Well, my first internship has officially ended, but thank goodness for extensions. Pretty much all of the range field season is over, but new projects just keep popping up left and right, so we’ve been extended here for awhile. One of our latest projects involved making sage grouse fence markers. For the record, using tin snips to cut vinyl undersill is not very effective, but a tile cutter works great. We’ll be choosing some fences near active leks to start putting these on, in hopes of preventing the extremely high mortality rate from fence collisions.
Another new project we’ve just started is the mapping of saltcedar. We are still working out the logistics, but we are hoping to get a very detailed picture of where and how much saltcedar can be found in local draws, especially around manmade resevoirs. Once we know the distribution, focused efforts to remove it can be undertaken. I’m excited for this project because walking through these draws, looking in all the nooks and crannies, is so different from surveying the rangeland. It should make for another interesting experience from Buffalo, WY.