Taylor Wilderness Research Station Archive

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:15:25
Bridget Bradshaw:
Well. Hummingbird.

00:00:15:27 - 00:00:20:17
Bridget Bradshaw:
Sometimes at Taylor, you get surprise wildlife.

00:00:20:20 - 00:00:28:02
Unknown
Oh hey, buddy! Come here.

00:00:28:05 - 00:00:36:07
Bridget Bradshaw:
Hannah Wilson and I went into the lab one afternoon to look at maps, but we had to stop for a brief rescue mission.

00:00:36:09 - 00:00:38:12
Hannah Wilson Creel:
Oh hi, cutie.

00:00:38:15 - 00:00:39:24
Bridget Bradshaw:
Go get some sugar water, you’re probably tired.

00:00:39:24 - 00:00:44:06
Hannah Wilson Creel:
He has pollen on his nose.

00:00:44:08 - 00:00:55:28
Hannah Wilson Creel:
Can you see it? Tell me when you’re ready.

00:00:55:00
Hannah Wilson Creel:
Ready.

00:00:56:01 - 00:01:06:12
Hannah Wilson Creel:
That’s pretty awesome. […] Could you. Could you hear it on there? Poor baby. All right. what do you want me to do?

00:01:06:12 - 00:01:09:26
Bridget Bradshaw:
Right back to the task.

00:01:09:28 - 00:01:18:04
Hannah Wilson Creel:
Let’s go open the map cabinet. The map cabinet! There’s a label coming off.

00:01:18:06 - 00:01:24:01
Bridget Bradshaw:
That’s Hannah. Hummingbird Princess, and a graduate student at the University of Idaho.

00:01:24:01 - 00:01:28:28
Hannah Wilson Creel:
I don’t […] with American fly.

00:01:29:00 - 00:01:31:29
Bridget Bradshaw:
For all intents and purposes, the maps we are looking at are

00:01:32:06 - 00:01:32:27
Hannah Wilson Creel:
There’s this awesome,

00:01:33:00 - 00:01:33:20
Bridget Bradshaw:
Her babies.

00:01:33:20 - 00:01:59:22
Hannah Wilson Creel:
Leather. Faux leather. One day I ended up with the entire floor of the lab covered in quads just so I could see the full Big Creek drainage, so it would go from the Dave Lewis through to draw a line across. Dave Lewis going upstream Mormon Mountain, Monument, Central Mountain, and Edwardsburgh. What else do you want to know about the mappies?

00:01:59:24 - 00:02:17:29
Bridget Bradshaw:
Can we pull out your springs map and look at that? This map is the favorite child. It stands out amongst the rest, and you can see how much it’s been lived. And feel the softness from hundreds of folding and unfolding in the paper.

00:02:18:01 - 00:02:25:29
Hannah Wilson Creel:
So Taylor is in the Dave Lewis peak, which makes so much sense.

00:02:26:01 - 00:02:36:01
Bridget Bradshaw:
This map has all the usual things you’d find on the rest of these quadrangles, the dotted trails and the topographic lines. They all have peaks and ridges and mountains.

00:02:36:01 - 00:02:59:06
Hannah Wilson Creel:
And the way that quads work is you have them, let’s see, so you have an area and then they’ll say on the side of them which one goes next. So like this one that we’re looking at Acorn Butte, Idaho. Puddin mountain, puddin mountain, one of the interns is like, I don’t I don’t know how to say this puddin,

00:02:59:09
Hannah Wilson Creel:
And I was like, puddin. Haven’t you ever eaten banana puddin?

00:03:03:00
Bridget Bradshaw:
Had puddin? Okay, so take it over to a table?

00:03:04:18 - 00:03:14:25
Bridget Bradshaw:
But if you lean in closer, you’ll see that this particular map is sprinkled with tiny penciled in asterisks.

00:03:14:27 - 00:03:16:13
Hannah Wilson Creel:
Big Creek goes in the top.

00:03:16:16 - 00:03:41:23
Bridget Bradshaw:
And each one marks a place where, in a sea of dry, rocky, steep slopes, there is an island of lushness. Or at least theoretically, there is an island of lushness. They are at least the last known whereabouts of lushness, to the best of someone’s recollection. Because this map is more like a collection of memories and stories of where springs used to be.

00:03:42:00 - 00:03:42:28
Hannah Wilson Creel:
Okay, so we

00:03:43:00 - 00:03:50:14
Bridget Bradshaw:
And it’s Hannah’s job to ground truth them to find out if the stories are real.

00:03:50:16 - 00:04:16:21
Hannah Wilson Creel:
And so when I first started my springs work, and were interviewing Jim and Holly Akenson, they were the, caretakers back here. And we got on a zoom together. They live in Oregon, and I had my quadrangle out, and then they had um, I think they were on Google Earth and they had their quads and they would tell me approximately where to look.

00:04:16:21 - 00:04:42:25
Hannah Wilson Creel:
So like right here it says National Forest, Frank Church, Payette National Forest, Frank Church. And he’d say, go south of the ‘t’ in national and put an asterisk right there. That’s all I was going off of was like, okay, if I’m standing at this peak, I need to walk west until I hit water, and sometimes I’d find them and sometimes I wouldn’t.

00:04:42:28 - 00:05:00:26
Bridget Bradshaw:
Hannah is working with Doctor Mary Engels, an assistant professor in the University of Idaho’s College of Natural Resources. Okay. Are you ready for what may or may not be kind of an awkwardly timed interview?

00:05:00:28 - 00:05:08:21
Mary Engels:
Oh, hello. Let’s let’s do it. Let’s do it.

00:05:08:23 - 00:05:19:27
Mary Engels:
Over the years, I’ve looked at a lot of different things, though, like, you know, sort of the throughline through a lot of this is water in one form or another.

00:05:19:29 - 00:05:31:07
Bridget Bradshaw:
Doctor Engels didn’t begin in spring research. In fact, landlocked freshwater research is the opposite of what she spent her career working on up until this point.

00:05:31:09 - 00:05:59:25
Mary Engels:
I’ve looked at things from like growth patterns of coral reefs under different stages of sea level to, the habitats rotation patterns of ocean water striders. How does oxygen limit tuna migrations?

00:05:51:00
Bridget Bradshaw:
And now?

00:05:53:00
Mary Engels:
More recently, a lot of my interest is centered around the islands.

00:05:58:00
Bridget Bradshaw:
The genius of ecology is that you can find parallels in opposites and a spring, in a dry landscape is like an island in a lot of ways. A little dot of hospitality in an otherwise inhospitable sea. So as a, fellow island-phile, what is it about islands that you’re like? Yes! Because I’m that way too.

00:06:26:07 - 00:06:47:03
Mary Engels:
Yeah. Well, so okay, so I just think that there’s so many really interesting things that come together in, for Islands. and I’m going to talk here for a moment about the oceanic islands. So when you were looking at islands, how, isolated that island often will control the number of species that you have on the island.

00:06:47:05 - 00:07:07:04
Mary Engels:
So, for example, in Hawaii, I studied corals that, around the islands. And Hawaii is one of the most remote islands anywhere in the world. So it has relatively few coral species. And that means that there’s this phenotypic plasticity to the corals that you just don’t see in other parts of the world. Oh.

00:07:07:07 - 00:07:41:18
Bridget Bradshaw:
Hang on, hang on, hang on. So phenotypic plasticity, big words. But a phenotype is more or less what an organism looks like. Like what you can know about it just by looking with your eyes. For example, I am 54 with hazel eyes. I bite my nails. I’m good at baking but not cooking. Luckily, I live with someone who’s a good cook, and if I had phenotypic plasticity, that means that should I be left alone for a week?

00:07:41:18 - 00:08:04:01
Bridget Bradshaw:
God forbid. I can cook for myself. I might not be as good, I might make more of a mess, but it is within my genetic means to cook a nice meal. Now, if I needed to change my nails to be unchewable, my phenotype is pretty rigid, even if it would be better for me if my nails tasted like ghost peppers,

00:08:04:08 - 00:08:29:03
Bridget Bradshaw:
It’s just not in my genetic wheelhouse to make that happen. Oh well. But maybe I’m the only cook now. And so now I bake and I cook. I filled this open niche. It’s not so different from an ecosystem with lots of job openings. Some organism is going to feel them. It’s just a matter of who and how long it will take them.

00:08:29:05 - 00:08:33:13
Bridget Bradshaw:
Anyway, back to Hawaii.

00:08:33:15 - 00:09:03:06
Mary Engels:
So these corals are expanding out into these available niches, because there isn’t any competition. And so that’s one of the things that I find really interesting about islands is that if you have species there and you give them the time, they will figure out how to exploit the environment that’s around them. and you know, so that’s, that’s one of the things that I find really interesting about islands.

00:09:03:08 - 00:09:13:23
Bridget Bradshaw:
So how does the spring research that you’re doing here fit under the umbrella of those big interests like Island ecosystem?

00:09:13:26 - 00:09:41:25
Mary Engels:
Yeah. Well, so I was visiting a friend’s ranch that’s on the Middle Fork. and they almost lost that ranch in 2018 when a big fire burned through there. And it was fascinating to walk around. The property was really interesting because it’s this incredibly burned area. And then we we come across these springs, and they were just these bright islands of green in this otherwise pretty decimated landscape.

00:09:41:27 - 00:10:19:22
Bridget Bradshaw:
The west central mountain ecosystem is one that revolves around fire. And these springs, they’re like little green islands in a sea of fire. You have this forest that burns and regenerates and burns and regenerates. And it’s possible that the plants and animals weather this storm sheltered by these little green islands, and that they are the stock that goes out and repopulates that forest. In science, places that stay hospitable in the midst of a great deadly event like that are called refugia, basically, where plants and animals take refuge.

00:10:19:25 - 00:10:29:00
Bridget Bradshaw:
When Hannah and I were looking at her springs map, we reflected on the springs we’d found the day before up on the south face of the Big Creek drainage.

00:10:29:03 - 00:10:54:14
Hannah Wilson Creel:
What else I thought was neat was, the area had burned wood badly in the diamond complex fire in, 2000. And these spring sites were also regenerating the Doug firs out there, which made me really excited. Little babies. which is so important because, like, right above it, you didn’t see any regrowth, right? But right there around that bench, you saw the regrowth of the Doug firs.

00:10:54:14 - 00:11:02:02
Hannah Wilson Creel:
Yeah. I hadn’t thought about, That being the case.

00:11:02:04 - 00:11:23:19
Mary Engels:
Like from some of the work that Hannah has been doing out there, right, mapping actually just mapping where the springs are, we have some of them that come out, and are clearly in the riparian area already. So they are relatively close to water. And then you have springs that are, removed from the riparian areas and are truly these sort of unique landscape features.

00:11:23:21 - 00:11:41:00
Mary Engels:
But regardless, both of those, then provide year round water in a way that, that the, precipitation derived, water does not. And so what is the importance of that to the larger landscape?

00:11:41:02 - 00:11:54:19
Bridget Bradshaw:
Do we see different organisms at every little green island, or are they all kind of the same? Do they get more diverse the closer they are to big riparian corridors? We don’t know yet.

00:11:54:21 - 00:12:09:12
Mary Engels:
I think there’s a lot of interesting things there to to try to better understand about these springs. And, their role and, this larger landscape.

00:12:09:14 - 00:12:11:23
Bridget Bradshaw:
And this is where Hannah’s field work comes in.

00:12:11:25 - 00:12:33:21
Hannah Wilson Creel:
A funny little side note about my life. I’ve been thinking about this. You have lots of time to think when you hike to these springs. It takes a long time to get to them. The other day, I was out for 12 hours just getting springs and, ever since I was a little girl, I have loved springs.

00:12:33:21 - 00:12:50:29
Hannah Wilson Creel:
And I was out with my dad one day, and we had gone to an old wood yard to pick up wood chips, and we had borrowed someone’s dump truck. And so I was riding in the dump truck with him, and I thought I was big stuff because daddy had asked me to go with him to get wood chips for the garden and like, I could do anything.

00:12:50:29 - 00:13:13:20
Hannah Wilson Creel:
No. So while he’s loading the wood chips, I start exploring this old woodyard. I’ve driven by it my whole life. I’ve only been in there once. And so I was walking around and I found this pipe coming up out of the ground, and there was just clear water, like, gushing out of it. And I ran back and I was like, daddy, daddy, I found we call them overflowing wells in the South.

00:13:13:22 - 00:13:35:29
Hannah Wilson Creel:
And so I was like, I found an overflowing well. Can I drink out of it? And he was like, let me look at it. And so he went over there and he’s like, yeah, let’s try it. So we tried it and it tasted so good. And that ruined me because ever since then, I have just had this love for overflowing wells or springs.

00:13:36:02 - 00:13:47:05
Bridget Bradshaw:
And so here we are, perched at a little spring, secret springs, doing a vegetation survey to find out who’s here.

00:13:47:07
Hannah Wilson Creel:
Red veinberry. Ooh, that’s this one right here. That’s next to you. It’s highly poisonous.

Bridget Bradshaw:
00:13:51:07
Good to know. Won’t eat it.

00:13:53:07
Hannah Wilson Creel:
So don’t ever eat those leaves, okay? This is a new one. It’s so cute. See it?

00:14:00:29 - 00:14:05:23
Bridget Bradshaw:
Oh, my gosh, how cute it is. I want one as a pet. Hey little buddy!

00:14:05:26 - 00:14:25:19
Hannah Wilson Creel:
But I don’t know what it is. And is that a bird? Hee! Nope. That’s a little mammal. Little squirrel. Mammal squeaking. Little Colombian ground squirrel. So we got this summer. We got new instruments, which is super exciting. This is a YSI professional series.

00:14:25:22 - 00:14:32:25
Bridget Bradshaw:
Hannah gets out the handheld water sensor looks kind of like a brick mixed with a remote control.

00:14:32:28 - 00:14:40:02
Hannah Wilson Creel:
And then you just put water in it.

00:14:40:04 - 00:14:43:27
Hannah Wilson Creel:
And then it gives us all the readings. That’s a nice, cool spring.

00:14:43:29 - 00:14:44:18
Bridget Bradshaw:
Cold spring.

00:14:44:21 - 00:14:47:11
Hannah Wilson Creel:
Cold, cold.

00:14:47:14 - 00:14:58:21
Bridget Bradshaw:
After taking all of the water measurements and plant survey and bird surveys, she takes photos at the springs.

00:14:58:23 - 00:15:11:13
Hannah Wilson Creel:
Oh, turned out bad. The sun is kind of coming through. Can you lift your hand up for just a tad? Okay. All right.

00:15:11:16 - 00:15:18:19
Hannah Wilson Creel:
So that’s that’s all the things at the spring, at the spring for now.

00:15:18:22 - 00:15:25:02
Bridget Bradshaw:
She’s preparing this collection of springs data to pass on to the next graduate student in line.

00:15:25:04 - 00:15:42:29
Hannah Wilson Creel:
It’s just an amazing thing to see, to hear, to smell, the water coming straight up out of the ground, creating its own little oasis. It is like that. It is like an oasis.

00:15:43:02 - 00:15:48:16
Bridget Bradshaw:
The two of us are leaving soon to go on to do other things with our lives.

00:15:48:19 - 00:15:54:20
Hannah Wilson Creel:
You’re beautiful. You’re so beautiful. Never change.

00:15:54:22 - 00:16:04:02
Bridget Bradshaw:
So that’s the research. Now, do you have a vision for what you want this continuing project to look like?

00:16:04:05 - 00:16:09:27
Mary Engels:
I guess the way to answer that question is, did you ever read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe series?

00:16:09:29 - 00:16:12:20
Bridget Bradshaw:
Indeed.

00:16:12:23 - 00:16:35:00
Mary Engels:
So there’s some line in, I think it’s the the last book about come further up further in and, and I guess the science, I think of it that way. So there’s this whole side of the spring research that’s related to human interactions. Or I should say all of these ranches, that area out here have access to water in one form or another.

00:16:35:00 - 00:17:07:16
Mary Engels:
And I am willing to bet that most of them have springs that were, instrumental in, in leading people to choose those locations for settlement. But how has that changed? Like these are no longer necessarily, functioning working ranches. You know, I think a lot more of them now occupy this space of tourism. So how does that change the equation about water use in the backcountry?

00:17:07:18 - 00:17:26:23
Bridget Bradshaw:
The question of how humans use this water and how the water availability will change over time is still unanswered. A study out of Sarah Godsey’s lab with the Idaho State University has dated the groundwater coming from the springs around Big Creek to be between 40 and 60 years old.

00:17:26:26 - 00:17:50:14
Mary Engels:
You know, that is the world, climate-wise was a different place 40, 60 years ago. What does that mean? In this question of changing climate, and what does that look like going forward? So, that’s my long way of saying I think there are lots and lots of different connections. The more that we start looking at, the springs.

00:17:50:16 - 00:18:05:05
Bridget Bradshaw:
Connections between people and water and the landscape, the complexity of the ecosystem here is overwhelming at times, but it means that there’s lots of room for discovery and for learning.

00:18:05:08 - 00:18:37:01
Mary Engels:
I noticed this particularly being at sea or in the desert, but this is true in the in the backcountry, too. It’s just there’s all these surprising things, surprising confluence of, geology and, biology that occur in different little places. And maybe this is part of the reason that springs are interesting to me. Right? It’s like you’re you’re trekking through, in this otherwise, this time of year, very hot rocky area.

00:18:37:01 - 00:19:15:11
Mary Engels:
And you come around the corner and you see green! When that is, it seems like it would be out of character with the rest of that place. it’s these barriers that that are sometimes visible to us and sometimes not. And, and I love in the wilderness that it is, there’s all that complexity. We as humans, I feel like when we’re in, in human dominated environments, I think they start to reflect our minds a little bit and that we like things to be structured in order, not that it always is.

00:19:15:13 - 00:19:38:16
Mary Engels:
And the wilderness doesn’t have that in the same way. And I think that is good, at least for me, for my brain to not have it all figured out when I’m out there cruising around and it opens me up in a way, to unexpected joy of surprise, of finding these cool things that are out there.

00:19:38:18 - 00:19:46:00
Bridget Bradshaw:
The joy of surprise. Yeah, yeah.

00:19:46:02 - 00:19:48:17
Bridget Bradshaw:
What other things did you see yesterday?

00:19:48:20 - 00:20:15:29
Hannah Wilson Creel:
Oh my goodness, I’ve never seen this before. Found a spring that we weren’t expecting. I thought you were about to step on a snake. Couldn’t tell what it was. And being from Alabama. All snakes are poisonous in my mind, even though I know they’re not. Don’t worry, I’m not that bad. but I couldn’t see his head, and I thought maybe he was dead at the spring, which I thought was really weird.

00:20:16:01 - 00:20:40:03
Hannah Wilson Creel:
Definitely makes me not want to drink out of it. Poison dead snake spring, but it was a bull snake, and it was alive. And it had protected its head under, like, this little rock overhang. And it was drinking, a little drinking snake. I had never seen a snake drink in my life. Never even thought about snakes drinking

00:20:40:05 - 00:20:49:02
Hannah Wilson Creel:
And it was just I was about to try to make a sound, but I don’t know if snakes make sounds while they drink.

00:20:49:04 - 00:21:04:05
Bridget Bradshaw:
One of the beautiful things about the Taylor Wilderness Research Station and about field campuses everywhere, is that you’re put in the direct path of surprise every day, just walking between your tent and the kitchen.

00:21:04:07 - 00:21:17:24
Hannah Wilson Creel:
And so now I’m getting to the point I found three springs so far that nobody’s told me about. yeah, three. That’s a really good feeling.

00:21:17:27 - 00:21:18:26
Bridget Bradshaw:
Discovery.

00:21:18:28 - 00:21:38:20
Hannah Wilson Creel:
It’s discovery. Yeah. It makes me feel like I’m not just going through the motions of what someone’s telling me now. Like I’ve gotten to the point where I can do it on my own and kind of figure it out on my own.

00:21:38:22 - 00:21:54:07
Bridget Bradshaw:
Doctor Engels, who worked aboard research vessels for most of her career, knows this, and I asked her about parallels that she sees between island ecosystems and educational settings.

00:21:54:09 - 00:22:25:28
Mary Engels:
Time. Time is a big part of it, in my experience. Right. Like if you have students for limited duration, well, so, you know, a lot of my experiential, education background comes from working for the Sea Education Association, which is a sailing organization that takes, students to see and to study oceanography, among other things.

00:22:26:00 - 00:22:57:20
Mary Engels:
And one of the things that is most powerful to my mind about that experience is that that experience is, 24 seven. The ship sails all the time. So you have to sail the ship all the time. So somebody has to be awake. You have to be doing stuff and doing science all the time. and there is real value in that from an educational perspective in my mind, because you open up these spaces for learning to happen where it is not scripted.

00:22:57:23 - 00:23:38:29
Mary Engels:
And so much of what we do in our, in our education systems now is about programing at the time, very specific periods of time. And I think that misses the necessity of having lull time, where creativity develops, where insights and connections are made, where these casual conversations develop into, exploration of deeper ideas. and so, you know, so that is definitely sort of one of the ways that this is a little bit like this, phenotypic plasticity.

00:23:39:02 - 00:23:59:16
Mary Engels:
And then it’s also a limited community. Right, like the edges of our ship, like we always described it as a problem solving with limited resources. And so, you know, yeah, you just got to figure it out. And the only way to do that is with the resources you have. And I feel like that is very similar to what,

00:23:59:18 - 00:24:10:04
Mary Engels:
What you see species doing on islands when there isn’t anything else there. So they just expand and fill niches that need to be filled.

00:24:10:06 - 00:24:46:28
Bridget Bradshaw:
It is easy to believe that the age of discovery and natural history has passed, and that field science is destined for extinction, and that research stations are no longer a funding priority. But I wonder if it’s just that we’ve forgotten the value of the joy of surprise, or the value of the time that you suddenly have when you live where you work, and maybe the value and the benefits of a little bit of discomfort.

00:24:47:00 - 00:24:57:18
Mary Engels:
Some amount of stress is required. Right, like you don’t learn much if you’re comfortable. Let’s put it that way.

00:24:57:20 - 00:25:10:11
Hannah Wilson Creel:
And thankfully mosquitoes aren’t super bad right now. Yeah, usually they’re atrocious. And it sounds like it sounds more like this.

00:25:18:23
Bridget Bradshaw:
Well, thank you for sharing.

00:25:26:00
Hannah Wilson Creel:
You’re welcome.

00:25:28:00
Bridget Bradshaw:
It’s a nice map.

00:25:30:00
Hannah Wilson Creel:
Keep it forever.

00:25:31:00
Bridget Bradshaw:
I want to, want to.

00:25:35:00
Hannah Wilson Creel:
My little map. I’m so particular about folding it. But it never fails. You’ll start to get little tears the more you look at it. And little holes. But it will always be pretty special.

00:25:47:25 - 00:26:15:15
Bridget Bradshaw:
Thank you to Hannah Wilson, Mary Engels, Teresa Cohn, and all of the people that go into making the Taylor Wilderness Research Station run.