So - this herbicide spray didn’t actually happen yet to entire area marked, but to just ~2 acres of ~350. It will happen in Aug. There is opportunity to count bumble bees, maybe find Rusty Patched BB to justify a protection order and/or rescue plants. Near existing Line 3 ROW. If MN Court of Appeals throws a monkey wrench in Enbridge’s plan, there’s still plenty of good work here to protect wild blueberries, raspberries, food plants and nectar/pollen plants of endangered pollinators, hunting grounds of Tiger Beetles.

My first take on rumor of Enbridge actions to shutdown ceremony is they are punching down at poor people, racialized and minority religious observances because they worry traditional knowledge/indigenous science is compatible with observations of nature by non-native allies... ...and “Protecting the Sacred” may lead to discovery of additional science facts of protected species like migratory birds, e.g. cranes, or endangered insects in their intended workspace on public land, treaty land that they’re not yet actively working on.

I left camp last night to do an overnight at home. I don’t want to have thorough tick checks performed by strangers or let any of the deer ticks secretly latch in and go undetected. Getting Lyme’s in 2013 was not cool. I meed to keep things alive in my very small indoor conservation garden. I noticed a new sprout in my own “cone-tainers” this AM. I have some willow seeds to process. I’ll be back ASAP!

Right now, Enbridge’s planned drill pad sight is a bare patch of muddy earth that is 100% inhabited by a neat nix of ants, solitary wasps and bees, hunting spiders that don’t use webs of several type, and breeding tiger beetles. As there are state-listed #TigerBeetles, @mndnr... ...might want to put a stay on HDD at that drill pad site until a #Coleoptera expert gets a chance to ID them. There seems to be at least one species, similar to but also different from what I’ve seem at Fosston Trail, also Clearwater County: