Throughout August the flora at Cedar Creek Natural History Area has been changing. Blackberries are abundant in bushes along the paths, late season flowers are in bloom, and early season flowers are going to seed.

The atmosphere has been changing too. The interns are still working hard, but there is a bit of an edge to their attitudes. The music is louder, the singing along more vehement, the jokes a little weirder, and the laughter almost a little crazed. They have been working a long time. There is a seemingly endless supply of tasks to be completed many of which are inherently pretty tedious.

“Wow,” muses one intern aloud, “by the time I’m done here, I’ll have spent in total a whole month just sorting plants.”
“Well, look at the bright side,” says another.
“Yeah, it could have been a month and a day,” the first intern responds, chuckling.

Blackberries, yum	Sorting is getting, well, a little old.

The intern coordinators are in tune with their interns’ feelings and very understanding. They keep people on task, but if, for example, someone simply can’t handle washing any more roots one afternoon, the coordinators are generally willing to find that person a new job. They have even been known to offer the occasional afternoon off to their crews.

As the summer has progressed the interns have allocated more and more time to their individuals projects (individual is actually a misnomer since most of the interns have been working with a partner). I have watched them in their pairs, sometimes triplets, grab their cameras, measuring sticks, GPS readers, or whatever other equipment they needed, and head out into the open fields, the oak savannas, and the wetlands to do their work. And, I have watched them sit in front of computers or at tables, making graphs and discussing their results for hours with one another, with an available graduate student, or a member of the Cedar Creek faculty, delving into what they have found and what it could mean.

This process has opened my eyes even more to just how many research opportunities Cedar Creek has to offer. Nine square miles can fit a lot of experiments in it, and though many of the experiments have strong similarities they also each have an original twist. This abundance of experiments that are already set up means there is an abundance of resources and tools available for the interns. They don’t need to plant experimental plots; they can do their own research in plots that are already planted. They don’t need to do any prescribed burns; they can study areas that are already being burned. The individual research projects give the interns a chance to claim their own little corners of Cedar Creek.

The intern research symposium, where the interns presented their projects, was spread over three afternoons. The interns gave fifteen-minute talks – complete with Power Point slides – in front of everyone and answered questions. The talks were very well done, though more than a couple people were a little nervous. As could be expected, most of the experiments had not provided mind blowing, Science or Nature worthy data, but some of them were quite interesting.

One intern presented some evidence that cool-season grasses produce or promote the existence of a soil pathogen that can cause oak seedlings to die. This would be an interesting possibility for why certain grasslands don’t become forest. Another intern had data suggesting that adult skinks prefer living in territory that has been burned, or grazed by herbivores, or is low in nutrients. He proposed that this was because these types of areas have more open spots where the skinks can sun themselves. Yet another pair of interns had found that in fertilized ponds the ratio of carbon to nitrogen in small clams seemed to decrease. This could have nutritional implications for the fish and other animals that feed on the clams. In total there were 15 presentations.

The symposium was, in a strong sense, the culmination of the summer, and in the days following the interns have started leaving - for home, or school, or other jobs. They are both ready to go and not ready to go at the same time. It has been a lot of work, but they can’t believe the summer is actually almost over. Plus they are going to miss everyone, they tell me.

Taking a break with some fudgesicles	Back to work

Throughout the summer at Cedar Creek people have come and gone. The principal investigators have moved between Cedar Creek, other research sites, meetings, offices, and vacations. Various graduate students and post doctoral researchers have done fieldwork at Cedar Creek but have gone to the Twin Cities and the university campus to process their data and write papers. Through all this fluctuation most of the work at Cedar Creek has proceeded undisturbed. However, now that the interns are leaving many projects are shifting into a lower gear. The field season is drawing to a close.

Cedar Creek doesn’t come to a complete halt during the winter (apparently a lot of drying and grinding of biomass goes on). Instead, like the plants growing here, the work just sort of dies back while new research ideas take root and germinate. Then like a perennial - ever so appropriately - the place is ready to bloom again in the spring. Next summer the fields will be filled once more with life as the grasses and flowers start to grow, and the buildings too will be filled with new life as new interns arrive to work, to play, and to have their own Cedar Creek experience.