Last week, I was lucky enough to go on a rafting trip down the Middle Fork Eel River with the BLM Arcata field office. My job was mainly to look for invasive species along the river, and to get a general idea of the ecosystems out there. There were also wildlife biologists, fisheries biologists, and archaeologists on the trip, and I took any chance I could get to follow them around and see what they were up to! When I was a kid, I wanted to be an archeologist (Indiana Jones was my hero), so it was extra special to get to see archeologists at work (a lot less danger and booby traps than I had imagined, but just as exciting).

For most of the trip, we floated through mature oak woodlands, peppered with cottonwoods, willows, and ash along the river banks. I saw my first black bear (and then two more). The spring wildflowers were in full bloom, and it was gloriously sunny the entire trip (a rarity in my usual Humboldt county!). Here and there we could see burn scars along the ridges from previous fires, and the occasional cattle ranch when we drifted by private property. Another part of why we were out there was to make sure that there wasn’t any illegal activity on the BLM managed land – the last time anyone had checked on these parcels was in 2008, because they are really only accessible by the river. Thankfully, we didn’t come across anything suspicious, and we didn’t see any other people for the entirety of the trip! Probably my favorite part of the day was in the morning, when I would wake up to watch the sun rise (I swear this had nothing to do with my leaky sleeping pad) and take the time to organize my notes from the previous day and just soak in the scenery around me. I still can’t quite believe that I got to go on this trip, but my fading sunburn and mounds of pictures won’t let me forget. Here are a few!

Other than the rafting trip, I’ve been doing some invasive weed mapping, participating in safety days, gearing up for SOS collections, working with crews from the California Conservation Corp and prepping for Kids Ocean Day (more on this later!)
Madie

So I’m closing out my third month as an intern in Marina, California. Let’s see, I’ve been to the office twice, and spent the rest of my time in the field or working out of my bedroom/office; which looks far more like an herbarium, library, and backpackers crash pad. Stacks of dried tissue, seeds, specimens, cardboard, rocks with lichens on them, presses, and papers are building up around me and it’s becoming hard to navigate throughout the room. This is definitely how a room should look!

The winter and spring of 2017 were uncharacteristically wet for California. As a result the spring blooms have lasted much longer, and nearly all the species present are coming up. The higher precipitation allows for some weedier more mesic plants to displace some species; but in general everything is emerging- just not always in huge quantities. It seems the richness is here, but the diversity if skewed.

Most importantly this rain has prolonged the bloom in California, allowing me to see a lot more species than I would have been able to otherwise. It’s a total blessing for anyone who is very interested in the study of the flora of Western North America.

My mentor has well botanized the area we work in, so it’s a lot harder to make valuable contributions here than it generally has been in my previous internships. However, some of my highlights so far have been in developing understandings of some rare plants micro-habitats. In particuliar for: Phacelia phacelioides, Astragalus lentiginosus var. idriaensis, Allium howelli, as well as working through identifying slews of Eschscholzia hypecoides. Aside from this I have been continuing along my floristic mission of collecting all species in our field office. This has been fun and challenging, now most of my office work just consists of making hundreds of herbaria labels, which I guarantee you is not the most fun part. Additional activities have been making seed collection and traveling along on rare plant monitoring work.

Im my free time I have been traveling around California collecting Apioids for the PENA project, some Onagrads, and a couple other groups. I’ve also been working on collecting >95% of the flowering plants I see along my travels, which is pretty time intensive. It turns out I’m just kinda falling into being a taxonomist, which is strange because a few ecology professors always use to oftentimes liken me to  Gleason.

Recently I have still been reading Thompson’s “the Co-evolutionary Process” and assorted papers on genomics and desert ecology. Unfortunately not much time reading recently, I’ve been busy collecting and planning expeditions. I’ve been studying for the GRE too, which has got to be the biggest waste of time in my life. This feels like reading a dictionary to find a ton of fancy words to say at a party to impress people; rather than developing interesting ideas for their own merit and generally being a well rounded person.

It was a long journey from Northern California all the way up to Anchorage, Alaska. Fifty-four hours of driving to be exact, covering 2,968 miles. The mountains exploded immediately as I entered Canada and never stopped all the way up to Alaska. Each day of my journey I saw a bald eagle, as if I was being shepherded up to the north country. I also saw six bears (one grizzly), one red fox, two coyotes, three moose, one porcupine, three caribou, and one golden eagle. It truly was an epic journey bringing me much needed solitude and bliss.

Working with Eric Geisler, at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, I was excited on my first day to learn about my assignments and projects for the summer. There would be plenty of time to talk about that though, it was time to pile in the truck and head down to Homer for the week to do National Resources Conservation Service training. It was a gorgeous drive down to the end of the Kenai Peninsula. I was able to learn about some of the Alaskan vegetation, eat fresh-caught cod, and watch a small otter float on its back, paws and arms crossed, pushing itself through the water.

The adventure continues this week. We drove up to Fairbanks, passing by The Denali Range and Denali National Park. In Fairbanks we got a bit muddy doing ATV training, which was such a blast! It was also a great opportunity to check out my main study site for the summer time in the tiny town of Tanacross. My site was a predominately spruce/aspen stand surrounded by yet another spectacular snow-capped mountain range. There is no escaping the magnificent and massive mountains here, so needless to say I am very excited to see what sorts of adventures I get into this summer. Until next time…

Robbie Tepp. Bureau of Land Management. Anchorage, AK

In Wyoming it’s a common belief that most everyone who spends a significant amount of time here ends up staying “for the long haul.” While I don’t necessarily believe that’s true, for now I’ve happily become one of those people. After living in the Midwest for my college career I was incredibly excited to land an internship where I can grow professionally in the mountains I call home!

A few quick things about me: Intern at the BLM Buffalo Field Office, at the base of the Bighorn Mountains, doing AIM monitoring for land management purposes. Avid hiker, backpacker, biker, climber, canoer, hammocker, or basically anything I can do outdoors. HUGE plant nerd, which is why I’m so excited to learn more about the Wyoming plants and their ecosystems this summer!

A picture is worth a thousand words, right? So here’s a few photos of places my fellow interns and I have been and the things we’ve seen during the first couple weeks of training.

From left to right, top to bottom:

1. Castilleja blooming everywhere during AIM field training. 2) Smiling (and freezing!) faces during ATV training. 3) Watching a storm narrowly miss our line of trucks off the Wind River Mountains. 4) A baby bunny hiding in a crevice on Independence Rock. 5) Cryptantha, a new flower for me! 6) The view from Outlaw Campground, one of the sites we will be working on this summer.

Montrose, Colorado is a perfectly sized town of about 20K people.  It sits as a central location to everything a lover of the West covets.  The San Juans tower in the south, the Cimmarons to the east, and Black Canyon to the northeast.  The northern horizon holds the Gunnison Gorge and the Grand Mesa.  To the west, Paradox Valley, Escalante/Dominguez Canyon, and the Manti La Sals just before you get to Moab.  I’m overwhelmed and overjoyed.

The high deserts and red rocks in Escalante/Dominquez canyon are reminiscent of the Grand Staircase in Utah, one of my favorite places back home.  We spend a lot of time here, returning to monitoring sites of the Hookless Cactus, Sclerocactus glaucus and hunting for new populations.  I have developed a keen eye for cacti, to say the least.

Escalante canyon is riddled with seeps of perennial water flows that feed through cracks in the sandstone, creating habitat for several rare, “hanging garden” species such as Eastwood’s Monkeyflower, Mimulus eastwoodiae and the Giant Hellborine orchid, Epipactus gigantea.  The misty seeps are protected from the sun year-round and will undoubtedly bring my dog and I relief in the foreboding hot months ahead.

I was lucky enough to be invited down the Dolores River for a 3-day trip with the Rangers here in Montrose as the team botanist.  I was equipped with a map through the application Avenza on my phone, by which I was able to find various populations of rare and narrowly endemic species that occur along this unique river.  Among the species included the Naturita Milkvetch, Astragalus naturitensis, and 3 hanging garden species (including the aforementioned) in addition to the one and only Kachina Daisy, Erigeron kachinensis.  It was kind of dreamy to see all three of these in the same square meter.

Most of my time has been spent in sage grouse country above Crawford, on the north rim of the Black Canyon.  The Gunnison Sage Grouse, Centrocercus minimus is a federally protected species.  I have camped out on two lek counts and have had the pleasure of observing the birds dancing and popping on the ridge at dawn.  Soon we will be running transects in this habitat to monitor the vegetation.  Most of our work has been done in saltbush/greasewood shrublands, so this will be a change of pace.

I’ve also spent a lot of time in Crawford on corvid surveys.  They consist of walking or mountain biking along the 7 mile stretch of road that overlooks the West Elk mountain range.  I stop every 400 meters for 10 minutes, walk around with binoculars, and try to flush some scrub or pinyon jays out of the canopies so I can count them.  Last week I counted over 100 ravens.  The biologists at the BLM suspect that these intelligent birds may have a detrimental effect on the sensitive sage grouse population.

There is some curiosity about the Peregrine Falcon in the Uncompahgre Field Office, and I’ve had the opportunity to take part in a one-night raptor survey in Paradox Valley.  I woke up at 5 am with a scope and walked around Pinyon/Juniper forests, scanning the massive cliff walls.  It’s a good thing that I marked my camp on the GPS because it is SO easy to get lost out there.

While in Paradox, we surveyed an extremely isolated population of the Sandstone Milkvetch, Astragalus sesquiflorus.  You’ve never seen something so cute in your life.  My partner and I were able to find the boundaries of the population after a long days work, and later mapped it out in ArcMap.  It is so rewarding and interesting to see exactly where it is on a map after being there all day.  I’m really excited to learn more about GIS.  Now that I’ve received my access card, here in my SIXTH week, I can start working with our wonderful GIS wizard at the BLM.

I spend my spare time reading about Colorado’s flora, learning about birds, keying out and drawing plants, learning to love grasses (begrudgingly), and hiking my dog to a new beautiful place every weekend.  I left my undergrad with a good base in botany, but with a thirst for field experience, mostly a wanting to see how plants interact with their environment.  Here I am! I have a lot to learn, but this is the kind of work that just keeps giving, and I remember why I chose a major in biology.

See you in Chicago!

M

 

It’s been three weeks since I left the coniferous embrace of my home in Olympia, Washington and made the trek to the sagebrush steppe desert of Twin Falls, Idaho. It’s basically exactly opposite of my home- it’s dry and dusty and the towering old-growth evergreens have been replaced by sagebrush (Artemesia spp., more on that later), Bitterbrush (Purshia tridentata), and rabbitbrush (Chrysothamnus viscidiflorus), the Puget Sound replaced by the Snake River. My first week was mostly spent out of the Shoshone BLM office, going on daily field trips to become acquainted with the area and learning the plants.

Starting on Monday of my second week, I began working with the Twin Falls BLM fuels crew as their “botanical specialist”- which is just a fancy way of saying I help them identify plants to include in the data of their monitoring plots, mostly areas that have been burned. Last week we went out to three different plots to collect sagebrush leaves, bring them back to the office, dry them for 24 hours and record the moisture content as a way of analyzing fire likelihood and behavior. I’m excited to learn more about fire behavior and ecology. Most of May and June are training for me, so I look forward to getting it all done so I can dive into the work.

I feel in love with Sagebrush the moment I met her years ago, so I’m excited to get to know the subtle difference between subspecies (sometimes only possible with a UV light!). Sagebrush is really important habitat to the threatened Sage Grouse.

This year seems like an interesting year for the area. As I was driving across the massive canyon into the city, peering downwards at the meandering Snake River, I thought, even without anything to compare it to, that the water seemed high. I learned that this was absolutely true- this area had an especially snowy winter and as the snow has melted, the rivers and reservoirs rose to a high that hasn’t been seen in this area in at least 20 years. Because of all the water and the extra cold winter and spring, the flower blooms are about 2 weeks behind which was good timing for us! Usually by the time CBG interns get here, many plants are past their prime.

Until next time!

Sofia

Starting as the only Seeds of Success intern at the BLM office was a bit of a rocky start. This particular program has not been run in at least 2 years and the staff that were familiar with it are long gone. However, this does leave a fresh start for me! Scrounging through old archives, I was able to find previous plants collected for seeds and where they might be. Calflora has become my best friend, as it is a necessary source on plant identification and conveniently has locations on where particular plants of interest may be. After making a tentative list of what plants I might collect, I was out in the field.

California has some beautiful landscapes. The photo below was taken near the Oregon border. Our mission that day was to find a rare lily, Fritillaria gentneri. We found two small different populations of this lily growing next to its look a likes, Fritillaria recurva and Fritillaria affinis

After being at this job for about two weeks, I am able to get a better grasp on what is feasible and what I need to do. Right now I go out in the field on various pieces of land owned by Redding BLM to survey what is in mass. Collecting 10,000+ seeds per species is not an easy feat, so I need to find large populations of plants that will produce a lot of seed. So far so good, I have found about three species of plants that have a sufficient amount of plants to give me enough seed. These plants will be great for restoration and are pollinator friendly!

Not a collection plant, but one of California’s native succulent type plants! It grows on a rock face; this seeming difficult to achieve. However, the Lewisia thrive in this environment and I am thankful because this species makes for a beautiful picture.

 

Redding Field Office – Bureau of Land Management

I think my favorite thing about this internship so far has been coming to love the Great Basin desert! Growing up, when ever we had to drive through Nevada and Utah along I-80, I thought it was so ugly. Now, as we go out exploring every day, I fall more and more in love with everything out here! So much is alive!

I love getting to explore all over Utah and our district, and it is always so satisfying when we find a nice solid population of one of our target species!

Life is good!

Salt Lake Field Office, BLM

I have been working in the desert for the last 3 months, making me more than half way through my internship with the CLM. Since being here in California I have gotten to go to a plant conservation conference in San Diego, visit Death Valley National Park, Sequoia National Forest, Mt. Zion National Park, Los Angles and Las Vegas. This list fails to include all of the stunning places I have seen in the Ridgecrest Field office. I feel very grateful to have worked here the last 3 months. Many plants are seeding right now in the Ridgecrest Field office.

In this blog I wanted to talk about the seed collection process. The most interesting and beautiful part of the seed collection process is scouting. Having the opportunity to drive/hike around searching for plants is an absolute blast. Over the last few weeks we have transitioned from focusing on annuals to perennial shrubs. This makes it a lot easier for us to make a seed collection. Over the last week we have made at least half a dozen seed collections. Last week we made an Encelia farinosa seed collection in Pleasant Canyon. Pleasant Canyon is in Panamint Valley, one of the most beautiful parts of our field office. There are quite a few riparian areas there and amazing biodiversity of plants/animals. Also, the Navy base has a flight path right through there, meaning you almost always get an amazing airshow while collecting seeds.

On this particular day myself and the other SOS intern were scouting around for Chylismia brevipes and happened upon a few other populations, including the Encelia. We found a population of about 100 plants that were all in seed in this canyon.  We quickly got out and vouchered some of the still flower plants. We then took some photos of the population and filled out the SOS data sheet. It does not take long to make a seed collection, especially with 2 people. We probably finished our collection in under an hour. We collected over 15,000 seeds from over 60 plants. Since this took so little time, we were able to go take some other vouchers and also check out a lake bed. Just another great day in the Ridgecrest field office! 

These recent weeks have been a whirlwind of activity.  After returning from a long vacation I got back into the office and strait to work.  I had to catch up on my ongoing eagle monitoring whilst juggling various other projects with seemingly ever shortening due dates.  We headed up to the Columbia River to check on Washington Ground Squirrels while they are still active.  They are only active from March till early June and then they spend the summer and winter underground.  That is the life!  Those surveys proved to be long days, but we did locate some new colonies and confirm previously mapped colonies.

More recently I have been working on Special Recreation Permits (SRP’s) as the wildlife point of contact.  I have really enjoyed the SRP’s as it brings together field work and decision making together to determine the effects of a proposal and whether or not it should go forward.  Hopefully I will be able to work on more projects like these including some NEPA work, possibly CX’s or other smaller projects.

Currently temperatures have spiked into the 90’s, making hiking up and down hills slightly less exciting and surely more exhausting.  The silver lining is that roads are no longer muddy messes and instead are a wonderful dusty beige just waiting to be explored.  It looks like it is going to cool down for the next couple of days, so that will be a welcome respite.

In my spare time I have been working on a owl survey with a local birder and I am having a great time.  Surveys can run a little late (1am) and waking up the next morning to work isn’t always the most fun.  However, it is a wonderful opportunity and we have already heard great-horned owl, northern-pygmy owl (We saw it fly over and it was calling non-stop from within 15ft) and even Flammulated Owl, the bird for which we were surveying.  I have continued to go birding and have had a great time watching the great horned owl chicks around town goofily walk and fly around.

The next weeks and months are sure to be busy, so I will try to enjoy a relaxing Memorial weekend and keep everybody updated to my goings on as they go on.