Part II, Day 1: 080627

The first day of Part II of my 4-or-5 part summer o’ biology fieldwork. I got up horribly early, and drove a U of Guelph full-size van to school, to pick up some of my companions for this leg of my trip. I am travelling with people who are mostly affiliated with the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario, an institute at the University of Guelph. You may have heard of DNA barcoding; these are the people perhaps most directly involved in that.

Today was a day devoted to driving; I did no collecting. We got stuck in just a little 401 / 400 highway traffic*, and passed through the cottage country east of Georgian Bay. We ended the day at a private campground just beyond Sault Ste. Marie, a place on the shore of Lake Superior named “Harmony Beach”.

* Note to readers not familiar with southern Ontario: the 400-level highways are the largest highways in Ontario; they are mostly concentrated in the vicinity of Toronto. The 400 runs North from Toronto, the 401 runs East-West with Toronto near the middle.

I was born on the shore of Lake Superior, in Thunder Bay, reputedly in a hospital room overlooking the frozen surface of the world’s largest-by-surface-area freshwater lake. It feels good to be back at the lake of my birth, even though we are currently nearly 1000 kilometres from Thunder Bay.

Tomorrow we’ll continue on to Pukaskwa National Park, to camp for a few nights and collect some of the invertebrates of Lake Superior and its contributing waterways.