Friday, June 29, 2007
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Leaving Oulu
I was warned about Markku Orell, that he had a reputation for using people. I basically volunteered to work for him for five or six weeks – and I thought offering myself to him like that would satisfy his appetite. When we found out that I wouldn’t be getting the government funding he had applied for on my behalf, he kindly offered to pay my rent for the time I was in Oulu. In the end this worked out to 410 euros – for two months – an extraordinary bargain and an amount he should be pleased to pay.
During June I was assigned to the pied flycatcher project (see Arlo, Egg-Thief below) which should have concluded with the recovery of the specified number of eggs from the nests. The protocol of the project also stated that hatching success and fledging success should be checked for each nest. Because these nests were within the Great Tit nest areas, and Dr Orell had at least two people each day going out to these areas, I felt my own involvement was no longer necessary. Not so! I announced I was leaving Oulu on the solstice, a week before previously planned, for a number of reasons. Dr Orell expressed his concern that the project would not be finished by then, and his desire that I should see it through to the maximum possible extent while I was still there.
On Monday we went together to the financial office to work out my pay. I had originally thought that because I wasn’t officially employed, this would be an under-the-table deal where he would just write me a check or hand me a wad of euros. Evidently there was some accounting that needed to be satisfied. On the way down to the financial office he announced that he was only going to give me 300 euros. What could I say? The work was already done, and there was no written agreement. So I shrugged and said I would take it. Then, he told me he expected me to pay Finnish taxes on the amount, which he quoted as 35%. Again, there was no real case I could make to justify not paying, so now I was receiving less than 200 euros for six weeks of work. This worked out to less than 1 euro per hour.
Originally I had been fretting about getting a recommendation from Dr Orell, who is after all a world-renowned ecologist. But by now I didn’t really care, because he was as likely as not to tell the other party that I would work for next to nothing – not something I am anxious to have conveyed to a potential employer! I held my tongue and accepted what was offered. Somehow I had an illusion about a brotherhood of zoologists who would not pull this kind of shady maneuver on each other, but now I know to get it in writing.
The icing on the cake is ongoing. He wanted me to return to each nest to assay hatching success, which I did, and then he quibbled endlessly about the presentation of the data. I put every fact I had into an Excel spreadsheet and emailed it to him, and then endured days of curt text messages arriving on my phone, telling me to work out one simple math trick or another on the data. It was taking more energy for him to type the text messages than it would take for him to work the problems out himself. Then I realized this data is for another researcher, some unseen entity in Turku. He probably wants to be able to completely wash his hands of it if it is not to their satisfaction for one reason or another, but I have zero doubt that he will take full credit if everything is peachy-keen.
Ahh, Oulu. Flat town, tar town, high time I skip town. Land of the most excellent bicycle trail network in Europe, possibly in the world. The bike trails here connect every major and minor district of the city with minimal crossing of automobile pathways. The bike trails were obviously planned into the city design a long time ago, and continue to be added alongside the streets as the city expands. If it weren’t for my numerous bike woes I would have explored quite a lot more. But the problem is that Oulu is a large city in area, but most of the expansion has come quite recently, so outlying neighborhoods tend to be indistinguishable. There are no old buildings that give character to areas outside of the city center, or parts of the outskirts that give the impression of having been there more than thirty or forty years.
Apparently Oulu is also the punk rock capitol of Finland, though I daresay half a dozen other towns would vehemently lay claim to the same distinction. The punk element in Oulu is most visible in its youth – lots of pink or green or black dye in the hair, crappy denim clothes, and wild facial piercings, even on junior high kids. I have never seen such a collection of grotesquely-pierced young faces. I guess it’s not shocking if it’s not shocking. When I was their age, old codger that I am now, it was really out-there to have a pierced eyebrow, and even nose rings were uncommon. These kids have perforations that would make a Mayan priest cringe. What do you even call that thin sail-like flap of skin inside your mouth, where your upper lip meets your gums in the center? No need for a name, just pierce it and dangle a steel bauble from it that clinks against your front teeth anytime you say the letters “m” or “b.” Or how about a whole family of holes through your cheek, corked with shiny little BB’s? The upside is that they will play any old kind of music over the Muzak system in supermarkets – death metal being surprisingly popular. It’s quite an interesting shopping experience to compare dates of expiry on yogurts or weigh heads of broccoli while the Muzak speaker is growling out Finnish heavy metal.
One of my absolute favorite Oulu traits is the thick forest that blankets almost the entire city. Downtown is all concrete, sure, but get out of downtown and you’re surrounded by birches, pines, spruces, berries, mushrooms, wildlife, and frozen bogs. Sometimes they clear a spot out to put in a neighborhood or a strip mall, but the great tendency is to leave big patches of forest cover between buildings. This may not last indefinitely, if Oulu continues its technological sector economic growth, and more people need more places to spend more money. But as it is now, it’s green and lovely in all directions. There is a large and thriving population of hares in Oulu, which you see at night while riding your bike. Sometimes they will sprint along with you in that idiotic lepine manner, where they hope to escape something by running parallel to it. They are quite large, tomcat-sized and bigger, nibbling flowers in people’s planters during the dim hours.
Now that the sun is regularly here, Oulu people are of a quite different character. There are waves, and greetings, and even strangers talking to me. I have a shirt with a sinister-looking octopus in the center, its tentacles disappearing into a circular Celtic-knot around the edges, with the caption “Ia! Ia!” So far I have been stopped twice in the street in Oulu to receive compliments on the design. The caption is misspelled, of course, the a’s should be ä’s, a critical distinction for Finnish people and one that both admirers were quick to point out. I was shocked that multiple individuals in a single city would recognize a decidedly atypical image of Cthulhu, and have the wherewithal to notice he’d been misquoted to the tune of four little dots.
I’m ready to go south. People in Oulu dream of visiting southern cities with mild climates, places like St. Petersburg, Reykjavik, Calgary, Fairbanks, and Vladivostok.
Now I’m in Valkeakoski, south of Tampere, and we’ve just celebrated the Midsummer holiday. I’ll post that in an update as soon as I can, but I will be away from the computer for a few days. There’s a short road-trip to the East that I got invited to join.
During June I was assigned to the pied flycatcher project (see Arlo, Egg-Thief below) which should have concluded with the recovery of the specified number of eggs from the nests. The protocol of the project also stated that hatching success and fledging success should be checked for each nest. Because these nests were within the Great Tit nest areas, and Dr Orell had at least two people each day going out to these areas, I felt my own involvement was no longer necessary. Not so! I announced I was leaving Oulu on the solstice, a week before previously planned, for a number of reasons. Dr Orell expressed his concern that the project would not be finished by then, and his desire that I should see it through to the maximum possible extent while I was still there.
On Monday we went together to the financial office to work out my pay. I had originally thought that because I wasn’t officially employed, this would be an under-the-table deal where he would just write me a check or hand me a wad of euros. Evidently there was some accounting that needed to be satisfied. On the way down to the financial office he announced that he was only going to give me 300 euros. What could I say? The work was already done, and there was no written agreement. So I shrugged and said I would take it. Then, he told me he expected me to pay Finnish taxes on the amount, which he quoted as 35%. Again, there was no real case I could make to justify not paying, so now I was receiving less than 200 euros for six weeks of work. This worked out to less than 1 euro per hour.
Originally I had been fretting about getting a recommendation from Dr Orell, who is after all a world-renowned ecologist. But by now I didn’t really care, because he was as likely as not to tell the other party that I would work for next to nothing – not something I am anxious to have conveyed to a potential employer! I held my tongue and accepted what was offered. Somehow I had an illusion about a brotherhood of zoologists who would not pull this kind of shady maneuver on each other, but now I know to get it in writing.
The icing on the cake is ongoing. He wanted me to return to each nest to assay hatching success, which I did, and then he quibbled endlessly about the presentation of the data. I put every fact I had into an Excel spreadsheet and emailed it to him, and then endured days of curt text messages arriving on my phone, telling me to work out one simple math trick or another on the data. It was taking more energy for him to type the text messages than it would take for him to work the problems out himself. Then I realized this data is for another researcher, some unseen entity in Turku. He probably wants to be able to completely wash his hands of it if it is not to their satisfaction for one reason or another, but I have zero doubt that he will take full credit if everything is peachy-keen.
Ahh, Oulu. Flat town, tar town, high time I skip town. Land of the most excellent bicycle trail network in Europe, possibly in the world. The bike trails here connect every major and minor district of the city with minimal crossing of automobile pathways. The bike trails were obviously planned into the city design a long time ago, and continue to be added alongside the streets as the city expands. If it weren’t for my numerous bike woes I would have explored quite a lot more. But the problem is that Oulu is a large city in area, but most of the expansion has come quite recently, so outlying neighborhoods tend to be indistinguishable. There are no old buildings that give character to areas outside of the city center, or parts of the outskirts that give the impression of having been there more than thirty or forty years.
Apparently Oulu is also the punk rock capitol of Finland, though I daresay half a dozen other towns would vehemently lay claim to the same distinction. The punk element in Oulu is most visible in its youth – lots of pink or green or black dye in the hair, crappy denim clothes, and wild facial piercings, even on junior high kids. I have never seen such a collection of grotesquely-pierced young faces. I guess it’s not shocking if it’s not shocking. When I was their age, old codger that I am now, it was really out-there to have a pierced eyebrow, and even nose rings were uncommon. These kids have perforations that would make a Mayan priest cringe. What do you even call that thin sail-like flap of skin inside your mouth, where your upper lip meets your gums in the center? No need for a name, just pierce it and dangle a steel bauble from it that clinks against your front teeth anytime you say the letters “m” or “b.” Or how about a whole family of holes through your cheek, corked with shiny little BB’s? The upside is that they will play any old kind of music over the Muzak system in supermarkets – death metal being surprisingly popular. It’s quite an interesting shopping experience to compare dates of expiry on yogurts or weigh heads of broccoli while the Muzak speaker is growling out Finnish heavy metal.
One of my absolute favorite Oulu traits is the thick forest that blankets almost the entire city. Downtown is all concrete, sure, but get out of downtown and you’re surrounded by birches, pines, spruces, berries, mushrooms, wildlife, and frozen bogs. Sometimes they clear a spot out to put in a neighborhood or a strip mall, but the great tendency is to leave big patches of forest cover between buildings. This may not last indefinitely, if Oulu continues its technological sector economic growth, and more people need more places to spend more money. But as it is now, it’s green and lovely in all directions. There is a large and thriving population of hares in Oulu, which you see at night while riding your bike. Sometimes they will sprint along with you in that idiotic lepine manner, where they hope to escape something by running parallel to it. They are quite large, tomcat-sized and bigger, nibbling flowers in people’s planters during the dim hours.
Now that the sun is regularly here, Oulu people are of a quite different character. There are waves, and greetings, and even strangers talking to me. I have a shirt with a sinister-looking octopus in the center, its tentacles disappearing into a circular Celtic-knot around the edges, with the caption “Ia! Ia!” So far I have been stopped twice in the street in Oulu to receive compliments on the design. The caption is misspelled, of course, the a’s should be ä’s, a critical distinction for Finnish people and one that both admirers were quick to point out. I was shocked that multiple individuals in a single city would recognize a decidedly atypical image of Cthulhu, and have the wherewithal to notice he’d been misquoted to the tune of four little dots.
I’m ready to go south. People in Oulu dream of visiting southern cities with mild climates, places like St. Petersburg, Reykjavik, Calgary, Fairbanks, and Vladivostok.
Now I’m in Valkeakoski, south of Tampere, and we’ve just celebrated the Midsummer holiday. I’ll post that in an update as soon as I can, but I will be away from the computer for a few days. There’s a short road-trip to the East that I got invited to join.
Oulanka Part 2
I am getting behind on my posts. Let me recap my last two weeks rather quickly, with plenty of pictures to substitute for the paucity of words.
I went to Oulanka Biological Station again, with the same group of students from Shark Island, to complete the Freshwater Aquatic Animal course. It was the same basic divisions of classwork: fish, plankton, benthic invertebrates, and stream insects.
The deep, seemingly endless forest around Oulanka was in full summer foliage, in a palette of greens that rivaled any tropical environment.
Every surface was green and growing, and the thick damp aroma of sprouts and buds hung in the air. The water level was much reduced in the river, but dark clouds still massed around the mountains.
My absolute favorite part of the Oulanka reserve are the huts and buildings in the forest. One of them near a lake was made to look like a fish, and you went in through the mouth. It was a small unfurnished wooden building where you could squat and cook your fish during inclement weather – but very solidly build, and old enough to have a creditable growth of moss and lichens on it.
The very best was the kota, the black log-tepee in the forest behind the station. It was modelled after the Lapp shaman-huts of lore, octagonal, opening to the east, and crowned with antlers. Inside were more antlers, skulls, gnarled roots, fur-covered benches, and a firepit. There were plenty of small shelves and low tables for people to set down their sausages, mustard and beer – the obvious essentials for a late-night spirit journey.
Nobody seemed to know what the old rituals might be, or anything of the purpose of the original kota in Lappish culture. I have found this a continual frustration in Finland, the apparent lack of interest in earlier culture. My guess is that Finland is so recently arrived in the “modern” era that there has not yet been a popular resurgence of affection for the simpler times. Or, perhaps the eminently practical and realistic Finns have not fallen under the illusion that aboriginal life was somehow better, purer, or more environmentally harmonious than information-age society. The myth of the Pure Native is an attractive one, sure: living off the land, taking only what they needed, rich spirituality, uncomplicated outlook, deep appreciation of nature, and so on. This myth inevitably fails to include death by curable diseases, malnutrition, murder, high infant mortality rates, low life expectancy, slavery, and bad teeth. OK, ok, I’m getting off my soapbox – suffice to say the kota is just about as awesome a little building as the mythical Blue Yurt of the Mongolian boreal forest – and although we didn’t make contact with the spirit world, we roasted sausages and drank beer, which is satisfying in its own small way. I had found a shop in Oulu that sold creditable micro-brews at a reasonable price, and instead of sloshing through #3 Karhu or #3 Karjala, bottle after bottle at 4.7%, I could nurse one bottle of #4B Portteri at 9% and savor the dark smoky flavor through a whole evening. Still, for a nice black hut in the woods like the kota, you should brew some kind of tea laden with diaphoretics and sialagogues, in my humble opinion, but the local pharmacognoscenti weren’t sharing their secrets.
On one of our early collecting trips I captured a large dragonfly nymph which I incorrectly identified as a libellulid. I brought it back to the station and put it in some water in a Tupperware dish, on the table in the social room. At first people were horrified by it, dragonfly nymphs being of quite an alien appearance, but I named it Yrjö (a Finnish male name, pronounced ewr-yoe) and showed people how the extendable jaw worked (by prising it open with a pine-needle.) Soon Yrjö became a kind of mascot. I had a Northern Europe dragonfly key, and he was big enough that I was able to identify him to species under a dissecting microscope without killing him. Not a libellulid! A corduliid! This is one of the strange puzzles of aquatic entomology: the dragonfly families Libellulidae and Corduliidae are easily distinguished as adults, but there does not exist a single reliable character that tells the nymphs apart – you have to look at several different things that may or may not occur in your specimen. But here Yrjö had the prominent dorsal hooks (no picture now, but they are awesome) and the uneven-but-snugly-fitting-teeth on his prementum. The lateral abdominal spikes on segments 8 and 9 sealed the deal: this was Somatochlora metallica, one of the most brilliantly-colored and charismatic adult dragonflies in Europe: large, unafraid of humans, and bright metallic green.
I went to Oulanka Biological Station again, with the same group of students from Shark Island, to complete the Freshwater Aquatic Animal course. It was the same basic divisions of classwork: fish, plankton, benthic invertebrates, and stream insects.
The deep, seemingly endless forest around Oulanka was in full summer foliage, in a palette of greens that rivaled any tropical environment.
Every surface was green and growing, and the thick damp aroma of sprouts and buds hung in the air. The water level was much reduced in the river, but dark clouds still massed around the mountains.
My absolute favorite part of the Oulanka reserve are the huts and buildings in the forest. One of them near a lake was made to look like a fish, and you went in through the mouth. It was a small unfurnished wooden building where you could squat and cook your fish during inclement weather – but very solidly build, and old enough to have a creditable growth of moss and lichens on it.
The very best was the kota, the black log-tepee in the forest behind the station. It was modelled after the Lapp shaman-huts of lore, octagonal, opening to the east, and crowned with antlers. Inside were more antlers, skulls, gnarled roots, fur-covered benches, and a firepit. There were plenty of small shelves and low tables for people to set down their sausages, mustard and beer – the obvious essentials for a late-night spirit journey.
Nobody seemed to know what the old rituals might be, or anything of the purpose of the original kota in Lappish culture. I have found this a continual frustration in Finland, the apparent lack of interest in earlier culture. My guess is that Finland is so recently arrived in the “modern” era that there has not yet been a popular resurgence of affection for the simpler times. Or, perhaps the eminently practical and realistic Finns have not fallen under the illusion that aboriginal life was somehow better, purer, or more environmentally harmonious than information-age society. The myth of the Pure Native is an attractive one, sure: living off the land, taking only what they needed, rich spirituality, uncomplicated outlook, deep appreciation of nature, and so on. This myth inevitably fails to include death by curable diseases, malnutrition, murder, high infant mortality rates, low life expectancy, slavery, and bad teeth. OK, ok, I’m getting off my soapbox – suffice to say the kota is just about as awesome a little building as the mythical Blue Yurt of the Mongolian boreal forest – and although we didn’t make contact with the spirit world, we roasted sausages and drank beer, which is satisfying in its own small way. I had found a shop in Oulu that sold creditable micro-brews at a reasonable price, and instead of sloshing through #3 Karhu or #3 Karjala, bottle after bottle at 4.7%, I could nurse one bottle of #4B Portteri at 9% and savor the dark smoky flavor through a whole evening. Still, for a nice black hut in the woods like the kota, you should brew some kind of tea laden with diaphoretics and sialagogues, in my humble opinion, but the local pharmacognoscenti weren’t sharing their secrets.
On one of our early collecting trips I captured a large dragonfly nymph which I incorrectly identified as a libellulid. I brought it back to the station and put it in some water in a Tupperware dish, on the table in the social room. At first people were horrified by it, dragonfly nymphs being of quite an alien appearance, but I named it Yrjö (a Finnish male name, pronounced ewr-yoe) and showed people how the extendable jaw worked (by prising it open with a pine-needle.) Soon Yrjö became a kind of mascot. I had a Northern Europe dragonfly key, and he was big enough that I was able to identify him to species under a dissecting microscope without killing him. Not a libellulid! A corduliid! This is one of the strange puzzles of aquatic entomology: the dragonfly families Libellulidae and Corduliidae are easily distinguished as adults, but there does not exist a single reliable character that tells the nymphs apart – you have to look at several different things that may or may not occur in your specimen. But here Yrjö had the prominent dorsal hooks (no picture now, but they are awesome) and the uneven-but-snugly-fitting-teeth on his prementum. The lateral abdominal spikes on segments 8 and 9 sealed the deal: this was Somatochlora metallica, one of the most brilliantly-colored and charismatic adult dragonflies in Europe: large, unafraid of humans, and bright metallic green.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Solstice Pause
I have left Oulu for Valkeakoski. I have limited internet access here and will resume posting updates as soon as I can.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Sea and Swamp
Full sun, a stiff breeze to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and a brisk walk to an inshore brackish swamp. The land around it is wonderfully spongy and springy, matted with mosses and berries. Poor Daniela is having a bad day for one reason or another, and as we approach the swamp I turn to her with a grin and say “Hier wird ein Mückenparadies!” This will be a mosquito-paradise! “Oh, nein,” she wails, her face falling. Sure enough, the breeze drops and we are covered with large, hungry bloodsuckers. These mosquitoes really seem hungry, the poor dears.
Our instructor today is Kaisa, a young pre-graduate student who speaks with the peculiar flat Finnish accent – hard to describe but very distinct, all the English vowels being converted to their nearest Finnish equivalents. She shows us the method for kicknet sampling in a swamp: wrong, all wrong. This is an area in which I can confidently comment. But I don’t say a thing, I just use my own net to apply my own technique, and show the other students the treasures it yields. I am working with Vekku, and right away we have one of the most hideous-looking predators in creation: the predatory diving beetle larva. It’s a sleek, fast-swimming grub with giant tusks and a flat hydrodynamic head. This one is not of a particularly threatening girth, being only a few centimeters long, but it immediately tries to macerate me with its tusks when I pick it up.
We return with buckets full of swamp-slop to the laboratory, and after a hasty lunch, start sorting the creatures out from the slime and rotten organic material. Somehow the Frenchman has assigned himself into our group. I let him work with Vekku, and concentrate on my own little alcohol-filled Petri dish of beasties. The beetle larva has unfortunately sundered its cranial capsule along the ecdysial sutures, either from the water in its head dissolving in the alcohol or from being crushed by something in transit. A pity, it really was a horrific specimen. There’s the normal rogeu’s gallery of standing-water fauna: some water striders, water boatmen, mosquito larvae… but what is this? The true Aquatic Spider, unknown to us naïve North Americans! Argyroneta aquatica, the one that builds a bubble-filled nest under the surface and carries a scuba bubble around on its butt! Wow! There is also a plenitude of small beetles which I do not recognize, and I look forward to keying them out.
We are one microscope short. Between Vekku and me, one of us is going to have to share with Jonathan. I foolishly leave my station to help someone identify a damselfly (sight ID to genus, ha! Never mind that there’s only one genus in the whole family in Northern Europe) and when I return I find Jonathan has not only taken my microscope, but also my little tray of insects and snails!
I decide to let him have a look: he’s here to learn after all, and he’s not destroying my samples. He has no intention whatsoever of sharing the microscope, and I get a nice long look at him while I’m waiting. He seems to be determined to singlehandedly reinforce every French stereotype – a mixture of garlic, bile and piss. His voice is loud, his body language telegraphs crankiness, surliness or disgust. He only laughs when other people are made to look foolish, and has a variety of complaints on the tip of his tongue for all occasions. He is slim and swarthy, covered with wiry black hair, weak of chin and yet somehow possessed of an aristocratic caste to his eyes, cheeks and nose. I wince as he pounds the tips of my delicate tweezers against the counter. He paws through the samples, trying to match them up to the pictures in our handout. This is always the problem with introductory entomology: any picture you receive is going to be a broadly general likeness to the animal you have, not an identical replica. You have to look at the specific features, not the gestalt, at least not until you’ve looked at dozens and dozens of them.
The Frenchman mutters constantly at the sample. I see the interesting beetles being manhandled under the tweezers, and somehow he is able to identify most of them. I’ll give him that: he is determined to master the material, there’s no question. I watch him drag a horsefly maggot under the scope and say “Who eez zees bastarrrd?” Somehow the idea of an insect being called a bastarrrd, or the idea of any emotional context being applied to a dead invertebrate, strikes me as hilarious, and I can’t contain a guffaw. I receive a dark look. I suggest to him that it is my turn to look at my sample, and he tells me he just wants to finish. I calculate for a moment. I can either insist, and further anger an already angry person, whom I will be working with in close proximity for at least eleven more days, or I can let him do his own thing and slowly poison himself with soul-gout. It's almost too much to take when he turns to me and says "Zis is absolutely not my favorite subject." Kaisa, bless her keen eye and good heart, observes the whole process and goes to fetch the spare microscope from the other lab.
The mysterious beetle turns out to be a hydraenid, a so-called Tiny Aquatic Beetle, with clubbed antennae and a stupefied manner when alive. I have a great fondness for these dullard-like crawling water beetles, they seem so comical walking around underwater like old men on icy walkways.
The rest of the week is similar: trips to the seashore to collect plankton, molluscs and crustaceans, then lab-time identifying them. We get to see some bizarre creatures, like this amphipod that looks like it escaped from the Ordovician era:
Or the invasive Chinese mitten crab:
Or the humble Daphnia:
On our last night, Raine has arranged the Sumppu restaurant to stay open until late so we can have a party. We take our test that afternoon, which largely consists of material from the Monday lecture. Then everyone has a nap after dinner, and around nine we start drifting toward the restaurant again. It is a warm, still night, and the mosquitoes are famished. We have to walk slowly, because people are trying to drink as many warm weak beers as they can before they actually go inside the bar, thereby minimizing the number of expensive cold beers they need to get into the party mood. I’m walking with the “fellows,” Vekku and my work-colleague Petri, the ultra-mellow Samuli and the towheaded, sharp-witted Tarmo. The fellows are trying to teach me some useful Finnish, like how to refer to my own behind, how to curse something in a demeaning manner (one sixteenth of hell!) how to order the cheapest beer in the restaurant (One reindeer piss, please) and how to describe something irreparably broken (smashed into shit, a delightful and instructive use of the translative case.) At last they swallow their final belchy suds and we can go inside.
The evening is hot, and the restaurant is stuffy, but the staff have helpfully opened all the doors and windows. Somehow the application of “screen” technology has not made it to this part of Finland, and there is no porous flexible layer with holes wide enough to admit air molecules but small enough to deny the ingress of bloodsuckers. So we sit at the tables, swatting mosquitoes and sipping cold reindeer piss, and the barman fires up the karaoke device. I simply don’t know enough popular songs to participate in karaoke, even though there was a special English language disc available. Got any Soundgarden? Ween? Nine Inch Nails? Red Hot Chili Peppers? Of course they do not. No point even asking about the Mongolian throatsinging, Russian rap, Indonesian hip-hop, or Beck. After two beers I have had all I can stand of this environment, and walk slowly back along the beach to the research station. I take a picture of the sky at midnight:
By the time I am back, several other people have also returned, and moved the party to the fire-hut, to escape the whining insect onslaught. I stand outside for a while chatting with Petri and Tarmo about Finnish tradition. We walk toward the building, and Tarmo gestures to the rear face. “Here is a fine Finnish tradition, a man pissing on a building.” Petri agrees: “You can see it everywhere in Finland.” We go into the smoky hut, and I end up in a corner with Petri, Samuli, Pauliina, and Raine. They are discussing a classic party trick performed by a famous biologist in Jyväskylä, which involved setting his pubic hair on fire at the height of the evening. They commented regretfully that this man was no longer on the party circuit, and that his performance had spawned many pathetic imitators. Then Raine produced a beer bottle and said with a grin that this was a beer that had been open for a couple days and we needed to finish it off. I shrug and accept it, take a slug, expecting flat weak beerfluid. Instead it is flat warm vodka, with an oily texture. “This beer has aged gracefully,” I comment. Petri takes a taste and nods. “Aged eighteen years in a cherry casket,” he says. Samuli and I burst out laughing, both of us imagining a tiny casket for a cherry. Pauliina and and Raine are discussing the possible English translation for a Finnish word. “Do you ever say attactive? For a flavor?” they ask me. “Attractive?” I ask. No. “Aggressive?” No! They are starting to get worked up, trying to figure out what the English version of this word is – a flavor that attacks. I try something else: “Oh, you mean attactive!” I say, as if I’ve known this word for years. They both point their fingers at me and say “YES!” in unison. They seem satisfied. Raine tells about his time in California and the glorious experience of Two-Buck Chuck, a discount wine from Trader Joe’s Supermarket. This was a wine that combined favorably with his Miracle Liver. By now I was getting drowsy, so I left and took another picture of the sky, now around 1:30am:
In the morning we trundle down to Sumppu restaurant, which is now badly infested with mosquitoes. I have foolishly worn sandals, exposing the thin skin on the tops of my feet to every thirsty proboscis. I slap dozens of the little bastarrrds, making a pile of corpses on my breakfast tray. Sheer mathematics suggests that there is a finite number of mosquitoes in this room, but the more I kill, the more appear. This does not combine harmoniously with my physical or mental state. I mutter something about the lack of screens in the country, and someone tells me they used to have them, but they get broken by people punching or falling through them. My feet are starting to tingle most unpleasantly. It seems the kind of condition a restaurant would strive to avoid. But this was the only restaurant. If there had been another one across the parking lot, they could advertise their relative merits and try to attract custom by pursuing excellence, like "We have enough food for everyone!" or "We have less mosquitoes per cubic meter of air!" or "We use a scant trace of seasoning on some of our dishes!" I was eating plain gruel, the only available alternative to a meetvursti sandwich on dry brown bread, and I decided to just slurp it straight out of the bowl. Two mosquitoes landed on my nose during this maneuver, and I tried to execute justice, but succeeded only in executing the spillage of gruel in my lap and the knocking-over of my water.
We had one more session that morning: snails and mud creatures. For this we used a dangerous sampling device that was apt to chop off a toe if mishandled - it was springloaded steel jaws that could be lowered into a muddy substrate, and then a heavy metal cylinder slid down the line to trigger the trap. Then you lifted it out of the water and wrestled it open to disgorge a heap of stinking, oily harbor mud into your sample bucket. The continual blopping of black mud into a bucket made everyone's bowels start to ache. The grim-faced Finns were there for a purpose, and nobody wavered in that purpose until everyone had had a turn. We picked through the mud for a couple of hours, and then we packed up all the equipment and returned to Oulu.
Our instructor today is Kaisa, a young pre-graduate student who speaks with the peculiar flat Finnish accent – hard to describe but very distinct, all the English vowels being converted to their nearest Finnish equivalents. She shows us the method for kicknet sampling in a swamp: wrong, all wrong. This is an area in which I can confidently comment. But I don’t say a thing, I just use my own net to apply my own technique, and show the other students the treasures it yields. I am working with Vekku, and right away we have one of the most hideous-looking predators in creation: the predatory diving beetle larva. It’s a sleek, fast-swimming grub with giant tusks and a flat hydrodynamic head. This one is not of a particularly threatening girth, being only a few centimeters long, but it immediately tries to macerate me with its tusks when I pick it up.
We return with buckets full of swamp-slop to the laboratory, and after a hasty lunch, start sorting the creatures out from the slime and rotten organic material. Somehow the Frenchman has assigned himself into our group. I let him work with Vekku, and concentrate on my own little alcohol-filled Petri dish of beasties. The beetle larva has unfortunately sundered its cranial capsule along the ecdysial sutures, either from the water in its head dissolving in the alcohol or from being crushed by something in transit. A pity, it really was a horrific specimen. There’s the normal rogeu’s gallery of standing-water fauna: some water striders, water boatmen, mosquito larvae… but what is this? The true Aquatic Spider, unknown to us naïve North Americans! Argyroneta aquatica, the one that builds a bubble-filled nest under the surface and carries a scuba bubble around on its butt! Wow! There is also a plenitude of small beetles which I do not recognize, and I look forward to keying them out.
We are one microscope short. Between Vekku and me, one of us is going to have to share with Jonathan. I foolishly leave my station to help someone identify a damselfly (sight ID to genus, ha! Never mind that there’s only one genus in the whole family in Northern Europe) and when I return I find Jonathan has not only taken my microscope, but also my little tray of insects and snails!
I decide to let him have a look: he’s here to learn after all, and he’s not destroying my samples. He has no intention whatsoever of sharing the microscope, and I get a nice long look at him while I’m waiting. He seems to be determined to singlehandedly reinforce every French stereotype – a mixture of garlic, bile and piss. His voice is loud, his body language telegraphs crankiness, surliness or disgust. He only laughs when other people are made to look foolish, and has a variety of complaints on the tip of his tongue for all occasions. He is slim and swarthy, covered with wiry black hair, weak of chin and yet somehow possessed of an aristocratic caste to his eyes, cheeks and nose. I wince as he pounds the tips of my delicate tweezers against the counter. He paws through the samples, trying to match them up to the pictures in our handout. This is always the problem with introductory entomology: any picture you receive is going to be a broadly general likeness to the animal you have, not an identical replica. You have to look at the specific features, not the gestalt, at least not until you’ve looked at dozens and dozens of them.
The Frenchman mutters constantly at the sample. I see the interesting beetles being manhandled under the tweezers, and somehow he is able to identify most of them. I’ll give him that: he is determined to master the material, there’s no question. I watch him drag a horsefly maggot under the scope and say “Who eez zees bastarrrd?” Somehow the idea of an insect being called a bastarrrd, or the idea of any emotional context being applied to a dead invertebrate, strikes me as hilarious, and I can’t contain a guffaw. I receive a dark look. I suggest to him that it is my turn to look at my sample, and he tells me he just wants to finish. I calculate for a moment. I can either insist, and further anger an already angry person, whom I will be working with in close proximity for at least eleven more days, or I can let him do his own thing and slowly poison himself with soul-gout. It's almost too much to take when he turns to me and says "Zis is absolutely not my favorite subject." Kaisa, bless her keen eye and good heart, observes the whole process and goes to fetch the spare microscope from the other lab.
The mysterious beetle turns out to be a hydraenid, a so-called Tiny Aquatic Beetle, with clubbed antennae and a stupefied manner when alive. I have a great fondness for these dullard-like crawling water beetles, they seem so comical walking around underwater like old men on icy walkways.
The rest of the week is similar: trips to the seashore to collect plankton, molluscs and crustaceans, then lab-time identifying them. We get to see some bizarre creatures, like this amphipod that looks like it escaped from the Ordovician era:
Or the invasive Chinese mitten crab:
Or the humble Daphnia:
On our last night, Raine has arranged the Sumppu restaurant to stay open until late so we can have a party. We take our test that afternoon, which largely consists of material from the Monday lecture. Then everyone has a nap after dinner, and around nine we start drifting toward the restaurant again. It is a warm, still night, and the mosquitoes are famished. We have to walk slowly, because people are trying to drink as many warm weak beers as they can before they actually go inside the bar, thereby minimizing the number of expensive cold beers they need to get into the party mood. I’m walking with the “fellows,” Vekku and my work-colleague Petri, the ultra-mellow Samuli and the towheaded, sharp-witted Tarmo. The fellows are trying to teach me some useful Finnish, like how to refer to my own behind, how to curse something in a demeaning manner (one sixteenth of hell!) how to order the cheapest beer in the restaurant (One reindeer piss, please) and how to describe something irreparably broken (smashed into shit, a delightful and instructive use of the translative case.) At last they swallow their final belchy suds and we can go inside.
The evening is hot, and the restaurant is stuffy, but the staff have helpfully opened all the doors and windows. Somehow the application of “screen” technology has not made it to this part of Finland, and there is no porous flexible layer with holes wide enough to admit air molecules but small enough to deny the ingress of bloodsuckers. So we sit at the tables, swatting mosquitoes and sipping cold reindeer piss, and the barman fires up the karaoke device. I simply don’t know enough popular songs to participate in karaoke, even though there was a special English language disc available. Got any Soundgarden? Ween? Nine Inch Nails? Red Hot Chili Peppers? Of course they do not. No point even asking about the Mongolian throatsinging, Russian rap, Indonesian hip-hop, or Beck. After two beers I have had all I can stand of this environment, and walk slowly back along the beach to the research station. I take a picture of the sky at midnight:
By the time I am back, several other people have also returned, and moved the party to the fire-hut, to escape the whining insect onslaught. I stand outside for a while chatting with Petri and Tarmo about Finnish tradition. We walk toward the building, and Tarmo gestures to the rear face. “Here is a fine Finnish tradition, a man pissing on a building.” Petri agrees: “You can see it everywhere in Finland.” We go into the smoky hut, and I end up in a corner with Petri, Samuli, Pauliina, and Raine. They are discussing a classic party trick performed by a famous biologist in Jyväskylä, which involved setting his pubic hair on fire at the height of the evening. They commented regretfully that this man was no longer on the party circuit, and that his performance had spawned many pathetic imitators. Then Raine produced a beer bottle and said with a grin that this was a beer that had been open for a couple days and we needed to finish it off. I shrug and accept it, take a slug, expecting flat weak beerfluid. Instead it is flat warm vodka, with an oily texture. “This beer has aged gracefully,” I comment. Petri takes a taste and nods. “Aged eighteen years in a cherry casket,” he says. Samuli and I burst out laughing, both of us imagining a tiny casket for a cherry. Pauliina and and Raine are discussing the possible English translation for a Finnish word. “Do you ever say attactive? For a flavor?” they ask me. “Attractive?” I ask. No. “Aggressive?” No! They are starting to get worked up, trying to figure out what the English version of this word is – a flavor that attacks. I try something else: “Oh, you mean attactive!” I say, as if I’ve known this word for years. They both point their fingers at me and say “YES!” in unison. They seem satisfied. Raine tells about his time in California and the glorious experience of Two-Buck Chuck, a discount wine from Trader Joe’s Supermarket. This was a wine that combined favorably with his Miracle Liver. By now I was getting drowsy, so I left and took another picture of the sky, now around 1:30am:
In the morning we trundle down to Sumppu restaurant, which is now badly infested with mosquitoes. I have foolishly worn sandals, exposing the thin skin on the tops of my feet to every thirsty proboscis. I slap dozens of the little bastarrrds, making a pile of corpses on my breakfast tray. Sheer mathematics suggests that there is a finite number of mosquitoes in this room, but the more I kill, the more appear. This does not combine harmoniously with my physical or mental state. I mutter something about the lack of screens in the country, and someone tells me they used to have them, but they get broken by people punching or falling through them. My feet are starting to tingle most unpleasantly. It seems the kind of condition a restaurant would strive to avoid. But this was the only restaurant. If there had been another one across the parking lot, they could advertise their relative merits and try to attract custom by pursuing excellence, like "We have enough food for everyone!" or "We have less mosquitoes per cubic meter of air!" or "We use a scant trace of seasoning on some of our dishes!" I was eating plain gruel, the only available alternative to a meetvursti sandwich on dry brown bread, and I decided to just slurp it straight out of the bowl. Two mosquitoes landed on my nose during this maneuver, and I tried to execute justice, but succeeded only in executing the spillage of gruel in my lap and the knocking-over of my water.
We had one more session that morning: snails and mud creatures. For this we used a dangerous sampling device that was apt to chop off a toe if mishandled - it was springloaded steel jaws that could be lowered into a muddy substrate, and then a heavy metal cylinder slid down the line to trigger the trap. Then you lifted it out of the water and wrestled it open to disgorge a heap of stinking, oily harbor mud into your sample bucket. The continual blopping of black mud into a bucket made everyone's bowels start to ache. The grim-faced Finns were there for a purpose, and nobody wavered in that purpose until everyone had had a turn. We picked through the mud for a couple of hours, and then we packed up all the equipment and returned to Oulu.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Roach Scales and Dill
Up at 7:30, walk out to the restaurant for some prison-style gruel, hard bread with meat and cheese, and strong coffee. I have to admit this kind of breakfast really gets me going in the morning, even though I miss my yogurt, banana, and granola that I broke my fast with for years in Oregon.
We drive down to the harbor. I get to row the rowboat, which is great fun, except that my right arm is much stronger than my left and it causes the boat to pull larboard. With some minor correction, we arrive at the flagged buoys – called “swimming flags” by Daniela the German – and haul the gill nets in. They are covered with fish. We used these special Nordic nets developed by various Scandinavian countries: 30 meters long, 1.5 meters tall, 12 different gauges of mesh-size, to maximize the variety of the haul. The number of fish is almost shocking – hundreds, dangling like beads of dew on a dawn spiderweb. The nets are slopped into buckets and we return to shore.
Raine, the professor, has an inkling to get some ice cream before we go back to the station, but he gets a call informing him that a local fisherman will be arriving at the dock with the morning’s catch in a few minutes, and we may be fortunate enough to collect some species that we missed in the gillnets. We hurry back and Raine goes stomping down to the little quay behind the station.
The rest of us undertake a most distasteful task. We hang the net on nails driven into the shady side of the dormitory, and pick the fish out one by one. Each fish has struggled for its life and is severely tangled into the net. We sort the fish into buckets marked with the gauge of that particular length of net. A few of them slide out easily, but these are rare exceptions. One species, the ruffe, has poison spikes in the rays of its dorsal fins. The most numerous by far is the three-spined stickleback, who is not poisonous but whose bony sharp skeleton is wont to pierce finger and slash knuckle. Many of the fish are so tightly twisted into the net that the only way to get them out is to decapitate them by hand, and the heads are apt to burst instead of cleanly separating from the body. To add to our joys, clouds of mosquitoes discover us in the shade and descend on our bare arms and necks. We cannot slap them without covering ourselves in scales and fish-slime.
Daniela of the Goths
The Finns do not complain, so I try not to. Our French companion, Jonathan (pronounced Zhon-a-tawn) is venting enough spleen for everyone combined. He cannot go two minutes without voicing his discontent: bilious invectives hurled at mosquitoes, fish, the net, the task, the world. Finally lunchtime arrives, and we gladly leave the net to trundle down the wooden boardwalk to Sumppu Restaurant.
Soon enough, we are back at it, but the heat of the day has taken some of the moisture and left the fish sticky. For two and a half more hours, we struggle with the corpses, enduring the hordes of tiny vampires. Occasionally a gust of wind comes up, like a squad of djinn bouncers, and gives the mosquitoes the bums’ rush, but they soon return. Some of the fish are inexplicably tangled into both sides of the net, as if they had employed some kind of tesseract maneuver in their futile escape attempt. At last we are down to the final panel of fish, and there are only three of us working on it: the indefatigable Daniela, me, and Vekku, a tall friendly fellow who has a smile and kind word for everyone. The last fish is so badly snarled into the weave that it seems best to just take scissors and cut a circle around it, but then by some quirk of magic-knot sleight-of-fin, it untwists and drops neatly into my hand.
Gasterosteus aculeatus, Three-Spined Stickleback
Now we go to the steps of the dorm and sort the fish by species. I have some experience with tropical aquarium fish, but none with these Baltic species. I recognize the dace and the Baltic herring, and of course the three-spined stickleback, but the ruffe, the bleak, the roach, and the sand goby are all new. They have wonderful Finnish names: kiiski, salakka, särki, hietatokko. We weigh the fish in aggregate bags by species to calculate biomass, then throw all but the roaches away. We have a total of around 800 fish from a single night’s netting.
A roach is not a big fish, the ones we have get to about five inches, but they are pleasantly fat and we have several dozen. We set up an assembly-line: the fish are decapitated with scissors, eviscerated, and washed, then each one gets a pat of butter and a generous pinch of salt and dill where its guts used to be. They are then wrapped by threes in aluminum shrouds and sequestered in a refrigerator.
We gratefully wash our hands, rinse the nets, and bounce a volleyball around on our hands until dinnertime.
After dinner, many people have short naps before it is time for sauna. Even though the men’s and women’s saunas are in separate chambers, it seems by dint of tradition that the women go first. We wait until we see the pink towel-wrapped bodies heading back to the dormitory, then we gather in the wood-and-tile room to try to mitigate some of the scratches and bites. Once we are all pleasantly sweaty, and the empty beer-bottles are almost too hot to pick up, we shower off and change into evening clothes. Despite the sun and warm sea air, everyone dons long pants and long sleeves to keep the mosquitoes at bay.
We build a fire in the firepit, and when there are some nice coals, we stick the aluminum coffins in where they glint like little treasures. They stay there for a long time, through stories and jokes, a couple of songs, and countless bottles of weak beer.
The smell of cooked fish rises from the ashes, and we begin to pull the packages out. We open one at first and pass it around, so everyone can have a tidbit – the fish is packed with bones and covered with sticky scales, but it tastes wonderful. After a few tries we figure out the best way to eat them: shuck the scales off one side with a knife, then eat the meat off that side and lift the spine out of the other. Someone has a bag of rye buns, which we toast on a grill over the fire to a delightful dark crunchiness that combines exquisitely with the fish.
Raine cheerfully tells us about the thousands of roaches he dissected for his PhD, counting the dozens of diverse parasites inside each one. He assures us than none of them are transmissible to humans, and as his mouth is full of the same fishn as ours, we believe him. Soon we are all sticky and scaly, and sated long before we get through the entire pile of fish.
People wander off in twos or threes to go to bed, thereby increasing the number of mosquitoes per person around the fire. We decide to retreat to the old storage hut that has been converted into a social chamber, and someone produces a CD of Finnish pop from the ‘70s, and soon everyone is singing along with great gusto. Cut off from the sunlight, I suddenly feel sleepy, full of fresh fish, and decide to call it a night.
We drive down to the harbor. I get to row the rowboat, which is great fun, except that my right arm is much stronger than my left and it causes the boat to pull larboard. With some minor correction, we arrive at the flagged buoys – called “swimming flags” by Daniela the German – and haul the gill nets in. They are covered with fish. We used these special Nordic nets developed by various Scandinavian countries: 30 meters long, 1.5 meters tall, 12 different gauges of mesh-size, to maximize the variety of the haul. The number of fish is almost shocking – hundreds, dangling like beads of dew on a dawn spiderweb. The nets are slopped into buckets and we return to shore.
Raine, the professor, has an inkling to get some ice cream before we go back to the station, but he gets a call informing him that a local fisherman will be arriving at the dock with the morning’s catch in a few minutes, and we may be fortunate enough to collect some species that we missed in the gillnets. We hurry back and Raine goes stomping down to the little quay behind the station.
The rest of us undertake a most distasteful task. We hang the net on nails driven into the shady side of the dormitory, and pick the fish out one by one. Each fish has struggled for its life and is severely tangled into the net. We sort the fish into buckets marked with the gauge of that particular length of net. A few of them slide out easily, but these are rare exceptions. One species, the ruffe, has poison spikes in the rays of its dorsal fins. The most numerous by far is the three-spined stickleback, who is not poisonous but whose bony sharp skeleton is wont to pierce finger and slash knuckle. Many of the fish are so tightly twisted into the net that the only way to get them out is to decapitate them by hand, and the heads are apt to burst instead of cleanly separating from the body. To add to our joys, clouds of mosquitoes discover us in the shade and descend on our bare arms and necks. We cannot slap them without covering ourselves in scales and fish-slime.
Daniela of the Goths
The Finns do not complain, so I try not to. Our French companion, Jonathan (pronounced Zhon-a-tawn) is venting enough spleen for everyone combined. He cannot go two minutes without voicing his discontent: bilious invectives hurled at mosquitoes, fish, the net, the task, the world. Finally lunchtime arrives, and we gladly leave the net to trundle down the wooden boardwalk to Sumppu Restaurant.
Soon enough, we are back at it, but the heat of the day has taken some of the moisture and left the fish sticky. For two and a half more hours, we struggle with the corpses, enduring the hordes of tiny vampires. Occasionally a gust of wind comes up, like a squad of djinn bouncers, and gives the mosquitoes the bums’ rush, but they soon return. Some of the fish are inexplicably tangled into both sides of the net, as if they had employed some kind of tesseract maneuver in their futile escape attempt. At last we are down to the final panel of fish, and there are only three of us working on it: the indefatigable Daniela, me, and Vekku, a tall friendly fellow who has a smile and kind word for everyone. The last fish is so badly snarled into the weave that it seems best to just take scissors and cut a circle around it, but then by some quirk of magic-knot sleight-of-fin, it untwists and drops neatly into my hand.
Gasterosteus aculeatus, Three-Spined Stickleback
Now we go to the steps of the dorm and sort the fish by species. I have some experience with tropical aquarium fish, but none with these Baltic species. I recognize the dace and the Baltic herring, and of course the three-spined stickleback, but the ruffe, the bleak, the roach, and the sand goby are all new. They have wonderful Finnish names: kiiski, salakka, särki, hietatokko. We weigh the fish in aggregate bags by species to calculate biomass, then throw all but the roaches away. We have a total of around 800 fish from a single night’s netting.
A roach is not a big fish, the ones we have get to about five inches, but they are pleasantly fat and we have several dozen. We set up an assembly-line: the fish are decapitated with scissors, eviscerated, and washed, then each one gets a pat of butter and a generous pinch of salt and dill where its guts used to be. They are then wrapped by threes in aluminum shrouds and sequestered in a refrigerator.
We gratefully wash our hands, rinse the nets, and bounce a volleyball around on our hands until dinnertime.
After dinner, many people have short naps before it is time for sauna. Even though the men’s and women’s saunas are in separate chambers, it seems by dint of tradition that the women go first. We wait until we see the pink towel-wrapped bodies heading back to the dormitory, then we gather in the wood-and-tile room to try to mitigate some of the scratches and bites. Once we are all pleasantly sweaty, and the empty beer-bottles are almost too hot to pick up, we shower off and change into evening clothes. Despite the sun and warm sea air, everyone dons long pants and long sleeves to keep the mosquitoes at bay.
We build a fire in the firepit, and when there are some nice coals, we stick the aluminum coffins in where they glint like little treasures. They stay there for a long time, through stories and jokes, a couple of songs, and countless bottles of weak beer.
The smell of cooked fish rises from the ashes, and we begin to pull the packages out. We open one at first and pass it around, so everyone can have a tidbit – the fish is packed with bones and covered with sticky scales, but it tastes wonderful. After a few tries we figure out the best way to eat them: shuck the scales off one side with a knife, then eat the meat off that side and lift the spine out of the other. Someone has a bag of rye buns, which we toast on a grill over the fire to a delightful dark crunchiness that combines exquisitely with the fish.
Raine cheerfully tells us about the thousands of roaches he dissected for his PhD, counting the dozens of diverse parasites inside each one. He assures us than none of them are transmissible to humans, and as his mouth is full of the same fishn as ours, we believe him. Soon we are all sticky and scaly, and sated long before we get through the entire pile of fish.
People wander off in twos or threes to go to bed, thereby increasing the number of mosquitoes per person around the fire. We decide to retreat to the old storage hut that has been converted into a social chamber, and someone produces a CD of Finnish pop from the ‘70s, and soon everyone is singing along with great gusto. Cut off from the sunlight, I suddenly feel sleepy, full of fresh fish, and decide to call it a night.
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Shark Island part 1
The name sounds like something out of a bad mystery TV special: Shark Island Research Station. The tagline: “1 professor. 3 Teaching Assistants. 35 students. One intruder.” And the standard TV story goes, the students arrive by car from the ferry terminal, get assigned to their bunkhouses, and end up at the dining hall for the evening meal – and the professors count heads and there are 36! Who is the stranger?
Well it’s not quite like that here. The real story is that I finished my egg-thievery in a timely fashion and now as a kind of reward, I get to take part in the North Baltic Aquatic Zoology course. We arrive on Shark Island on Sunday night, and found that the kitchen at the research station is being remodeled – so all meals are to be taken at the restaurant 1km down the boardwalk. We are sternly warned not to try to take a shortcut, because nesting terns will attack us. Anyway there will be no evening meal on Sunday – breakfast is at 8am sharp. We have a clear view of the setting sun, which rolls very slowly down into the sea around midnight. The bulk of students aren’t scheduled to arrive until the first Monday ferry at 9-ish.
There are three foreigners in the course: myself, Daniela the German, and Jonathan the Frenchman. Daniela is visibly pleased to communicate in her own language – she doesn’t speak Finnish and has been using English only for the 9 months or so she’s been in Finland. We chat up a storm – it is also nice for me to remind myself that I am capable of talking foreign.
The foreigners are exempt from the first day of the program, as it consists of lecture in Finnish. We get a brief debriefing, an introduction to the four teachers, and some photocopied taxonomic keys in English and Finnish. I am delighted to see a diagram of a dragonfly larva with dual translation – now I can finally tell people about epiprocts and premental setae in their own language! We are also sorted into four groups, so each group will spend one day with each teacher. The Finnish students get to choose their groups, but I am shunted into the English-speaking group, for obvious reasons.
There is wireless on the island, but only just barely. After a few minutes of waiting for it to connect, I give up and take a hike. The island is covered by very low rolling hills and dense pine forest. A few birches poke up here and there, but mostly it is dry sand and pine. The trees even have the same flattopness as their coastal counterparts in Oregon. I search in vain for a pond or a ditch where some aquatic insects might dwell, but with no luck. There are scores of tiny cabins in the woods, gaily painted one-or-two-room cottages, artfully located to blend in with the landscape so they are mostly invisible until you are in the front yard. They all look deserted.
Millions or billions of ants also call this home – medium-sized coffee-colored ants, friendly as ants can be, living in vast colonies that stretch forever across the coarse sand of the forest floor.
The lectures end, and we hike out to the restaurant. The restaurateurs have known for weeks or months that we were coming, and yet they had not prepared nearly enough for the onslaught of hungry diners. A little over half got plates full of food, the rest stood hungrily and uselessly next to the empty buffet while the cooks tried to whip out replacement portions. Somehow the acts of food preparation and consumption are typically not joyous or deeply valued in this culture. The food is filling, sure, but it might as well be bars of prison loaf for all the interest that is taken in its presentation.
After the food, our group heads out to the bay to set gill nets. There are eight people in the group, but only room in the rowboat for four, so I choose to wade around the shoreline, with the guarantee of being in the boat to retrieve the net the next morning. There are clouds of mosquitoes, all of them ravenous in the evening light. I wade out into the water so my legs will be protected, but my shoulders and neck take a heavy hammering. I knew this was going to happen, I had mentally prepared for it, but there is still something of a shock at being swarmed by bloodthirsty parasites. They were not nearly so bad during the day because they dislike direct sunlight, but now the sun is an orange ball low over the sea, and the hordes are at their height of activity.
Nets set, we return to the station and hit the sauna. Males and females officially segregate to take sauna, but everyone tells me that this rule goes out the window during the “after-party.” Since there has been no party, the sexes keep to their own sides of the building. This is the great social equalizer – the professor, Raine, joins us, and we all sit around naked in the steam, telling jokes and stories, sweating out the mosquito poison and the salt of the day. Raine is a little older than me, a strapping Finn several inches over six feet, with a ponytail and a soul patch. He looks oddly familiar, perhaps because of his tonsorial status, but then we discover we both attended an evolution conference in Alaska two years ago. Neither of us remembers the other, of course, but we both remember some of the standout talks and the experience of being in Fairbanks in June.
We emerge from sauna in our towels and sit on a bench outdoors, swatting mosquitoes and rapidly cooling off. Soon the mosquitoes are intolerable, so it’s back into the heat and steam. The role of ladle-master switches with each session: this person controls how much water is tossed onto the hot rocks, and hence, how much steam fills the room. Sometimes a guy will get it into his head to see how much punishment people can take, and just start throwing spoonsful of water onto the rocks until everyone is pink and gasping. I suggest hanging a sausage from the ceiling, canary-in-the-mine style, and when it splits its sides, it’s time to hold off on the steam. This is met with derision – they’ve all been in hotter saunas than this, come on now.
Finally I get dizzy and have to leave. The ancient remedy is suggested: drink water. Then it’s time for another great Finnish ritual – beer and sausages around the fire. Opinions are all over the map for what constitutes a good Finnish sausage – there are packages and packages of them available at every store, with varying proportions of meat and flour – but all pre-cooked and pre-formed. It’s very difficult to get what I consider a “real” sausage – filled with raw meat and spices and goodies – and not filled with homogenate. But regardless of what is in the sausage, this is the venue where Finns take real pleasure in their food. Some like to stick it straight in the flames until it bursts in a spray of hot liquids. Others suspend it from hooks and let it slowly sweat. Most take the regular hot-dog-over-the-coals approach, and then liberally smear it with “strong” mustard (a joke!) Sometimes it is also taken with a little wheel of rye bread, and always it is washed down with the old 4.7% small beer. The campfire smoke even keeps some of the mosquitoes away.
Well it’s not quite like that here. The real story is that I finished my egg-thievery in a timely fashion and now as a kind of reward, I get to take part in the North Baltic Aquatic Zoology course. We arrive on Shark Island on Sunday night, and found that the kitchen at the research station is being remodeled – so all meals are to be taken at the restaurant 1km down the boardwalk. We are sternly warned not to try to take a shortcut, because nesting terns will attack us. Anyway there will be no evening meal on Sunday – breakfast is at 8am sharp. We have a clear view of the setting sun, which rolls very slowly down into the sea around midnight. The bulk of students aren’t scheduled to arrive until the first Monday ferry at 9-ish.
There are three foreigners in the course: myself, Daniela the German, and Jonathan the Frenchman. Daniela is visibly pleased to communicate in her own language – she doesn’t speak Finnish and has been using English only for the 9 months or so she’s been in Finland. We chat up a storm – it is also nice for me to remind myself that I am capable of talking foreign.
The foreigners are exempt from the first day of the program, as it consists of lecture in Finnish. We get a brief debriefing, an introduction to the four teachers, and some photocopied taxonomic keys in English and Finnish. I am delighted to see a diagram of a dragonfly larva with dual translation – now I can finally tell people about epiprocts and premental setae in their own language! We are also sorted into four groups, so each group will spend one day with each teacher. The Finnish students get to choose their groups, but I am shunted into the English-speaking group, for obvious reasons.
There is wireless on the island, but only just barely. After a few minutes of waiting for it to connect, I give up and take a hike. The island is covered by very low rolling hills and dense pine forest. A few birches poke up here and there, but mostly it is dry sand and pine. The trees even have the same flattopness as their coastal counterparts in Oregon. I search in vain for a pond or a ditch where some aquatic insects might dwell, but with no luck. There are scores of tiny cabins in the woods, gaily painted one-or-two-room cottages, artfully located to blend in with the landscape so they are mostly invisible until you are in the front yard. They all look deserted.
Millions or billions of ants also call this home – medium-sized coffee-colored ants, friendly as ants can be, living in vast colonies that stretch forever across the coarse sand of the forest floor.
The lectures end, and we hike out to the restaurant. The restaurateurs have known for weeks or months that we were coming, and yet they had not prepared nearly enough for the onslaught of hungry diners. A little over half got plates full of food, the rest stood hungrily and uselessly next to the empty buffet while the cooks tried to whip out replacement portions. Somehow the acts of food preparation and consumption are typically not joyous or deeply valued in this culture. The food is filling, sure, but it might as well be bars of prison loaf for all the interest that is taken in its presentation.
After the food, our group heads out to the bay to set gill nets. There are eight people in the group, but only room in the rowboat for four, so I choose to wade around the shoreline, with the guarantee of being in the boat to retrieve the net the next morning. There are clouds of mosquitoes, all of them ravenous in the evening light. I wade out into the water so my legs will be protected, but my shoulders and neck take a heavy hammering. I knew this was going to happen, I had mentally prepared for it, but there is still something of a shock at being swarmed by bloodthirsty parasites. They were not nearly so bad during the day because they dislike direct sunlight, but now the sun is an orange ball low over the sea, and the hordes are at their height of activity.
Nets set, we return to the station and hit the sauna. Males and females officially segregate to take sauna, but everyone tells me that this rule goes out the window during the “after-party.” Since there has been no party, the sexes keep to their own sides of the building. This is the great social equalizer – the professor, Raine, joins us, and we all sit around naked in the steam, telling jokes and stories, sweating out the mosquito poison and the salt of the day. Raine is a little older than me, a strapping Finn several inches over six feet, with a ponytail and a soul patch. He looks oddly familiar, perhaps because of his tonsorial status, but then we discover we both attended an evolution conference in Alaska two years ago. Neither of us remembers the other, of course, but we both remember some of the standout talks and the experience of being in Fairbanks in June.
We emerge from sauna in our towels and sit on a bench outdoors, swatting mosquitoes and rapidly cooling off. Soon the mosquitoes are intolerable, so it’s back into the heat and steam. The role of ladle-master switches with each session: this person controls how much water is tossed onto the hot rocks, and hence, how much steam fills the room. Sometimes a guy will get it into his head to see how much punishment people can take, and just start throwing spoonsful of water onto the rocks until everyone is pink and gasping. I suggest hanging a sausage from the ceiling, canary-in-the-mine style, and when it splits its sides, it’s time to hold off on the steam. This is met with derision – they’ve all been in hotter saunas than this, come on now.
Finally I get dizzy and have to leave. The ancient remedy is suggested: drink water. Then it’s time for another great Finnish ritual – beer and sausages around the fire. Opinions are all over the map for what constitutes a good Finnish sausage – there are packages and packages of them available at every store, with varying proportions of meat and flour – but all pre-cooked and pre-formed. It’s very difficult to get what I consider a “real” sausage – filled with raw meat and spices and goodies – and not filled with homogenate. But regardless of what is in the sausage, this is the venue where Finns take real pleasure in their food. Some like to stick it straight in the flames until it bursts in a spray of hot liquids. Others suspend it from hooks and let it slowly sweat. Most take the regular hot-dog-over-the-coals approach, and then liberally smear it with “strong” mustard (a joke!) Sometimes it is also taken with a little wheel of rye bread, and always it is washed down with the old 4.7% small beer. The campfire smoke even keeps some of the mosquitoes away.
Monday, June 4, 2007
Arlo, Egg-Thief
Returning to Oulu from Oulanka, I changed my duties as a bird scientist. An ornithologist in the southern city of Turku was trying to perform an egg/chick phenology project on the Pied Flycatcher (kirjosieppo, Ficedula hypoleuca) Sometimes this bird invades the birdhouses our team sets up for the Great Tits – and for the previous week, the Titspotters had been marking these invaded birdhouses on the GPS.
My job, now, was to collect the third egg from each nest. This theoretically would involve checking the nests day after day, marking the first two eggs with some glyph of my choosing, and then snatching the third egg once it appeared. Some of the eggs were likely to already contain three or more eggs, but Markku, Bird Guru Extraordinaire, showed me an amazing technique he pioneered in the ‘70s for telling egg-order: there is a translucent bubble at the fat end of the egg, which shrinks as time goes on. So the trick is to line the eggs up and find the third-smallest bubble, and that one will be the unfortunate victim of science.
I was to gather at least twenty eggs, weigh them to the nearest milligram, then freeze them for transport to Turku. After collection, I was to re-check the nests to assess final clutch size, hatching success and fledging success. But all that stuff was going to happen at a later date. The only focus now was gathering twenty #3 Pied Flycatcher eggs and weighing them. This was set to occur as chaos erupted in the Willow Tit project. The tits were beginning to brood their eggs, and careful records had to be kept for each nest when the eggs hatched, so the young birds could get rings attached to their legs, after they were big enough but before they could leave the nest. The team had been swollen by two, so there was now a total of nine people crammed into the tiny ops room where we met for morning planning.
There were two cars going to the forest, and everyone was going to be dropped off closest to their target nests. Unfortunately my targets were spread out over six miles of forest. I was told to start with the ones closest and then see how far I got by the end of the day.
As the car rumbled away, I discovered I had lost the little piece of paper on which I had listed the flycatcher nestbox numbers. My GPS only had the nest numbers, not the type of bird that resided in each one. There were dozens of nestboxes in this part of the forest alone! I couldn’t very well go to each one and see what kind of eggs it had. I still had no cell phone, so I couldn’t call anyone. In the end I decided to walk back to the university (about four miles) get the numbers, and ride my finally-functioning bike back to the forest.
It was a nice sunny day, cool and perfect for walking. I was happy to make the trek. When I got back to school I wrote the numbers on my arm, got my bike, and returned to the forest. I checked the boxes I was responsible for, no third eggs yet, and decided to call it a day instead of slogging out to Oinaansuo, a large region with nestboxes far apart.
On the way back, my brakes blew out. I have no idea what happened to the rear brakes, but their housing was bent to a peculiar angle so they could no longer put the appropriate pressure on the wheel. The front brakes, fancy disc-brakes that had no business on a ten-euro bike, had snapped their cord. The little dangly piece of crimped steel that anchors the cord to the brake itself had popped off. Oh well, Oulu is flat, I thought, and didn’t pay any more mind to it until I found myself whizzing down an underpass ramp at Mach 2 with no way to slow down. This bike is built for action, and action I gave it! I leaned into a turn that brought me under the road and then up the slanted concrete side of the underpass, that little ramplike thing that bums like to sleep on. The tires made a glubbering noise but held the concrete, and I was able to ride the inertia out on the grass embankment on the other side.
I returned to the school and borrowed the tools from the animal-stuffing lab. With the help of my old buddies, duct tape and steel wire, I was able to jury-rig a prosthetic brake-anchor that would more or less take the tension from the handbrake without popping off. I would just have to use the brake sparingly if at all.
That afternoon I bought my first cellphone, a little Nokia number with no frills, off a lady from Dallas who was leaving Oulu after four months. She was the kind of exactly average American you seem to meet so often internationally, like if you took a person-shaped mold and filled it with bad television, Kraft macaroni and cheese, corporate mass-produced music, and the sticky puddles that form in the bottoms of suburban trashcans. Later I found out she grossly overcharged me for the phone, but oh well, now I have a cell phone. Here’s my cumbersome number: 358-468-892-037.
The next day I took off on my bike after the morning debriefing, and headed to Oinaansuo. There’s no good translation of Oinaa that I can find, but suo means “swamp.” Basically there’s two land-words here, suo and kangas. A kangas is a raised area with pine trees, you want to be on a kangas. A suo is a low area that is more or less one continuous puddle with ice underneath it, and little islands of trees, logs, berry bushes, moss, stumps, stones, or mud. Oinaansuo had the distinction of being right next to Jylkynkangas, Oulu’s northernmost subdivision. There was construction everywhere in Jylkynkangas, all the houses were new and large, stacked cheek to jowl, and zero of the original vegetation had been left standing between them. Beyond: the dark and forbidding northern swamp-forest. Here is a snippet from my notebook:
Spring comes slowly to the deep northern Finland forest. The birch trees didn't start to put their leaves out until mid-May, and the sky still turns cold and gray as iron some days. Yesterday I went into a very old part of the forest, in my new occupation as egg-thief. The trees were very thick and squat, standing on mounds of earth that rose above the suomaa, the half-land-half-water swamp-bog that the entire country is named for. The water was frozen when I first got here, and it was not too difficult to pick my way across the lumpy ice to get from one side of the forest to the other. But now, the top several feet of water have melted, though an unseen colossal ice-block of permafrost lays below. The water is intensely cold and stained the color of strong tea by peat and pine needles. The ants here, so like the standard red-and-black formicids at home, build giant mounds of twigs and pine needles to raise their colony up out of the suomaa. What seems to be solid ground underfoot is mud, thick as chocolate frosting, that sucks at my boots with each step. Giant woody shelf-fungus grows everywhere, even out of other shelf-fungi. Sunlight streams down between the sparse birch leaves and makes the puddles glow the color of burned pumpkin. Frogs and snakes, called sammakkot and kyykäärmet by the locals, stretch out on the raised land around the tree trunks. Ravens gabble in the highest trees, and bumblebees lazily nudge the thrones of moss that grow on stumps and stones. In a tiny pool of sunlight, I see the first flower of spring, a little purple something that would be crushed by a dime. It is regal in its own tiny way, and holds all the promise of summer.
After Oinaansuo I went to Rusko, another subdivision closer to the city. Here the birds had been most prolific in their laying, and I gathered eggs from almost each nest. By the end of the day I had ten eggs, and by the end of the week, I had twenty-two. I was planning to leave for Shark Island on Sunday and was happy to have discharged my responsibilities so effectively.
My job, now, was to collect the third egg from each nest. This theoretically would involve checking the nests day after day, marking the first two eggs with some glyph of my choosing, and then snatching the third egg once it appeared. Some of the eggs were likely to already contain three or more eggs, but Markku, Bird Guru Extraordinaire, showed me an amazing technique he pioneered in the ‘70s for telling egg-order: there is a translucent bubble at the fat end of the egg, which shrinks as time goes on. So the trick is to line the eggs up and find the third-smallest bubble, and that one will be the unfortunate victim of science.
I was to gather at least twenty eggs, weigh them to the nearest milligram, then freeze them for transport to Turku. After collection, I was to re-check the nests to assess final clutch size, hatching success and fledging success. But all that stuff was going to happen at a later date. The only focus now was gathering twenty #3 Pied Flycatcher eggs and weighing them. This was set to occur as chaos erupted in the Willow Tit project. The tits were beginning to brood their eggs, and careful records had to be kept for each nest when the eggs hatched, so the young birds could get rings attached to their legs, after they were big enough but before they could leave the nest. The team had been swollen by two, so there was now a total of nine people crammed into the tiny ops room where we met for morning planning.
There were two cars going to the forest, and everyone was going to be dropped off closest to their target nests. Unfortunately my targets were spread out over six miles of forest. I was told to start with the ones closest and then see how far I got by the end of the day.
As the car rumbled away, I discovered I had lost the little piece of paper on which I had listed the flycatcher nestbox numbers. My GPS only had the nest numbers, not the type of bird that resided in each one. There were dozens of nestboxes in this part of the forest alone! I couldn’t very well go to each one and see what kind of eggs it had. I still had no cell phone, so I couldn’t call anyone. In the end I decided to walk back to the university (about four miles) get the numbers, and ride my finally-functioning bike back to the forest.
It was a nice sunny day, cool and perfect for walking. I was happy to make the trek. When I got back to school I wrote the numbers on my arm, got my bike, and returned to the forest. I checked the boxes I was responsible for, no third eggs yet, and decided to call it a day instead of slogging out to Oinaansuo, a large region with nestboxes far apart.
On the way back, my brakes blew out. I have no idea what happened to the rear brakes, but their housing was bent to a peculiar angle so they could no longer put the appropriate pressure on the wheel. The front brakes, fancy disc-brakes that had no business on a ten-euro bike, had snapped their cord. The little dangly piece of crimped steel that anchors the cord to the brake itself had popped off. Oh well, Oulu is flat, I thought, and didn’t pay any more mind to it until I found myself whizzing down an underpass ramp at Mach 2 with no way to slow down. This bike is built for action, and action I gave it! I leaned into a turn that brought me under the road and then up the slanted concrete side of the underpass, that little ramplike thing that bums like to sleep on. The tires made a glubbering noise but held the concrete, and I was able to ride the inertia out on the grass embankment on the other side.
I returned to the school and borrowed the tools from the animal-stuffing lab. With the help of my old buddies, duct tape and steel wire, I was able to jury-rig a prosthetic brake-anchor that would more or less take the tension from the handbrake without popping off. I would just have to use the brake sparingly if at all.
That afternoon I bought my first cellphone, a little Nokia number with no frills, off a lady from Dallas who was leaving Oulu after four months. She was the kind of exactly average American you seem to meet so often internationally, like if you took a person-shaped mold and filled it with bad television, Kraft macaroni and cheese, corporate mass-produced music, and the sticky puddles that form in the bottoms of suburban trashcans. Later I found out she grossly overcharged me for the phone, but oh well, now I have a cell phone. Here’s my cumbersome number: 358-468-892-037.
The next day I took off on my bike after the morning debriefing, and headed to Oinaansuo. There’s no good translation of Oinaa that I can find, but suo means “swamp.” Basically there’s two land-words here, suo and kangas. A kangas is a raised area with pine trees, you want to be on a kangas. A suo is a low area that is more or less one continuous puddle with ice underneath it, and little islands of trees, logs, berry bushes, moss, stumps, stones, or mud. Oinaansuo had the distinction of being right next to Jylkynkangas, Oulu’s northernmost subdivision. There was construction everywhere in Jylkynkangas, all the houses were new and large, stacked cheek to jowl, and zero of the original vegetation had been left standing between them. Beyond: the dark and forbidding northern swamp-forest. Here is a snippet from my notebook:
Spring comes slowly to the deep northern Finland forest. The birch trees didn't start to put their leaves out until mid-May, and the sky still turns cold and gray as iron some days. Yesterday I went into a very old part of the forest, in my new occupation as egg-thief. The trees were very thick and squat, standing on mounds of earth that rose above the suomaa, the half-land-half-water swamp-bog that the entire country is named for. The water was frozen when I first got here, and it was not too difficult to pick my way across the lumpy ice to get from one side of the forest to the other. But now, the top several feet of water have melted, though an unseen colossal ice-block of permafrost lays below. The water is intensely cold and stained the color of strong tea by peat and pine needles. The ants here, so like the standard red-and-black formicids at home, build giant mounds of twigs and pine needles to raise their colony up out of the suomaa. What seems to be solid ground underfoot is mud, thick as chocolate frosting, that sucks at my boots with each step. Giant woody shelf-fungus grows everywhere, even out of other shelf-fungi. Sunlight streams down between the sparse birch leaves and makes the puddles glow the color of burned pumpkin. Frogs and snakes, called sammakkot and kyykäärmet by the locals, stretch out on the raised land around the tree trunks. Ravens gabble in the highest trees, and bumblebees lazily nudge the thrones of moss that grow on stumps and stones. In a tiny pool of sunlight, I see the first flower of spring, a little purple something that would be crushed by a dime. It is regal in its own tiny way, and holds all the promise of summer.
After Oinaansuo I went to Rusko, another subdivision closer to the city. Here the birds had been most prolific in their laying, and I gathered eggs from almost each nest. By the end of the day I had ten eggs, and by the end of the week, I had twenty-two. I was planning to leave for Shark Island on Sunday and was happy to have discharged my responsibilities so effectively.
Sunday, June 3, 2007
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