Hi there, my name is Martin, and I’m traveling with the BIObus collecting insects across the east cost of Canada. This week we are at Fundy National Park in New Brunswick. On Friday we woke up early in the morning worrying about the pouring rain we heard overnight. Hearing rain pretty much meant one thing: damage control. We had a quick breakfast and then we decided to set up our third collecting site. We packed up the RV and headed out down the road. We got to the hiking path that was going to lead us to our site; we had no idea what sort of a hike we had in front of us. After a grueling hill climb of about a kilometer up the Costal Trail, we made it to our site. At this point we were pretty good at setting up sites and breezed through the setup, just in time too, it began to rain… hard. Next on the list of things to do was damage control for the two sites we set up the day before.
We got to our first site at Maple Grove for damage control but at this point the rain was pouring buckets on us, we had no choice but to continue on. When checking on a site you are really collecting the insects the traps have caught and making sure there is no damage to any of the traps and that they’re all still functioning. The flight intercept traps needed to be emptied into a net, the malaise trap bottles needed replacing, the pit falls needed to be topped- off with ethanol, and the pan traps needed to be emptied and refilled. Luckily the damage caused by the rain wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be. The only damage was the damage our pants and socks took from the rain. We came out of the forest wet and miserable. We made our way back to the campsite with the heaters blasting and we made ourselves fajitas and drinks for dinner. With our moral back up we are ready for another day.
– Martin
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