Being Prepared

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Today was my first day of fieldwork for my own project. It's certainly one I won't forget in a hurry. I had planned to set out some Onduline sheets along a beach. Half of the Onduline would be in marram grass (nasty introduced grass, that the katipo don't like) and half in pingao (lovely bright orange endemic grass that katipo like). However there was no nice transition between marram and pingao areas, just the occasional tuft of marram in a sea of pingao. This is the sort of thing you learn in a pilot experiment, if you are prepared. It didn't make too much of a difference though. It did, however, mean that I spent the morning wandering around with a pile of Onduline looking for marram grass.

It was raining in Lincoln, but bright sunshine at the beach (as it always seems to be). Very windy though (as it always seems to be). I was quite happy walking about looking for marram grass amongst the pingao, occasionally checking to see if there were still katipo around. Every so often I glanced at the sea, as I have been told that dolphins sometimes turn up. The wind was blowing seaward, the waves weren't very strong and the sea was turning a beautiful turquoisy colour, a bit like milk with blue and green food colouring in it. But the sky on the horizon was blackening.

The wind was picking up, but I carried on my search safe in the knowledge that the wind was blowing the black clouds away from me, out to sea. I was wrong. Contradicting my experience flying hawks, whereby to check which way a storm is going you watch which way the grass bends, the black clouds were moving towards me. Rain was coming down in white streaks in the distance. The first shock of lightning was far too close for comfort: here was I in the middle of a beach, the tallest thing around, far away from my nice safe car! I have never been afraid of storms (in fact I love them and usually go out in them), and I know that nobody ever gets struck by lightning. But I'm no physicist and I'm not sure what the odds are of being struck when you're taller than everything else (I have never been taller than anything else). I eventually decided to stop working and legged it back to the car. Every time I saw the lightning, I dropped to the ground (not that my reactions are faster than lightning - it just seemed instinctive!). It was so close that it reflected off everything around me, producing blinding flashes of light, as though I was in a photo shoot. There was no rain, just wind and lightning. It took me ages to get to my car and shove everything inside, and get inside myself - I remembered learning when I was younger that a car makes a Faraday cage if you sit inside it and it gets struck by lightning: the metal exterior diverts the electricity away from you. As soon as I opened the door hailstones started pelting me, huge hailstones! In the two seconds it took me to get inside I was soaked. I didn't particularly want my car being struck, since it was now the tallest thing and I had planned to keep it in working order, so I drove until I found a taller thing - in this case, a power line. Was that wise? I don't know enough about electricity. I felt much safer though, and in another ten minutes the storm was gone and the blazing sunshine returned.

I went back to work, deciding it was foolish to carry about all of this Onduline. Instead I carried only the GPS receiver and a notebook, and marked places where I will put the Onduline. It might sound inefficient, but it means I can go directly to these places and put it there instead of wandering around with it.

I have learned 3 lessons: firstly, I draw the line at working on flat ground in a thunderstorm, and should therefore make my way back to the car if I see one approaching. Secondly, the wind does not always blow higher up in the same direction as it does on the ground.

Thirdly, marram grass is an invasive species that out-competes pingao, growing in dense clumps all over New Zealand. The most reliable aspect of this experiment was that marram would be easy to find, however it most certainly wasn't, and even when I found it it was not in dense clumps. Therefore, the aspect of my experiment least likely to go wrong went wrong!

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