Field Work is Awesome

The field trip I went on last week was fantastic.  So good.  It was really nice to get out of the office and my house and hang out for a few days in a place it's hard to get to on foot, camping under the stars and working in the fresh air.  This is where we were:

And this is how it looked in reality:

Milford Sound from the chopper on the way in.

Sue and Anna, on the flight in.

Camp at Moulin Creek for days 1-2.

View down the valley and across to Mitis Peak (the big knob on the right) as the sun sets.

Richard, my other team member and good companion for a few days - really laid back and intelligent and willing to talk politics for hours.

Sunset on Mitis Peak.

Camp in the morning.

Working.

The project I was working on is an ongoing study of alpine vegetation.  Here's the backstory: red deer and chamois were introduced into Fiordland a few decades ago and they've completely taken over the landscape, since they have no predators here.  Locals began to notice the forests going into a state of decline from being over-eaten by the deer, so they started promoting hunting to keep deer numbers down.  Helicopter pilots noticed big herds of deer running around on the tops of the ridges above the trees, and so they started running heli-hunting trips, giving hunters access to those high, hard-to-reach places.  Deer numbers dropped, hunters were able to export their meat, and things seemed good.  Then one hunter bagged a deer from inside a poison-drop area (which is done to keep possum and stoat numbers down, as they're also introduced species that cause a lot of harm to the natural environment) and sold the tainted meat on the market.  Once the authorities got wind of the poisoned meat, they shut down hunting operations, and the price of deer meat dropped internationally.  Consequently, deer numbers started to sky rocket again and the chopper pilots noticed huge herds running around on the tops again. They were concerned about the state of the natural vegetation, reasoning that the deer would only be up on the tops if the forest were full of deer and there wasn't much food to be found.  They approached DOC and expressed their concern, and this study was started in 2006 to monitor the effect of the deer browsing on native plants and eventually build up enough evidence to make a case for reinstating hunting.

The next year, however, the global price of deer meat rose again to the point where hunting in Fiordland was economically lucrative again - so the hunters and the pilots asked for permission to start up their operations again.  Permission was granted on the condition that all meat be catalogued and cross-referenced with GPS locations of where the deer was shot, so they could keep a better eye on the risk of tainted meat getting on the market again - one sign of that and hunting operations would be done, no more chances.  So while this study was originally planned to document the decline of three native plants that deer especially enjoyed, what's actually happened is that they've been able to prove the positive effects of increased hunting, because it brings deer numbers down and the plants can bounce back.

The way we measured this was to set up five 50-meter transects at each site (like the one pictured above) and count the number of the three plant species within a meter either side of the white line.  We also counted whether or not they had evidence of being browsed (eaten) and any deer scat we saw.  Rich showed me the stats from the first time they did these counts, and a large percentage of all the plants were eaten at each transect; this time, we barely saw any evidence of deer being around.  Which is a good thing!  This was part of a 5-year benchmarking, basically going out and checking the sites every five years to continue to collect data, just in case things go pear-shaped in the future and we need to have documentation of what happens to the vegetation.  Pretty sweet, aye?

Lake Pukutahi, our second site.

Camp for days 2-3.

Some curious rock wrens came for a visit.

Gentians waiting to bloom.

The last patch of snow hanging on in the shadows.

Afternoon wander around to the other side of Lake Pukutahi.

Looking down on Lake Never-Never. 

Lake Never-Never and Mitis Peak and awesomeness.

Never-Never, Pukutahi, and the rest of Fiordland beyond.

Lake Pukutahi and the view south.

My attempt at a star picture, but the clouds got in the way and the moon was super bright (light coming in from the left).

I feel like this is a scene from the Lord of the Rings...insert the Fellowship running across the ridge.

And to top it off, a couple videos of our helicopter flight back out to Milford Sound:

All photography copyright Kendall DeLyser