♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Pam Halstead: Welcome to the Humboldt Bay Wildlife Refuge.

I'm Pam Halstead, and this is "Field Trip."

Pam: Some animal would think that was just some crunchy deliciousness.

Pam: Yes.

male: Okay, so--oh, look, there's one with a collar.

Pam: And that poor little native plant's like, "No, no, don't do that."

Pam: That means they're looking for it.

Look at them run along the beach.

That is so cool.

Jessica: While also trying not to get too wet.

Pam: Hi, I'm Pam.

Miles Ebell: Hi, Pam, I'm Miles.

Pam: Hi, Miles.

Denise Seeger: I'm Denise.

Pam: Hi, Denise.

Denise: Hi, nice to meet you.

Pam: Great to meet you too.

Denise: Welcome to Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

We wanted to show you around a little bit.

We're here at the south end of Humboldt Bay at the Salmon Creek unit.

You want to go check it out?

Pam: Gosh, I'd love to.

Let's do it.

Denise: All right.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Pam: Denise, this is such a cool wildlife refuge.

I've really been enjoying where we've been going.

Now here we are in this water, and why is it that water is so important?

Denise: It happens to be like the life force everywhere on the planet, actually.

They call Earth the water planet, and water is life.

What do I mean by that?

Well, let's take a look.

So, what we'll do is we'll do a little bit of dip netting and see if I can show you what I'm talking about.

So if I just kinda dip this net in here and jiggle it around, sometimes that gets things to come off the surrounding vegetation.

Quickly, I don't wanna keep them without their water, the organisms.

I'm going to drop that down in there, my little bucket, and see who we might have caught, and if you can look in here-- Pam: Okay.

Denise: Oh my gosh, there's little pieces of plants.

There's seeds.

There's kinds of things swimming around in here too.

Some things we can barely see.

There's even things we can't see with our eyes.

Pam: We need a microscope or something, a magnifier?

Denise: Yeah.

Pam: Okay, cool.

Denise: Since we're in the field, we have these fun tools we can use, but one thing that I think is really fascinating is that there's all these different levels of food in these wetlands.

So right on the top there's certain types of food that's available.

Even right on top of the mud, there's a certain type of food that's available.

Pam: So who would want to eat like stuff that's floating around here, like the plant stuff?

Denise: Well, I would say a lot of the ducks that we see floating around out here are foraging on plant materials and seeds, but then when we see like the egrets walking through the wetland, they might be going after frogs or rodents that are in the pastures.

There's just so much for them to eat here.

And then the shore birds walk along the shore and go in the water there looking for worms and little water insects, and we actually did catch a little water insect here.

Pam: Oh boy.

Denise: If you wanna take a close look.

Pam: I would love to.

Denise: And sometimes when we find these things, we might not know exactly what they are, so we bring resources out, like a field guide to help us figure out what it is we're looking at.

So, you look at this little creature here and it's-- Pam: Moving very fast.

Denise: Swimming fast.

Pam: Swimming fast.

Denise: Well it looks like some kind of a bug, doesn't it?

Pam: Certainly does, yes.

If I'm looking at all these pictures, to me it looks more closely like this one right here.

Denise: So, kind of like some kind of beetle.

I think you're right.

Pam: It has a hard shell.

Denise: So, some animal would think that was just some crunchy deliciousness.

Pam: Absolutely.

So it's part of the food chain then, and it's pretty far down the food chain 'cause we got-- we've got the plants and then we've got maybe this little beetle, or maybe even something tinier in here.

We got these, so, so many of these little, teeny weeny guys moving around.

Denise, some of these things are so tiny it's really hard to see them.

Do you have like a magnifying glass or something?

Denise: I do.

I have another level of observation we can try.

Pam: Great.

Denise: So, this is a little field viewer.

I take schools out on field trips all the time and we use these little viewers 'cause they're easy to use.

Let's see what we can get.

We'll put, and then I put this top on so you can actually magnify now what you've got, and you can look down on it, but you can also look in.

What do you think?

Pam: Neat.

Denise: See if you found anything.

Pam: Oh my gosh, yes I did.

Denise: You can see it better?

Pam: Oh, they're swimming so fast, but I can definitely see them bigger.

I can see that they have a little head, they have little appendages or little like arms that are moving them around.

That is so neat.

Denise: So, a whole 'nother level like I was saying.

Some things we can't even see, but the wildlife know.

The birds know, and they're going to go looking for this food source.

All right, Pam.

Let's see what you might be able to find.

Pam: Cool, I'll pretend like I'm a bird and see what's goin' on.

All right, I'm going to catch some of these things.

Here goes.

Nah, doesn't look like that worked.

This is hard work, Denise.

Oh my God.

Denise: Now you know what the birds feel like.

Pam: Yeah, that's gotta be rough.

I'll see what I got.

Ooh wow.

There's a lot of vegetation.

Ooh, and there's a bunch of swimmers in there.

Look at all those tiny little swimmers.

And it's hard to believe that you could eat enough of those tiny swimmers to stay alive actually.

But, amazing.

There's so many of them, huh?

Denise: A lot of the wildlife have these special adaptations, things that are part of their bodies that help them to really efficiently process any food they can get.

So their mouths aren't necessarily like ours.

They might have like little filters in their mouth and special teeth and, where they just like are tuned in to getting their food the most efficient way possible.

Pam: So better than this net is what you're saying.

Denise: Oh yeah.

male announcer: Field Trip Trivia.

female announcer: Which of the following is a type of beetle?

Is it, A, ant; B, Ringo Starr; or, C, lightning bug?

[timer ticking] The answer is, C, lightning bug.

♪♪♪ Pam: Well Denise, this is a wildlife refuge.

How do you have wildlife here?

Denise: Well, in a lot of different ways.

We provide habitat for them, so that means managing habitats.

And then we also keep track of their populations to find out if they're doing well with the habitats we're providing, so that as well takes a lot of time.

So habitat is things that they need: a place to be, water, food, shelter.

Pam: For survival then.

Denise: Yeah.

Pam: Yeah, that's important.

It looks like Miles is ready to do something here.

Miles: Yeah, I'm going to go on a survey looking for Aleutian Cackling Geese.

This is their migration season as they move up north to Alaska.

They'll be there all summer, and we're just tracking their movements and trying to get a population estimate for them.

Basically, I count all of the geese that I see in a flock, and some of these geese actually have a collar that's put around their neck.

No, it doesn't hurt them or anything, but it has a little number, and so only a fraction of these geese have this collar, but we release them after they have it put on them.

And then they go and mix back in with their flock and I can go out there, count the total number of geese, and then count the number of geese that have that collar on and we can get a ratio of that, and from that we can estimate the population.

Pam: So we're going to go count the geese now?

Miles: Yeah, yeah.

I'll set up the scope, and I was wondering how you'd feel about helping me take some notes down?

Pam: Oh, I'd really like that.

Miles: Cool.

I'd appreciate that, thank you.

Pam: Sure.

Miles: I'm going to hand you our data sheet, and there's a pencil right there for ya.

Pam: Nice, thank you.

Alrighty, I'm ready.

Miles: So I'll start off, get my scope ready.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Miles: Okay, so first impression, it's kind of a small number, it's 15.

Pam: Okay, 15.

Miles: So we're going to have 15 Aleutians marked.

Miles: And now I'm going to look more in-depth, and this'll be a larger number because I'm confirming whether or not they're Aleutian geese or Aleutian cackling geese.

Pam: How do you know that you're not counting something over again?

Miles: Well, I just go on a sweep from left to right.

Pam: Okay.

Miles: Now I'm looking at one that's behind this big clump of grass.

We might have to wait quite a bit for it to show itself.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Miles: Look, there's one with a collar.

Oh, and there's another one, another collar right now.

And then finally I need coordinates from where we're observing.

Pam: Okay, latitude, longitude.

Miles: Yeah, so right now we are at 40 degrees-- Pam: 40, 41.

40 degrees, 41 minutes, and 166, 13, 266.

Got it.

West.

Neat, that's where we're located.

Miles: Yeah.

Pam: On the planet.

That's great.

Please make sure, everyone, that you write your name on your paper.

If you don't, the teacher has no idea whose paper it is and you can't get credit.

If you can't get credit, then why did you do the assignment?

So make sure that you write your name.

It's important.

Pam: So, why is collecting this information important, Miles?

Miles: Well, for starters, Aleutian cackling geese were actually once an endangered species.

The island that they lived on had a fox introduced to them, and the fox ate a lot of their eggs and unfortunately it knocked their population down, but efforts were put into place to kind of bring that population up, and they're actually doing very well right now, but there is kind of a-- Pam: Competition?

Miles: Yeah, kind of a conflict between humans and these geese.

A lot of our local farmers can be inconvenienced by these a lot because they'll come down in flocks of thousands and just eat everything on their fields.

You know, this grass is meant for cows, for food that we all eat.

It's how these farmers make their living, and so we're trying to find a balance.

That's one of the reasons why we have this refuge.

We've opened up a lot of our land to try and get the geese to come here instead of those private farm fields.

Pam: So we have the data here, Miles, and then what happens?

Miles: Well, all this data is going to go to a government office far away, and a bunch of people that are also doing the survey are going to send theirs in.

They're going to take all that information and they're going to find ratios and put it into formulas, and then we can get a population estimate for the entire population of geese, and also figure out how that's dispersed along the coast.

Pam: Sounds like a lot of math.

Miles: Yeah.

Pam and Miles: This looks like a job for Number Woman.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Number Woman: Pam, that technique you're talking about is the mark-recapture technique.

So let's go ahead and look at the formula.

So, what we start with is N equals, and that's our total population of geese, and what that equals is first of all, you have marked geese that are marked in the past and you know that number.

And then you're going to multiply that, so that's the marked geese, and then you're going to multiply that by a current random population that you look at.

So you look out and you count the geese, and those geese, or a surveyor that's out there counting, is gonna be marked and unmarked.

But that's going to be that random current sample, not like the ones marked in the past.

And in that random current sample, once you've counted up the marked and unmarked, the surveyor is going to divide out the letter R which is going to be the marked that you see in that current random marked-and-unmarked sample that the surveyors counted.

That's going to be the marked in that random sample.

So, Pam, when you went out on that field trip, you knew that you had 20 geese that were marked in the past.

And then, what you did is you counted 800 geese, and when you counted out 800 geese, you noticed that you saw two that were marked.

So we're going to divide out the two that were marked when you counted up that 800 geese.

And so what we end up with is 16,000 divided by 2, which is a population of 8,000 Aleutian cackling geese in total.

Back to you, Pam.

Denise: So Pam, there is a lot more to this wildlife refuge.

Pam: Really?

Denise: Yeah, we have to go check out the Dunes.

Pam: Let's do it.

Denise: All right.

♪♪♪ Denise: So, here we are, Pam, the Lanphere Dunes.

Pam: Wow, this place is amazing.

Denise, can you tell me more about it?

Denise: I could, but there're some other people you need to meet.

I gotta go.

Pam: All right, well, thank you so much.

Really appreciate it.

Denise: All right, bye.

Pam: Bye.

♪♪♪ female: There's a lot of babies here, too, that we can just pull with our hands.

♪♪♪ Pam: Hi, I'm Pam.

Jillian Zimmerman: Hi there.

Welcome to Lanphere Dunes.

Pam: Thank you.

Who are you?

Jillian: I'm Jillian Zimmerman.

Jessica Burroughs: I'm Jessica Burroughs.

Pam: Nice to see you.

You know, I was sent here by Denise from the Humboldt Bay Wildlife Refuge because this is part of the refuge too.

How cool is that?

Now, these are dunes.

Tell me more about them.

Jillian: Well, we do a lot of restoration projects here, and that just means we're getting rid of all the invasive species and letting the native plants come back to life.

Pam: This plant, what's--this is a nonnative plant, a plant that wasn't here, a plant that was introduced.

What does that mean in terms of, like, what does it do that's not necessarily good in this environment?

Jillian: Yeah, it outweighs the natives, so all these other natives that we have on the ground, it takes over the land and so those natives then die and they can't form and create like a beautiful, natural dune that we want here.

Pam: I got you.

So these are competing.

It's like, I'm at war with you.

I'm gonna get you, and you can't grow anymore, so too bad for you."

And that poor little native plant's like, "No, no, don't do that."

But this plant's like, "I'm doin' great here.

It's a beautiful place."

And so you guys are trying to take care of it.

Jillian: Yeah, that's right.

We want it to be more of in its natural form of how it should be, how these dunes should really form.

Jillian: So, I know that these plants change the soil.

Do you know anything about that?

Pam: Yes, actually I think so.

These nodules contain bacteria.

The bacteria take the nitrogen from the air and they put it into the soil.

Now, that's good for plants.

The only thing is, it changes the soil here into the type of soil that's only good for these guys, these non-native plants, and not good for native plants.

So, even though this is a good thing, nitrogen fixation, it's not good here.

Jillian: Mm-hm, right.

Yeah, 'cause I've heard that nitrogen is good for some soil, but yeah, here it really lets these invasives sprout and they grow really strong, which we don't want that.

Pam: Yes, we want to keep this the way it was.

And it's not just these plants.

Who is relying on these plants?

What is around here that relies on these plants.

Jillian: Right, well, there's a lot of native animals here.

Yeah, birds-- Pam: Cool.

Can you maybe show me one?

Jillian: Yeah.

Pam: Awesome.

Jillian: We have some over here, actually.

Pam: Oh my gosh, look at this.

Jillian and Pam: Wow.

Pam: So many little creatures.

♪♪♪ Can you tell me about this?

What's going on here?

Jillian: If we look real closely, these are ants, actually.

Pam: Wow, it looks like the ground is alive.

Jillian: It does.

Yeah, they're specifically called thatcher ants.

Pam: Thatcher ants?

What does "thatch" mean?

Jillian: Thatch is in reference to like a log cabin.

A thatcher roof is built in a way that's climate controlled, and that's what these ants are doing with their mound right now.

And they're building it in such a way that if it gets too hot in the general climate area, they can make it cool, and if it's too cold, they can make it warmer with the way that they built with these twigs and dead vegetation they find around.

Pam: So we were talking about natives and non-native plants.

These guys are reliant on these native plants.

Jillian: Yes, indeed they are.

Pam: Very nice.

I see a bunch of little twig things that they probably-- how'd they get there?

Jillian: Well they probably dragged them in there.

Pam: They'e pretty strong, those ants.

It's amazing what they can carry.

Jillian: Sometimes they'll abandon mounds and make new ones, and that could be happening here too.

Pam: Yeah, 'cause it looks pretty flat.

Yeah, we're calling it a mound, but it will get bigger as they add more twigs.

Jillian: Absolutely, yeah.

Pam: That is just amazing, and talk about working together.

There doesn't seem to be any problems at all.

They're just doing their thing.

Jillian: Yeah, it's incredible how they communicate in an instant to tell each other to go out scouting or to help build.

They all have their roles.

Pam: Very cool.

Pam: Jillian, Jessica, Nicole, and I set out on a quest across the dunes to discover the various species of plants and creatures who all depend on one another for survival in these rolling hills.

We traversed for what seemed like days, stopping only to admire the diversity of life that makes up the earth's tapestry.

And before we knew it, we had reached the edge of the land, standing before the vast Pacific Ocean.

Pam: Here we are at the Pacific Ocean, a very, very powerful body of water.

I was just looking at a huge, giant log that got pushed by the water.

The water has no problem doing that.

In the wintertime, the waves are much stronger than they are in the summertime.

In the summertime it kind of slows down, but in the winter, the waves are crashing, we have all kinds of warnings like, "Be careful, the waves are high," so you gotta be careful when you get near the ocean in the wintertime.

But the winter waves can move stuff like that, which is incredible.

So, eating away the sand's what happens in the wintertime, and then in the summertime the sand gets kind of pushed back and onto the beach.

So that's one of the cool things that happens here, and it's part of what makes these dunes and tears them down.

Jessica, look at all those little birds going.

Who are they and what are they doing?

Jillian: So these are Dunlin, and they are currently foraging for food.

Pam: That means they're looking or it.

Look at them run along the beach.

That is so cool.

Jillian: Yeah, they're also trying not to get too wet.

Pam: But they do that because when the water comes in and then goes out, I see bubbles, I see bubbles.

Jillian: Yeah, that's the food that's coming from the bottom, and that could be anywhere from worms, mollusks, to clams, little tiny clams.

Pam: Oh my goodness, look at them.

Jillian: They poke their beaks into the sand again and pull up little tiny morsels out to eat.

Pam: That is incredible.

Pam: This is a piece of trash that shouldn't be on the beach, but it's known as a float, so it floats on the water and it holds ropes and things like that, but this is what's bad about it.

Look at it, it's cracked, it's little pieces, this is called Styrofoam.

It doesn't break down, and so little pieces end up everywhere and things like fish can mistake it for food and then the fish gets full of Styrofoam and that makes the fish sick.

So, this is good.

If you guys see this sort of thing, make sure you pick it up.

Especially if you bring a backpack, it's a good place to put trash.

Pam: And pick up trash we did.

Though we lacked the proper protective gear, we did our best to find and remove all unnatural types of litter scattered along the beach.

We do not choose to be caretakers of the dunes for fame and fortune.

We choose because it's the right thing to do.

Jillian: Hey Pam, check out this flower.

It's Humboldt Bay Wallflower.

Have you seen it before?

Pam: No, I don't think I ever have.

Is it native or non-native, Jillian?

Jillian: It's native.

It's only found here in Lanphere Dunes.

Pam: Wow, that makes it really special, and that makes it so that the yellow lupine is not a good thing to have around here.

Jillian: That's right.

So then, when we take down the lupine, this can grow.

Pam: And is it found here, or other places as well?

Jillian: There are a couple other species, but they're more southern.

But this Humboldt Bay Wallflower is just found here.

Pam: Is there a special name for that?

Jillian: It's an endemic, so that means it's just found here.

It's part of our rare and endangered flowers that you can find here on Lanphere-- Pam: And important that we don't step on it.

Jillian: Correct, yes.

So that's why it's really important to stay on the trails, and as you see on our signs, no dogs are allowed, no horseback riding or bikes, just because we want to keep this place very pristine and just keeping on the trails.

Pam: Excellent.

Thanks for that, Jillian.

Jillian: Yeah.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Jillian: So, one other thing I wanted to tell ya is that this is still a dune that we're standing on, and it's just a very stable one.

♪♪♪ Pam: All right, Jessica, we just came from the dunes, which are a completely different environment than this, and here's a big tree behind you.

Jessica: Yeah.

Pam: Tell us more, please.

Jessica: Completely different terrain, and that's because as the dunes go more inland, they become more stable, and as a result, we can have these giant sitka spruce trees.

You can see moss, and there's different kinds of moss.

And we're seeing right here right now beaked moss.

But we also have witches' hair, common name, and-- Pam: Is this--this isn't mo--wait, is this moss?

Jessica: This is lichen.

Pam: This is lichen.

That's what I thought.

Jessica: Yeah, there's lichens, there's moss, and there's tons of producers and decomposers that most people don't really notice or look around.

Pam: Can you tell me the difference between a moss and a lichen?

Jessica: Lichen has two organisms that work together.

Pam: Oh, yes.

An algae and a fungus, with the algae performing the photosynthesis and the fungus providing the structure?

Jessica: Correct.

Yeah, and then a moss just photosynthesizes by itself.

Pam: Boy, there's a lot going on in this forest floor, Jessica.

What can you tell me?

Jessica: Yeah, so if you look real closely, there's this pale white green lichen, and it's amongst this manzanita.

It's called ground manzanita, or bearberry.

This is a very interesting combination.

The lichen works with the bearberry in a mutualistic relationship.

Pam: When you say mutualistic, what are you talking about?

Jessica: They are symbiotic with each other, meaning they work together to fuel and produce and decompose the forest floor.

Pam: And see, these are native.

Jessica: Correct, yes.

Pam: And, do we have any non-natives?

Jessica: We do, and I'll point that out to you shortly, but there is a native campylopus here, and it looks like this, and it has these long hairs, but they don't have silver hairs like the invasive does, and-- Pam: So this is a moss.

Jessica: It's a moss, correct, yeah.

Pam: And so it is native.

Jessica: It is native.

Pam: All right, and so we're looking at a native moss, a native bearberry, bearberry, and a lichen.

Okay, so these guys are all native.

Are there any non-natives?

Jessica: Yeah, there is, and I'm going to show you that a little bit down that way.

Pam: All right, let's do it.

Jessica: So, I just wanted to point out one last thing today.

This is invasive campylopus introflexus, or heath star moss.

And you can tell the difference between the native, which is also kind of feathered, by these silver hairs that are sticking out from it.

It kind of needs more exploration on the impacts, but it does take up habitat and space that natives need.

Pam: Yes, there's the native, little space; there's the bigger non-native, wow.

Denise: So if you'd like to come out to this amazing place, there is a process.

You need to have a permit, and it's real easy.

You just need to go on a "Friends of the Dunes Guided Walk" the first Saturday of every month.

Contact "Friends of the Dunes" to sign up for that.

You can then ask for a permit, and you can come out here.

It's a very special place, so there're special regulations that you need to know before you come out.

Pam: That makes sense.

Thank you very much, Denise.

Denise: You're welcome.

Denise: They're now containment.

Be like, "Noooo."

Jillian: It's called Humboldt Bay National Wildlife, or, sorry-- [crosstalking] Pam: It's the forest floor, Jillian.

What can you show me?

So it's--Jessica.

Sorry, Jillian.

Jillian: That's okay.

Pam: Sorry, Jessica.

Denise: So, if you'd like to ma--come out-- okay, so-- ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪