Scientists study rare Adirondack bogs at annual research ‘camp’
By Zachary Matson
The day starts early at the Shingle Shanty Preserve and Research Station’s annual summer “Bog Camp.” Alarms buzz as early as 4:30 a.m. — that’s when the birds are singing.
In mid June, a group of a half-dozen eager birders gathered on the deck of an old hunting camp on the shore of Thayer Lake — which serves as a makeshift camp kitchen — before heading off to one of five birding routes at Shingle Shanty. Researchers return to the so-called transects each year, documenting the birds at 38 spots around the preserve and adding to nearly 20 years of data on where boreal bird species appear across the Adirondack Park.
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The sprawling preserve splits three major watersheds and includes around 2,000 acres of boreal peatlands, a rare example of the ecosystem at the southern edge of its range.
The transect on the agenda that day winds across two miles, gradually transitioning from woodlands, to forested bog to open bog. Bouncy mounds of sphagnum moss and thickets of stunted black spruce, hallmarks of the peatland ecosystem, create a maze of obstacles. Sometimes a misplaced step seeped into a muddy puddle; sometimes it sank into a foot of soft earth. In some spots, small bubbles on the surface of standing water simmered with the excitement of people walking by, a sign of the frothing activity below.
At the outset, the experience of traversing the route was described as “glorious misery,” but the college students, scientists and avid birders who joined were game.
“It’s so miserable, it’s quick and fun,” said Saikat Chakraborty, a chemistry professor at Paul Smith’s College. “It’s a different kind of bushwhack, because it’s not just bush, it’s also muck and mud.”
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Listening for rare boreal birds
The route included a handful of birding sites. The group stopped and for 10 minutes listed each species of bird they could identify by sight or, more often, by sound.
“The game here is to stand still and listen,” said Steve Langdon, who manages the preserve and organizes the annual week-long camp for researchers and students to converge at the preserve.
At one stop, where beaver activity had killed a stand of spruce trees, a black-backed woodpecker chipped away at a dead tree. The bird is a rare sight outside of a bog system and not all that common in one.
“That’s a bird you don’t see so often,” said Caley Doell, a recent SUNY Plattsburgh graduate.
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“Look how sleek its back is,” Langdon said, peering through a set of binoculars.
After more than three hours of “glorious misery,” the team had counted 21 bird species, including eight boreal specialists. The birding route has been monitored since 2011, part of broader research by Michale Glennon at Paul Smith’s College. Glennon’s bird research across the Adirondacks is nearly 20 years old and is pointing to a troubling pattern — birds once spotted during the surveys are showing less often.
“Things that were once reliable, we are having a harder and harder time finding,” Glennon said.
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Summer camp for science nerds tackles climate change impacts
Langdon, who as director of Shingle Shanty is charged with facilitating researcher access to the preserve and conducts his own ongoing studies, initiated the annual “Bog Camp” week 15 years ago to minimize trips down the long woods roads that lead to the property.
Langdon’s ongoing research and long-term monitoring sites, where he tracks temperature, water levels and other key measures, provide a critical baseline to visiting scientists. Many new research projects center on sites that Langdon has visited for years.
“I like to think I’m a reasonably competent do-it-all-ogist,” Langdon said. “But only in bogs.”
He also helps coordinate food, tenting spots, transportation and campfire chatter. A gaggle of Plattsburgh students dubbed Langdon “the bogfather.”
The preserve’s environment houses a lot of plants “only found here” and, of great interest to climate researchers, “surviving at its range’s southern reaches.” The impacts of a warming climate on peatland systems could first show up in a place like Shingle Shanty. During a visit into one of the open bogs, Langdon picked a blade of sedge.
“It only grows in these cold boreal bogs,” he said.
Petasites frigidus, sweet coltsfoot, is known to occur in just two locations in the state, including a hearty patch in an area on the forested edge of the preserve’s vast open bog. Bug-eating carnivorous pitcher plants thrive.
By mid-morning, different research teams had spread out to sites in the preserve. A trio of bogs — named Big Bog, Medium Bog and Small Bog — and the gradations between forested and open bogs offer a variety of types of sites for research. Scientists from Paul Smith’s College were joined by researchers and both undergraduate and graduate students from SUNY Plattsburgh. An ornithologist with the State Museum dropped in to search for an American three-toed woodpecker; the bird hasn’t been spotted in New York in years, and he was looking for a forthcoming update of the state’s inventory of birds that breed in the state. Alas, the bird was not seen nor heard.
Measuring black spruce growth
Olivia DeVito, who is working on a master’s degree at SUNY Plattsburgh, was joined by Professor Mark Lesser to set up dendrometers on black spruce trees in the bogs. Lesser, a forest ecologist, and Langdon have documented the spread of tree cover into more open areas of the bog, as well as the encroachment of maple trees into areas previously dominated by black spruce.
DeVito’s work will study the fine-scale, hour-by-hour growth of black spruce trees. The sensors can measure the daily contraction — when water drains out of the tree as it opens up to photosynthesize — and expansion, as well as longer term growth trends. Previous research has shown that warming weather patterns may be slowing tree growth in the hottest part of the summer, but also boosting growth in later winter. DeVito said she is fortunate to have the chance to conduct research at Shingle Shanty.
“I’m really grateful to be able to work and go into such a pristine preserved ecosystem,” she said. “It’s such a rare experience to see these environments that are so free from invasives and hold such ecological value.”
Insect communities: Indicators of environmental health
Annie Arnold is working on her master’s thesis about the insect community at Shingle Shanty and, as a “Bog Camp” veteran, helped Langdon with the logistics of organizing a small platoon of scientists in the remote backcountry for a week. A preparatory email ahead of the visit made one thing clear: prepare for bugs.
Arnold’s research asks whether there is a connection between the species of insects and plant community or type of bog in a particular area.
“Unsurprisingly, there are a ton of bugs,” Arnold said. “I have 3,000 bugs to identify,” Arnold told other researchers, which was received by at least one knowing laugh. (Identifying that number of specimens is no small task.)
“I do want to graduate at some point,” Arnold assured her colleagues. “They are the most abundant animal on the planet. If we aren’t paying attention to them, we aren’t paying attention to one of the most important indicators of environmental health.”
How is bog water chemistry changing?
Chelsea Smith joined the Adirondack Watershed Institute as a research scientist earlier this year, specializing in biogeochemistry. As part of her PhD work, Smith studied permafrost and peatland systems in the Arctic.
She came out to Shingle Shanty to start monitoring the chemistry of the pore water at different depths of the peatlands, establishing a baseline to examine how the systems may be changing. Smith is also studying bogs near Paul Smith’s campus to gain insight into differences between remote systems and ones more influenced by development and road systems. She plans to study whether road salt pollution is impacting bogs and their ability to store carbon.
“Bogs are thought to be long-term carbon stores, but we see that with factors like climate change and land use changes over time, they may not be able to store carbon as long as they could,” Smith said.
Smith said a site like Shingle Shanty is invaluable to scientists and a special place to conduct research.
“There is this piece of land that very few people have gone to and even fewer people have done research there,” Smith said. “You feel like you are unlocking the secrets of this place with your research.”
After wrapping up a day of field work, typically by late afternoon, the scientists and students return to the base camp at Thayer Lake. Sitting on and around the hunting camp deck, they joke about the travails of muddy, bug-infested field work and reminisce about bog camps of the past. They also brainstorm future research questions and tease out the connections that tie all their studies together.
“We are all in our little niches, and it’s important to go and synthesize that,” DeVito said. “It’s not just tree growth or chemistry or bogs or birds; it’s the whole picture.”
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