Fermilab ecologists take to skies for annual deer count

An overpopulation of deer can damage the ecosystem. Damage done to a tree by deer is visible in the photo from 1997.

If you see a helicopter overhead today, go ahead and wave.

Rod Walton, Fermilab's ecologist, and Ryan Campbell, environmental consultant, will take to the skies this morning to survey Fermilab's whitetail deer population.

They'll make several passes over the site, systematically counting the whitetail deer in quadrants of the laboratory as part of Fermilab's annual deer population survey.

A pilot has to fly the helicopter at 300 to 500 feet above the ground for the ecologists to count effectively. If the helicopter is too close to the ground, deer get frightened and scatter, and if it is too high, the deer are difficult to see. They do the survey in the winter when the deer are easier to spot.

"You can't do it unless there is a good snow cover," Walton said. "It has to be a sunny, snowy morning, so they cast a slight shadow."

Walton started the deer-counting program 10 years ago as a method of tracking the population. After each count, Walton reports the number of deer to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the organization then removes excess deer.

"Ten years ago, if you walked into Big Woods, there was nothing on the ground. You could see all the way through the woods. It looked like someone had gone through the forest with a lawn mower upside down and had trimmed everything at the same height," Walton said. "We do this for the health of the ecosystem."

When the program began, there were between 600 to 800 deer on site, and 15 to 25 deer-related car accidents on site per year. Today the USDA keeps the herd between 100 to 150 deer, and Fermilab has had one or two deer-related accidents each year.

"Now we have a very consistent and healthy population," Walton said. "We only need to remove 25-50 deer each year."

Each deer is autopsied to assess its condition and look for disease, and the deer meat is donated to local food pantries in Cook, DuPage and Kane counties.

-- Rhianna Wisniewski

Jets at CMS: First high-energy collisions

CMS measured the distribution of the production of jets in its early data. With the upcoming higher energy and increased data set, CMS physicists expect to see jets with more than 20 times the energy indicated here.

This result of the month finds us poised between the long-anticipated data taken before Christmas and the exciting prospect of taking even more data at higher energies in the near future.

CMS physicists have been using this time wisely to understand how our detector works and to verify that we can successfully measure the phenomena predicted by the Standard Model. Only after we demonstrate that we can see the expected should anyone take seriously claims of unexpected discoveries.

When the LHC again turns on, it will have the highest-energy beams in the world. However, equally important are the total number of collisions recorded. Just as buying a million lottery tickets improves your odds of winning the jackpot, the more collisions you have, the better chance you have of finding something truly rare. And, as the size of the CMS data set grows, we will discover common things first, followed by a long line of increasingly rare phenomena, hopefully culminating in something totally unexpected.

The most common high-energy interactions at the LHC are collisions between the quarks and gluons in the beam. Because these collisions are governed by the strongest of the four known forces, these kinds of interactions dominate the early data. These quarks and gluons experience post-collision interactions that convert them into jets, blasts of particles travelling in the same direction as the scattered object.

CMS measured the scattered energy of jets in the data taken from the running period just before Christmas. The data agrees rather well with the theoretical predictions. Since these predictions have been verified by other experiments, failure to confirm would have indicated a problem with the detector, rather than a discovery.

This confirmation sets the stage for the next measurement and all those that will follow, each hopefully exploring successively rarer phenomena. Be sure to watch this column for the steady series of measurements that will hopefully end with the three most exciting words in physics.

"Huh.that's weird."

-- Don Lincoln

These young physicists have contributed to the analysis of the first jet data. Group photo, from top left: Sertac Ozturk, Cukorova University and Fermilab; Seema Sharma, Fermilab; Chiyoung Jeong, Texas Tech; Selda Esen Koylu, Brown University; Jason St. John, Boston University; Jim Hirschauer, Fermilab; Kalanand Mishra, Fermilab;, Cosmin Dragoiu, University of Illinois, Chicago. Individual pictures: top: Kostas Kousouris, Fermilab, and bottom: Keith Rose, Rutgers University.