Bog jumping

...trying to do a jump shot in a bog is like trying to get air off a water bed. I tried, but you just can't get the momentum to soar!

....I looked up enviously to see a hawk soar by harassed in hot pursuit by a breeding pair of Eastern King Birds at the edge of the bog though with ravens dancing above the hemlocks in the distance. Then, just before darkness a huge gangly sand hill crane cruised in like a giant lumbering lost dinosaur in the cattails. The echoes of its squaks like a velociraptor in the twilight.

I've come to mud bog with my friend Nate and three of my students. Their interested in doing a research project on inquiline communities, the community of creatures that live inside of water storing plants...like pitcher plants. Pitcher plants are freaks of nature and do things that well, plants just shouldn't do.....they EAT animals. They are carnivorous vegetables if you will....

You see living in the bog isn't easy. Bogs are like giant acid baths of murky water and organic matter trapped in a sort of purgatory of decomposition. The aenerobic conditions and acid waters created by spaghnum mosses, peat, act kind of like embalming water holding back the recycling of nutrients essential for most ecosystem "regularity". Nitrogen, a hard to get but essential nutrient, goes into short supply.

Those that do call the bog home learned to specialize, often in bizarre and ghoulish ways....Plants, like sundews, flytraps, and pitcher plants have even gone so far as to shun the soil and more actively look for their nutrients elsewhere. They have evolved to attract insects, trap them in ingeniously evolved containers, and slowly dissolve them for their nutrient juices.

Science stranger than science fiction. Just one of many reasons I love the bog. Its one place so bizarre it keeps up with my own imagination...