I am glad to learn that you are finally in the field. Hope the toilet is fixed soon. By the way, is Barbara Hurd on this expedition? If so, Jerri Dell sends her best.

Stay dry and keep a sharp lookout for Sphagnum. Perhaps more than three species will be found.

Eric

I am reading with great interest your adventures collecting mosses and liverworts in Tierra del Fuego and would like to know how a place so wet became known as the land of fire?

To make 100 collections in a single morning of collecting is an amazing accomplishment, especially considering that you still had the afternoon to collect another 100 or more! The only NYBG botanists to have gathered more collections of plants in their careers are the late Bassett Maguire (65,172 collection numbers) and the currently active Michael Nee (57,173 as of 17 July 2010). With 56,435 collectiion numbers before you left on this trip, you should pass Nee in the next several days and gain ground on Maguire by the end of the trip. I should, however, point out to others following this blog that Maguire and Nee gathered flowering plants and those take more time to collect and to process than do bryophytes which only have to be stuffed into a bag.

I know that you don’t care much about how many collections you make in relation to others, but the more botanists collect the greater our knowledge of the world’s plants becomes!

Scott