which he did. He did not however take the hint that we were tired and played obnoxious house music for the whole drive from Stansted to Luton. He took us to the Luton drop-off carpark where we were met by Filipe a short while later. At this point I felt like a zombie, just barely raised from the dead. I was cold, achey and physically exhausted. Still, we got more boxes of stuff from the university van to load onto trolleys and Lais got a few moments with her husband. We hoped to grab some sleep at Luton but since we couldn’t check-in yet, we only had access to a small area of the airport. My body desperately wanted to be flat after hours of sitting though, so I put the insulation padding on the floor and grabbed a twenty-minute nap with a headband covering my eyes.

We rearranged our bags now that the samples had gone with Filipe, but still got stopped at security for one of them, I can’t remember which. The rest of this day (which lasted 39 hours in total) is a bit hazy in my memory.

The story (and day) continues in Romania in my next update.

Ilex aquifolium

The occasional blog of a habitual ecologist

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Part 2 – The Party House

ForestSAP big trip – Romania

Part 1 – The Forest Lodge

ForestSAP big trip – Finland