These WAP submissions indicate whether the wood buyer practiced silviculture or planted saplings on privately owned lands. It is Regional Service's responsibility to go out and check the sites (they are provided with maps and GPS coordinates). Sounds simple, right?
1. Go to site.
2. Check site for silviculture or saplings by counting trees on a grid centered on the affected site.
Piece of cake! Except...
Most forestry technicians do these in the fall, after the ferns die off, or in the spring, before everything (i.e. ferns and thorny plants) grow up. The technician who trained us to check these sites was incredulous at the thought of us doing them at the height of summer. He suggested it was as close to hell as we were ever going to get, and he wouldn't even consider doing them himself.
Both of which I was really glad to hear before we ever got started. There was an end-of-the-month deadline, so delaying them was not an option.
So we travel to the field camp (which is a fire station in central NS - great lodgings!) and got to work.
Calling it hell was being nice. I have never experienced something so awful as trudging through chest deep brush from a thinning operation, all the while getting dive bombed by horse flies that can bite through jeans. Or struggling through 6-ft tall trailing thorn vines, which wrapped around you and dug into you through jeans. Or pushing through thick, thick regrowth only to disturb a wasp's nest and get stung (5 times, through jeans). See a pattern?
The above image is me at one of our first sites... All geared up with my 1m measuring stick. I was still enjoying it at this point. That didn't last long.
Between the heat, the sweat, the blood, and the exhaustion, we managed to get the WAPs completed before the deadline. And now that I know what doing WAPs is all about, if the same opportunity comes up next year - the summer students can have at'er (unless it's in the spring, of course - then I'm game) :P
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