Ladies and Gentleman of this CLM internship, this is Ella. Today, we will talk about a tragic event that happened this month. After traveling to the great state of Washington with my fellow CLM Interns, I returned with a shivering cold. Headache, runny nose, tummy ache, I had it all, and days before the backpacking trip that we had planned for months, none the less!! What’s a girl to do? I wanted to go backpacking, but my health had a different idea. So instead, I hunkered down and watched my friends Ash and Katie head off on their great backpacking adventure. The next few days, I was left alone to work in our cubicle with two empty chairs; it was lonely, so I made friends with the local Keurig that was left in the kitchen who so kindly made me tea in the morning.

After a Monday of loneliness had past, it was then Tuesday and I was feeling much better health-wise, but the loneliness of the cubicle was still there until an angel came down in the shape of a Phillip who asked me to help with fish surveys. Phillip could never fill the void I felt in the absence of Ash and Katie, but he would do for now. So with that, we ventured off to conduct fish surveys, I was in charge of the handy dandy notebook, writing down what fish Phillip saw as he bobbed his head in and out of the water, which can only be compared to a duck hunting down its next meal. As my duck friend and I moved to our next fish scouting location, we emerged upon a swift-moving current. Phillip, with his duck-like abilities, crossed the current with no problem. It was then my turn, and as I took a step, the world crumbled below me and I found the current taking me away. Water fills my waders, and my backpack becomes soaked with tears and water from the river. I accepted my fate and allowed the current to take me away. As I drifted away, I thought of all the things I was going to miss: Ash, Katie, that piece of cheesecake in the fridge I hadn’t eaten yet, Yung Gravy and his potential for a new album, Glee, the American flag, Dr. Pepper, fireplaces, dogs, sweet Hawaiian roles, colorful pens, ranch, stickers, babybels, bagels, french fries, fuzzy socks, Mountain Dew, musicals, Saint Patrick’s day, We Bare Bears, party hats, the color yellow, the cashiers at target who don’t scan the bottom of our grocery cart, olive garden, when the sky is pink, Washington lilies, cornflower, filling up my water bottle, Monica, Bonfire by Childish Gambino, Caesar from the planet of the apes, bad ape, French vanilla coffee creamer, subway, karaoke, Thanksgiving, the idea of living in a hallmark movie, the idea of a truck with two doggies in the back (see previous blog post), Jason Derulo, Ireland, flannel, non-dairy oat beverage, and my family. The thought gave me the courage I need to stand up in the 2 feet of water that I was in. Although I rose up, my hopes were down; I make my way through the water to a sunny spot to lie down. By then, it was lunchtime, so I took the opportunity to dry off. The rest of the day was uneventful so we headed back early due to me being soaked and Phillip peeing himself.

Fall is now in full swing here in the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit. The lake is now cold enough to scare off all but the bravest swimmers, and my beloved aspens have turned golden, beginning to drop their leaves. Life in general seems to be quieting down up here, with everyone adjusting to the shorter days, colder nights, and emotionally preparing for the winter. But while all the tourists are clearing out from the summer and the plants are senescing for the season, September has been our busiest month yet.

We are quickly approaching the end of seed collection season, so we have been on the hunt for any more seeding populations while collecting. It’s been a bit of a scouting and collecting frenzy, with the whole crew dispersing from the office in the morning and driving all day in search of seeding target species. Our seed hunt has brought us all over the basin, including right to the border between the LTBMU and the El Dorado National Forest. Unfortunately, most of the additional populations we’ve scouted in September have been past seed. Though we have stumbled upon a few fruitful populations this month, the rest of the new sites we’ve mapped will be used for seed collections next year.

This week, on top of our scouting and collecting, we’ve been making seed mixes for ran ongoing restoration project. Later, we will use these to revegetate a large area called Incline Meadow, formerly known as Incline Lake. A man-made dam was removed, restoring the “lake” to a meadow. The mixing process reminds me of those satisfying candy mixing videos….praying I am not the only one who watches those (on occasion!!).

Usually, the arrival of cooler weather, crispy vegetation, and changing leaves has me a bit forlorn. This year, however, I’ve really welcomed the harvest spirit. I’ve been slipping into the special trance that only comes from plucking off seeds gently, slowly moving through the forest, with Fleet Foxes and Hozier in my ears. It’s almost enough to make me wonder if this, not targeted ads with autumn-leaf Canva templates, is what the season is truly about. As much as I already miss the summer, some exciting fall activities have begun filling the beach-day-shaped hole in my heart. The past few weeks I’ve been religiously visiting the stream profile chamber, a mini-aquarium built into the side of Taylor Creek, in the hopes of catching some Kokanee salmon heading up the stream to breed. No luck yet, sadly. But maybe by my next blog post…

If there was one word to describe this month, it would probably be rainy. September has been full of grey skies, heavy rain, and thick mud. Honestly, the forest has needed this for a long time, so I’m happy that it’s finally come around and the fire risk isn’t high anymore. That does mean, however, that a lot of our time has been spent at the ranger station either getting our collections ready for Coeur d’Alene or helping our wildlife crew paint stakes for next season’s restoration efforts. Although this might seem like a real bummer compared to the rest of the season, it was nice to have a change of pace and not be running around frantically like we usually do. Besides, if we didn’t stay in the office for most of the time, I wouldn’t have been able to witness THIS:

That’s right! Belt Creek has their very own black bear resident! The crew has lovingly named her Beverly, and even though she is very timid, her presence is very much appreciated.

In other news, we went to Coeur d’Alene last week! It was really cool to see the other side of the seed collection and be able to help with some work in the field. We spent most of our time helping with the surveys they were doing for their penstemons where I was able to spend some time with one of the cats that lived there.

Afterwards, we were given a tour of the nursery and shown all of the different things they do to prepare the seeds to be used in restoration work. The first room they showed us was the cone preparation room where they set boxes full of pine cones over heaters in order to open them up so they could collect the seeds.

Then they brought us to the seed cleaning room, where they use a variety of different machines in order to separate the seed from any other debris that might be mixed in. Sadly, I wasn’t able to get a picture of this room since there was another tour being given right behind us.

Afterwards, we were shown all of the green houses that the nursery uses to grow out the plants that they have been given so they can be fully ready for the sites they will be sent to. Nate, who is one of the managers at Coeur d’Alene, said that they grow the most White Bark Pine saplings in the country and supply them for most of the restoration projects that need them.

Once again it has been another great month in Montana! I’m hoping to finish the season strong and collect a bunch of new seeds from the plants that haven’t been ready yet!

September has really started to feel like fall. Skeletons and ghosts are showing up in people’s yards. The greens have started to fade to gold and orange. The mornings are crisp, and the days are getting shorter, which has made making waking up much harder but has also resulted in seeing some beautiful sunrises.

This month has been full of seed collecting. We’ve continued to collect berries, and one of my favorite’s has been mountain ash, Sorbus scopulina. To me, the bright orange berries seemed to have come out of nowhere. Two months ago, the drainages and damp hills were a web of dark green, but now the mountain ash berries peek from the foliage and look like little gems in the sun.

Another fun collection has been rabbitbrush, or Ericameria nauseosa. It grows as a shrub in exposed and dry areas. It blooms a golden yellow, and as it goes to seed, turns fluffy and white from the pappus (hairs) on the seeds. It is fun to collect because it is easy to get a lot of it! The shrubs are fairly large and produce a lot of seed, and usually many shrubs grow together. In one day, Eliza and I ended up with a haul of thirteen bags!

In addition to seed collection, Eliza and I got to help with a whitebark pine survey at the Lost Trail Ski Resort. Whitebark pines (pinus albicaulis) are a threatened species that grow at high altitudes. The ski resort proposed new ski runs and lifts, and our job was to count the number of whitebark pine in the area to help them manage the new developments in accordance with the guidelines for threatened species protection. Whitebark pines have five needles per bunch (fascicle), which is how we could tell them apart from lodgepole pine, which also grows at high altitude but only has two needles per fascicle. Most of the trees were small, less than five feet, and blended in with the lodgepole seedlings, but we counted over 100 trees in about 10 acres.

Something that has been less exciting about September was the smoke. There were a few fires in the Bitterroot Valley that made for a very smoky couple of weeks. It was a bummer to look outside and not be able to see the mountains across from us. The smoky days felt somewhat like rainy days because we were stranded inside, but they were not at all cozy. Fortunately, we were out of town and (less fortunately) staying home with COVID for some of the worst of it. The benefit of the smoke was that when it cleared, I had a renewed appreciation and awe when seeing the mountains.

This past week, we went to Coeur d’Alene to visit our region’s nursery. It has been really cool to see how our seed collections are used. The nursery had rows and rows of plants being grown out for seed transfer zone studies. These seed transfer zone studies compare morphological data to find patterns and delineations between populations that then become seed zones. This is important because seeds taken from one place within a seed zone will likely grow well (and be well adapted) when planted in other parts of the seed zone. They also grow seeds out for seed increase, meaning they use wildland seed collections to grow plants, then collect seeds from those plants, increasing the total amount of seed from that population or species. Nathan, the seed transfer zone manager, told us that often with the wildland collections start as a handful of seed, but after the seed increase plantings they collect pounds and pounds of it.

Our job at the nursury was to measure a ton of Penstemon procerus plants. There are four rows that are called “repetitions” and one row on each side to act as a buffer to prevent any outer rows from experiencing an edge effect. For our measurements, we assessed overall plant vigor, counted flower heads, measured the overall plant width and basal leaf height, and measured the dimensions of an average leaf. After about 10 plants I realized it was going to be a long day of sitting on the ground, bending over plants, and counting.

The work was very repetitive, and Hannah and I tried many things to make the work more exciting and comfortable. We played music, found different things to sit on, had reward cheez-its, and made up different stretches to ease our aching backs. Despite the tediousness, it was satisfying to get more efficient at the measurements and see us slowly creeping towards the end of the row.

Another major operation in the nursery is to grow conifer seedlings. The nursery receives 3000 bushels of cones each year that they process, store, and save for future planting. To extract the seeds from the cones, they dry the cones over kilns. Once the cones are dry, the scales open and the seeds easily fall out. The seeds are stored in barrels and kept in a freezer until they are grown out in the greenhouses. According to Nathan, they have enough conifer seeds stored in freezers to keep producing 5 million seedlings a year for 10 years!

The nursery greenhouses are full of baby trees that come from the processed cones. In total, they grow around 3.5 million trees every year, which are then sold to be planted in the forests again. One of the trees they grow is whitebark pine, around 150,000 seedlings each year. Nathan said they are difficult to grow, as they are slow growing, don’t germinate well, and are very sensitive to heat.

In addition to growing whitebark pine seedlings, they’re also breeding resistance to whitebark pine blister rust. They collect and sow seeds from “parent” trees that appear to be resistant to the fungus. Then they expose the offspring to blister rust spores (10-20x the fungal spore amount than they would be exposed to in the wild). The percentage of blister rust resistant offspring determines the strength of parent tree resistance. Highly resistant trees are then bred with other trees to increase the number of blister rust resistant whitebark pines, hopefully slowing their decline.

Time seems to be moving much faster the longer I am here, and I can’t believe I’m approaching the last month of the program. I continue to learn so much and I’m looking forward to more seed collections, another visit to Coeur d’Alene, and more whitebark pine surveys.

Cicely

In recent weeks, many of our days have been consumed with harvesting seeds. We have spent all season scouting and monitoring native plant populations, and now that the summer is coming to an end and fall is just around the corner, many of the populations are setting seed. It has been a mad scramble to get all of the seed, which seemingly matured at the same time, before it blows away with the wind.

Most recently, we had the opportunity to collect seed from a population of Lomatium triternatum. The population is nestled between high mountain peaks in one of the highest elevated areas of our forest. The 3/4 mile hike to get to the population is beautiful, and requires one to pass by a clear mountain lake, meadows of wildflowers, and craggy red cliffs. It is the biggest population of any species that we have scouted this year. The population covers several acres and is very dense. If you stand upon one of the rocky mountain peaks, you can observe small tufts of greenish-blue foliage, the Lomatium, as far as the eye can see. It is a beautiful sight to behold.

Because of the vastness of this population and the nature of the seeds to mature at different rates even within the same plant, we opted to do multiple collections at this site. This meant that we collected 10 percent or less of the seed for a couple days. For obvious reasons, I didn’t mind spending multiple days here. By the end, we had a sizeable collection of seed, and it was a successful collection.

Just before collecting Lomatium, we collected Curl-Leaf Mountain Mahogany seeds. It was by far our most difficult harvest of the season so far. We had harvested Alder-Leaf Mountain Mahogany seeds earlier in the season. This is how we learned that seeds of the Mountain Mahogany variety can be very irritating to the skin and eyes. The seeds themselves are achenes that resemble a sort of twisted mouse tail, covered in tiny white hairs. Apparently, the tiny hairs can become lodged in your skin and eyes and cause pain, and irritation. It only took a few minutes of harvesting before we noticed our hands, arms, and eyes were in pain. We might as well had been collecting fiber glass from what it felt like.

But that was weeks ago, and this time around, when collecting the Curl-Leaf Mountain Mahogany, we came prepared. We brought long sleeves and latex gloves. Those seemed to do the trick although I did find myself wondering if an entire hazmat suit might have been better. Luckily, it seemed that the fiber-glassness of these seeds wasn’t quite as horrible, but the harvest was still a doozy. The plants were located on the side of a very steep mountain. My co-intern has an innate ‘mountain goatness’ about her that enabled her to traverse the steep hill with little to no effort at all (something that I’ve grown to envy). But I’m not nearly as skilled, so it took me a while to get up to the plants.

Unlike Alder-Leaf Mountain Mahogany, which is more of a large shrub, Curl-Leaf Mountain Mahogany grows into small trees averaging up to 12 feet tall. So although we had reached the plants by traversing up the steep mountain, we found that we couldn’t reach the seeds due to the height of the plants. Since we were already in the area, we got creative with our solution to this problem, and crafted our very own “butterfly nets”. Although not very pretty, they got the job done.

This month, we also had the chance to harvest more Lomatium dissectum. Sadly, we weren’t able to get as much of that as we had hoped because the population was trampled by grazing animals before we could do a second pass. We also harvested some Heliomeris multiflora – a dainty yellow flower. That was one of the easiest harvests of the season so far. And lastly, but not least, Milkweed. Go team monarchs!

This past week my crew along with some others went to the Forest Service Nursery in Couer D’Alene Idaho to help out with some data collection. The nursery was incredible and full of so many different cool projects. We were given a tour and got to see into all their giant greenhouses full of plants that were mainly used for restoration work.

Before this job, I knew very little about how the actual process of restoration worked. I had never thought about the actual way plants were grown and prepared to be planted. I had a lot of fun learning all about what they do at the nursery. They are constantly doing so many experiments to learn more about our native species and how to breed more resilient plants.

During our time at the nursery, we were helping with a common garden study. The nursery grows a bunch of the same plant from different locations to learn more about the genetics of the species from different areas. It was our job to count and measure the plants, which I will admit got a little bit tedious. Luckily, one of the nursery cats came to hang out with us while we did our data collection.

The silliest thing about our trip to Couer D’Alene was that we camped in tents at the nursery. The camping was generally uneventful except for our last night when it started pouring. There were also some flies who would not get out of my rain fly, but a praying mantis came to the rescue and ate them for me.

I am so glad that I was able to go to the nursery and learn so much about how they operate. I graduated from college in the spring, and I have been trying to figure out what exactly I want to do with my career. While I was at the nursery, I kept thinking “Wow, I could really see myself working here.” I love growing plants, and I am passionate about restoration work. For a long time now, I have been telling people that I am interested in the practical application of science and that is exactly what they do at the nursery.

We started the month strong with sightings of the ever elusive beaver! Yes, it was my first time seeing a live beaver in my entire life. Partnering up again with the wildlife and fisheries crew, we aided them with a beaver trapping project.

The trapping projects involved relocating a beaver family consisting of a parent/adult pair, sub-adults (first litter), and kits (second litter), from areas where their presence may disrupt recreational activities in forested areas. Examples of disruption include flooding of roads or trails which often to lead complaints. Instead of letting the public take it into their own hands, which happens often enough, the wildlife crew will aim to trap the entire family and relocate them to a more a suitable area in need of “ecosystem engineers.”

Traps are set the day before with aspen and castor lures, as the beavers are diurnal. The lure, which has a distinct root beer-like scent, tricks the beavers into believing that a new beaver is near their territory. When the beavers investigate, they’re trapped overnight, followed by an early morning pickup to minimize their time in the trap.

Prior to relocation, the beavers are taken to a facility that “processes” them. Measurements of beaver health are taken and recorded. Fun fact: What ice cream is to humans, aspens are to beavers! So we collected a ton of fresh branches for the beavers to munch on while in captivity.

This was another great learning experience in which I realized that I am definitely in the right department. Although I know it’s for a good cause and the wonderful people running the programs and facilities are so kind and careful, I had a hard time transporting the exhausted beavers in traps. Watching them get their stats recorded and then hoping they would eventually calm down in captivity was rough, to say the least. When they’re extremely terrified, they’ll chatter their teeth and just look so exhausted from attempts to escape the traps overnight.

One might wonder “Why keep them in a facility. Why not just take them to the new location?” Well, doing so would be a good way to transport and spread disease, aquatic flora, and other risks to new areas we don’t want them to be in. So the beavers are monitored and fed during their stay while they clean and clear their systems

That was a lot of beaver talk but, not to worry, we are still prioritizing our Native Plant Material projects. As the season nears its end and we finish up with our planned collections, we’ve found that we are lacking populations to collect from. We’ve started conducting opportunistic collections, approved by our mentor, of native plants that serve ecological value such as milkweed, sagebrush, and coneflowers. I’m sure I say this in every post, but the field season truly does fly by. It’s strange yet wonderful to see the color changes occurring so quickly throughout the canyons and subalpine areas that were just deep green a few weeks ago.

Within the botany department, we’ve also had the opportunity of assisting one of the botany technicians with executing invasive species projects. Simply put, spraying weeds. If you weren’t already familiar with the invasive and noxious weeds in your area, this is a great way to get REAL familiar with them. The most challenging part about this task is avoiding becoming an aid to the invasion by becoming a disperser! Invasive species at the sites we visited included: Common mullein – Verbascum thapsus; Canada thistle – Cirsium arvense; Yellow Star-thistle – Centaurea solstitialis; Curly Dock – Rumex crispus; Dyer’s woad – Isatis tinctoria; and Common burdock – Arctium minus.

Earth, wind, and a lot of fire. That pretty much sums up this past month. Utah has received awful air pollution from nearby fires. On the other hand, our mentor was often called out on fire assignments. Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, my co-intern and I weren’t able to help with fire assignments as we aren’t fire certified. Hearing our mentor’s experiences on her returns were intriguing since we got to learn how the department with the largest funding in the forest service is run. I’d like to learn more about the fire department and how botanists and ecologists play a role in it. On that note, I hope everyone is doing well and stay safe out there!