Today is my last day working from the Bishop Field Office. The plan was to spend one more beautiful day taking in the scenery of the place I now proudly call home, the Eastern Sierra, surveying for pygmy rabbits in the Bodie Hills. However, Bishop awoke today to the blessed sound of rain hitting its thirsty desert dirt. So here I am on the dry side of the window reminiscing over the many amazing field days I have had out there over the past two years.

The Bodie Hills are a place that I have grown to know at an intimate level, the time and space we have shared are incomparable. A vast open landscape, that at first glance appears to be a monotonous sea of sage, is truly an irreplaceable expanse harboring 14 unique plant communities, ancient cinder cones, gently rolling hills, meadows, aspen stands, hidden conifer groves, and much more. These diverse communities support an important collection of fauna including the iconic greater sage grouse, pronghorn antelope, and a variety of endemic rare plants. Perhaps one of the greatest features of Bodie is its removal from the beaten path and because of this I found great value in the hours spent seed collecting while day dreaming. The opportunity to carry on a continuous thought for extended periods is something that a lot of people infrequently have the luxury of doing. Never doubt its value.

As the rain outside continues to steadily fall, my mind is being flooded with feelings of satisfaction from knowing the strength my surroundings have on shaping my attitude. True happiness comes from within, but the things that bring it out are what matter. People and places matter, conservation land management matters, and the opportunity to be a steward of the land is rewarding far beyond our day to day feelings. So the next time you are filling your government vehicle with gallons upon gallons of gasoline and the feelings of being a conservationist are fleeting, remember that your efforts are for everyone. We cannot predict when the (proverbial) sun will shine, but when it does we CAN make sure to embrace it. Edward Abbey sums it up better than I can: “it is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it.”

Beyond the places I get to spend my work time, I also must extend great appreciation to everyone in the Bishop Field Office They are a strong community that has made me feel both welcome and valued. Thanks to them and those at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Marsh grass (Spartina alterniflora)

Spartina alterniflora covered in seed, ready for harvesting.

A natural rope of Spartina alterniflora

The days are getting shorter, particularly for the New England crew, but despite that, there is always so much to see. Fall has descended upon us and the seed collection has been kicked in to high gear.

Throughout the summer we had been visiting salt marshes as various species go into seed. Despite going to areas several times, each visit allowed us to experience something new, be it a another species going into flower/seed or unexpected wildlife. Many of these places/species have become very familiar and after months of waiting for the marsh grass (Spartina alterniflora) to go into seed, and when at last we were able to collect the large fruiting spikes, it was a like meeting up with a long awaited friend.

This past week we visited the Boston Harbor Islands and as the wind picked up and the waves splashed against the marsh grass, I noticed this long rope spanning the length of the shore. The recent tides and larger than normal waves had plucked the dead and freed marsh grass leaves and rolled them into a long contiguous cord. I would have never imagined these natural phenomena and look forward to future wonders.

Our group has been spending a lot of time camping out in the field the past few months working on Seeds of Success seed collecting, vegetation monitoring for past fires, and completing a little bit of weeds work. With so many days spent out in the grand expanses of the Great Basin desert, I have had ample time to observe this ecosystem, revel in its beauty, and attempt to put into words my experiences.

This poem is one of the attempts I have made to put the desert into words. While I realize one cannot possibly use words to give justice to the desert, I thought I would try to convey one small portion. The poem focuses on the two extremes I face each week when I bounce back and forth between living in the desert for work and living in a city on the weekends. Enjoy!

Desert Peace, City Melancholy
Quiet, noise
Unhurried, restless
Stillness, bustling
Open, constricted
Plants, people
Coyotes, dogs
Sagebrush, lilacs
Stars, streetlights
Cadence, cacophony
Humbled, prideful
Unrelenting, comfortable
Moments, minutes
Rocks, concrete
Wild, tamed

Content to stay, anxious to leave

-Maggie Gray-

Until next time, enjoy the fall season!

Maggie Gray, Carson City BLM

Hello World,

Unlike many folks in the BLM and in the CLM intern program, I live in a place that basically doesn’t burn. Natural fires are extremely rare in the Chihuahuan Desert, although relatively common in the nearby mountains (mostly USFS lands) and occasionally dropping down to the higher, pinyon/juniper portions of the Las Cruces District Office. There are sometimes anthropogenic fires, particularly along the interstates, but these are generally quite small. Neighboring Fort Bliss occasionally starts unintentional fires in the Organ Mountains. We’ve done some prescribed burns, and can generally get a good blaze going up in the pinyon/juniper. Prescribed burns at the lower elevations, in the Chihuahuan Desert that makes up most of LCDO, haven’t been as successful. The more densely-vegetated draws can burn OK, but otherwise the landscape just doesn’t seem to have the fuel load to carry a fire. So far as I can tell, natural fires are basically unknown. We don’t know if they ever played an appreciable role in Chihuahuan Desert ecology or how the landscape reacts to a natural fire. Interestingly—and diametrically opposed to the prevailing view that fires reduce or exclude woody plants while promoting grasses—the few studies on the effects of prescribed burns in the Chihuahuan Desert indicate that the opposite is true. Our grasses are less resilient to fire than our shrubs. So all that’s the long way of saying that I was a bit excited when one of my interns and I drove out to a seed collection site at Aguirre Spring on the northeastern side of the Organ Mountains… and saw this on the way:

This is, to our understanding, a natural fire ignited by lightning. There was a big thunderstorm system on 3 Oct 2015, but this area did not receive rain. This fire burned a pretty small area, 70-80 acres, and went out when the rain arrived the next day. So far as I can recall, this is the only natural burn on LCDO land that I’ve seen in the 11 years I’ve been in Las Cruces. So, we postponed the seed festivities a bit and I got some photo points—that one above, and these two:

For each, I’ve got the photo and a list of all identifiable plants within a 10 m radius. Hopefully I’ll be able to revisit these over the next few years and see what happens. And, no, the third one didn’t burn. We can pretend it’s a control.

Here’s a view of the whole burn area, seen from the Aguirre Spring picnic area:

So that’s probably not too exciting to most of you: “Yup, that’s a little burn.” To me, though, it’s pretty awesome. I have a rare chance to watch the response to a natural fire in a place that basically doesn’t burn.

Once we got to poking around at seeds around Aguirre Spring, we found that one of my nemeses thus far, Setaria leucopila, actually had seeds. I mentioned in my last post that I’d checked multiple populations of this species that had well-developed, mature inflorescences, but no seeds that I could find (not “very few”, but “none”, “nada”, “zilch”, “bupkus”). Well, this one still had an unimpressive seed set rate, about 1 in 10 fertile florets actually contained a caryopsis. But there’s plenty of it up there, so we collected around 400,000 of those fertile florets and we should be OK. Here’s the collection site:

And here’s Setaria leucopila:

Fertile florets (top) and caryopses (bottom; grass terminology: a caryopsis is a fruit with a single seed and the ovary wall highly reduced and adherent to the seed; non-agrostologists usually just call the whole thing a “seed”):

I enjoy photography and particularly like having an excuse to take macro photographs of plant bits that we don’t usually see. So I’ve been appreciating the SOS dictum to take pictures of the seeds we collect. I probably go a bit overboard. Also, some of these grass caryopses are pretty hard to separate out from the fertile florets. It’s fun, though. Here are some of my other seed pictures:

Aristida adscensionis:

Bothriochloa barbinodis:

Bouteloua aristidoides:

Chloris virgata:

Pectis papposa:

Sphaeralcea emoryi:

I guess that’s about it. Seed collection is winding down here. We could probably do more of it, but we’ve met the 2015 collection target and made a few collections that go into fiscal year 2016. There’s one more I want to try for in a couple of weeks, but mostly we’ll be back to looking at Peniocereus greggii var. greggii until my interns leave at the beginning of November. I’ll leave you with a pair of photographs. The one on top is from the New Mexico State University archives, Oct 1912. I took the one on the bottom on 19 Sep 2015.

Hello!

The past month here at the Carlsbad, NM field office has kept me very busy. Most of my recent task has been focused on birds, which I have absolutely no complaints about! As I believe I mentioned in my post from last month, I developed and was preparing to implement a protocol for surveying scaled quail (Callipepla squamata) for future management of the species. As it is a game species, it is important for this field office to keep tabs on the populations so the natural resource can be shared with public land users under the paradigm of sustainability. What I didn’t say before but what I’ll admit now, is that I first thought of this task as a cinch, but I quickly discoverd how difficult it was to create your own protocol that will be unique to the environment, culture, and condition of the land you’re working with. I couldn’t just translate one protocol from one region to the next, and I also didn’t have the same resources to work with. Needless to say, after some discussions and adaptations I accomplished the task, and over the past few weeks I have been putting it in practice successfully.

Two weeks ago I was able to participate in the celebration that is Public Lands Day. I was fortunate enough to help out at the BLM’s booth at the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens State Park. It was my first time getting to explore the facility in full. Overall, I found it to be one of those gems you stumble upon while living out your busy life. I had no idea they had so much biodiversity there, so although all of the displays and exhibits were exemplary, they don’t get enough attention… Anyway, I helped out at the booth by explaining the SOS program and melding that with the idea of successful restoration and wildlife management to fit the culture of the local community.

This week the wildlife crew took a nice little mid-week field trip to the Milnesand Prairie Preserve near the border of Texas and eastern New Mexico. Oh, and by “nice” I mean early, and by “early” I mean waking up at 3:00am to drive 2 hours to our work site. Only joking, or at least… it was a very enjoyable trip despite the extremely early morning. Our goal for this trip was to shadow a biologist who performs regular roadside surveys for the Lesser Prairie Chicken [(Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) for now on LPC]. The LPC is a federally threatened species of grouse that inhabits the arid and shortgrass grasslands in the west. Its habitat over the past century has been extremely reduced, unfortunately, and the species population has suffered. After solidifying our understanding of the surveying methods, the biologist took us on a tour of the prairie preserve where we scouted out old lekking grounds for LPCs as well as observing the different management practices seen throughout the property. The biologist we worked with was so informational, too! I loved every minute of listening to her talk. She was a local of the area, and has been working there for the past decade, so no wonder she served as such an amazing encyclopedia.

Interesting fact: I recently learned that a month ago a federal judge vacated the federal protection of the species temporarily from its listing in 2014. For reasons that are far too complicated for myself to explain, let alone understand completely, this action was taken. I’m not going to muddle your mind with my biased opinions, aside from the openingly admitted fact that this news initially frustrated me deeply for understandable reasons. However, I think this is only a temporary halt in the species’ protection.

Aside from work, here are a few representative pictures of my recent adventures!

That’s all for now! I only have one more month left, so be prepared for my concluding post of my experience in November!

P.S. October has thus far been an incredibly wet month here in Carlsbad. Is it “normal”? Can’t say, but it’s keeping the desert flora pretty rich in greenery.

Armand Cann
Carlsbad NM Field Office, Bureau of Land Management

A population of Baileya multiradiata “desert marigold” of which we made two collections.

We have had a rather exciting month of plant collections.  Down here at the extreme southern end of that which constitutes BLM land, our ability to make collections probably tends to come much later in the year than for many of y’all folks in the northern lands.  This, coupled with the general weirdness of precipitation patterns down here in the deep Chihuahuan Desert, has resulted in unusual and often belated phonologies of our target species and sites.  It has also required of us that we be somewhat spontaneous in that we collect seeds of those species that are collectible, rather than what is necessarily on the collection target list submitted by our crew leader.  For example, we were able to collect Sanvitalia abertii, Verbesina encelioides, Machaeranthera bipinnatifida, and Panicum obtusum (syn. Hopia obtusa); most of which were on our original target list, but that are excellent candidate species for the stated goals of the Seeds of Success Program.  Sadly, we have been unable to collect some species from the target list that, for whatever reason, did not produce viable seed this year such as Bouteloua gracilis,  Bouteloua eriopoda, and Enneapogon desvauxii.  However, this morning we were able to complete a collection of Setaria leucopila, a hot target species that until last week we had practically given up on as a lost cause.  But then we checked one final population for it and found that it was setting seed.  It was doing so at a low rate, but nonetheless, a collection was achieved.

Although a few species on our target list weren’t collected, we did make a lot of collections and we were able to make more collections than our goal of 35 for the duration of the internship.  As October is our final month and our collections are winding down, Jeanne and I will be presenting our work with the Seeds of Success Program to the office around October 20^th.  Aside from the presentation we will be doing some Peniocereus greggii var. greggii monitoring and vegetation monitoring at the Jornada Test Range.  One cool thing we’ve discovered about P. greggii is that this species seems to have a tendency to die back completely to the tuberous root, only to resurrect later on.  This implies that it may be less rare than previously thought.

We went out for two days on a trip up the lower Gila River Box to get some time lapse photo points.  In the early 90’s, the area was excluded from grazing because the riparian habitat had been so heavily denuded.  It turns out that cows really like to eat baby cottonwoods, an apparently short lived tree species, so young plants weren’t ever given the chance to mature to replace the older dead or dying trees.  Now, almost 20 years after exclusion the cottonwoods and willows have returned full force.  It is beautiful to witness the resilience of nature.  Furthermore, we got to see some very cool Indian ruins and petroglyphs.

In addition to our other duties and endeavors we will be getting some much welcome training in ArcGIS and NEPA. We have had some really great experiences to be sure. We have seen so many rattlesnakes that I have long since lost count. One time we even found a pair in the throes of coitus. We stared for a minute and left them to their business.  Coyote song has often accompanied our field work.  Yeah, the desert does have its charm, if you can take the heat.  Until next time fellow naturalists.  I hope your adventures have been as fun and satisfying as ours.

Best wishes,

Dave Morin, Las Cruces District Office of the BLM

Petroglyphs from Lowe Gila Box

a granary from Lower Gila Box

An annoyed Western Diamondbac

Pectis papposa, a collection we made that smell and tastes quite lemony

Last winter I was depressed and unemployed, and I jumped at the chance to accept the CLM internship and move from central New Jersey to central Oregon, a strange place I never even heard of, to a town called Bend… a town known for beer (as previously stated) and access to outdoor activities. Although nervous to move to a new place, I was excited that I would get to work outside in remote areas for the Prineville District, but live in Bend, a bustling town of almost 100,000 people.

I cannot say enough good things about the Prineville BLM. My supervisors Cassandra Hummel and Digger Anthony were extremely welcoming and great teachers. I was able to connect with many coworkers and work on a variety of great projects throughout the summer.

Because I have previous experience working with bats, I was made crew lead of a telemetry project with Western Long-eared Bats (Myotis evotis). This was my favorite project and I gained valuable skills using radio-telemetry.
Other projects included wildlife clearances in Westerm Juniper stands that are set to be thinned next year, elk and deer hiding cover measurements in Ponderosa and Lodgepole pine forests, Habitat Framework Assessment for sage grouse, golden and bald eagle nest monitoring, and removing/adding signage to hiking trails.

Not only did I gain professional experience working on these projects, I learned a ton of practical skills which I will now list in no real order – driving extremely large pick up trucks, using 4WD, using a compass, reading a map (I’m from NJ where every road actually has a name), using GIS, using a Juno GPS, how to set up a mist net to catch bats, how to climb a butte in the pitch dark, how to drink enough water in the desert, how to ride an ATV, how to back up a trailer, what a rattlesnake sounds like, how to listen to country music, how to use a radio, etc.

Some random things I learned living in Central Oregon… how to yield to pedestrians (pedestrian yield to cars in NJ), how to react when a stranger is genuinely interested in your well-being, how to react to a mean bull, how to float down a river on an air mattress, how to talk back to coyotes, how to look for arrowheads, how to never trust Yelp reviews because everyone in Oregon is so nice and never tells the truth, how to pack for a backpack trip, how to become known at a local bar, the list goes on.

I highly recommend the CLM internship to anyone that is right out of school and looking for an adventure and practical experience. I’m sad to leave this friendly beautiful land of central OR, but ready to see my family again in NJ. My next step is to probably take a job at Rutgers University working on more bat research. Hopefully I make it back to Oregon somewhere down the line. To everyone with more time left on their internships, enjoy every minute!

Thank you to everyone who makes the CLM internship possible.

-Kathleen Kerwin
Prineville, BLM
Oregon

Sidelines

Bat burrito

middle of the night telemetry fun

Hello Everybody!

If you’ve been paying attention to the news from the western part of the country in recent months, then you’ve probably heard about fire. Yep, there’s been lots of it. Washington, Montana, California, all over the place. Thankfully, for people anyway, fire activity here in the eastern Sierra’s has slowed of late, as we’ve received some rain and snow.

Oh, I’m sorry, you wanted a close-up shot of this mahogany forest WHILE it was actively burning? Yeah, you’re on your own for that one.

The Bishop Field Office, where I work, has had only a couple of fairly small fires near our border this year, but fire elsewhere has dramatically affected us. The Rough Fire started on July 31^st on the western side of the Sierra’s, in and around Sequoia and King’s Canyon National Parks. We caught a lot of the smoke from that fire as it drifted east over the mountains and then settled down into the Owens Valley, and it put quite the damper on the late summer. 13,000-foot mountains are just 10 miles away from Bishop, but on many days we weren’t able to see them at all. And occasional days of snowing ashes aren’t much fun either. Cooler weather and rain finally knocked this 150,000-acre fire back a few weeks ago. Wildfires like that one may be a danger and an annoyance, but they are an inevitable, and even necessary, part of life out here.

“Moonscaped” seems to be the best way to describe this site that burned in 2012.

It’s hard to say exactly what happened here. Typically, there would be new plants coming in after a fire, but here there was absolutely nothing. The fire may have been exceptionally hot, and killed everything. The soil is very sandy and ashy, and now it is blown around by the wind so much that there aren’t any new plants that have been able to establish.

Most of my workdays in recent months have revolved around fire, but I’ve been focused on past fires instead of active ones. My co-intern, Tyler, and I have spent much of our time visiting the sites of old fires, and recording data about their condition as part of an ongoing monitoring project. Most of the data we collect measures different traits about the presence, abundance, and size of different plant species that show up at these burned sites. Some sites that we’ve visited burned all the way back in the 1950’s, and others burned as recently as 2 years ago. What makes the project so important, and interesting for us, is that different sites will react to fire in dramatically variable ways. The data we collect is meant to help managers determine what causes these sites to respond differently to fire, and to track how sites change through time in the years following a fire.

Hey, you know what’s fun? Getting to drive an ATV to your work site. My job rocks.

AND we get to use lasers for collecting data at old fire sites. I know it’s hard, but try to contain your jealousy.

Fire ecology is fascinating. We spend most of our time working in lands that fall in the western portion of the Great Basin Desert, and this is an area that has adapted to burn. The estimates I’ve heard vary quite a bit, but suggest that local shrub communities would probably have burned every 50-200 years historically. Lighting would have caused some of those fires, and others would be the result of intentional burning by native people. There seems to be plenty of disagreement about just how much fire activity we can attribute to Native Americans, but it could be a whole lot. Whatever their cause, fires here were common, and the plants have adapted to deal with them.

The burn areas we work in often have these skeletons of old, burned-out shrubs still standing amidst the new plants that have come in. Seems like a nice little snapshot of death and new life and all that good stuff. Cue “The Circle of Life”

Most of the Great Basin plant communities we work with are dominated by woody shrubs (especially bitterbrush and big sagebrush) and perennial bunchgrasses (Indian ricegrass, western needlegrass, needle-and-thread grass, and Great Basin wild rye). When one of these shrublands burns, the woody shrubs are killed, but the deep-rooted grasses may survive, and are able to resprout and come back quickly after fire. Other species that disperse and establish quickly in recently burned areas move in as well. Yellow and rubber rabbitbrush, both woody shrubs with bright yellow flowers, are good examples of species that show up soon after fire. The previously dominant sagebrush and bitterbrush will repopulate the area eventually, but they grow and disperse more slowly. So, after an area burns, the plant community growing there will change over time, with different species exchanging dominance. When small to medium-sized fires burn intermittently across a landscape, as they typically would have a couple hundred years ago, the result is a mosaic of plant communities of different ages, and with different associations of plant species. That sort of variety is good for biodiversity, and good for the resiliency and “health” of the landscape.

Here’s an area that burned in 2003. You can see the bright yellow rabbitbrush, as well as the smaller bunches of perennial grasses. These probably established and grew pretty quickly in this area right after the fire. The green/gray shrubs are sagebrush and bitterbrush, and have come back in this area more slowly.

Here’s a closer look at some of those native perennial bunchgrasses. These guys are champions among the restoration and land management communities out here, because they are great at stabilizing soil and retaining water in burned areas where erosion and water runoff are big concerns.

Unfortunately, that natural process of fire and ecosystem response has changed quite a bit in the last 150 years as this area has become more densely settled and managed by not-so-native American settlers. We don’t seem to like fire very much, and have tried to suppress and put out wildfires ever since we got here. That’s perfectly understandable, as fires are dangerous and destroy most of what gets in their way, but the problem is that suppressing fire has allowed woody plants and plant litter to build up, when it would usually be burning off more regularly. So, when fires burn now, there is more fuel available to them, and they burn hotter, faster, and bigger than they did in the past. That makes them more dangerous for us, and the more severe fires may sometimes be too destructive for the fire-adapted plant communities here, so that burned areas aren’t able to recover as well. Invasive species, especially cheatgrass, are also part of the problem, as they burn easily but also move in quickly to dominate areas that have recently burned.

Here’s another area that burned in 2003. You can see that some shrubs are growing, but it’s also an unfortunate example of how well invasive cheatgrass can take over a site after it burns. Most of the faded, brown, grass covering the ground is cheatgrass. Stupid plant.

So much cheatgrass. I’m sure that most of my fellow CLM Interns can confirm that this stuff is a huge pain to work in. It’s bad for the landscape, and it’s just plain annoying. If you have to walk through this stuff in the Fall, your socks will inevitably become full of the itchy seeds. That’s a problem not just because it’s uncomfortable, but also because you’ll end up carrying this invasive scourge to new places if you’re not diligent about picking them out.

How do deal with and manage wildfires is a complicated issue, and I won’t claim to know what is the right way for us to go about it. But hopefully the data I’ve been collecting about burned areas will become helpful information about how natural areas here are responding to fire.

Until Next Time,

Steve Tillman

Bishop BLM Office

Steve the Pirate, signing off.

Greetings again from North Carolina!  The past couple weeks have been full of adventure for our Seeds of Success East crew.  We got to try something new and collect seeds from a boat at the National Park Service’s Dyke Marsh Preserve outside of Washington D.C.  As a large chunk of our target species are semi-aquatic, we have been longing to use a boat for collections for most of the season.  We finally got our chance, and even had a captain to chauffeur us around in a motorboat.  We worked with National Park Service staff to collect Fraxinus profunda, or pumpkin ash.  The seeds of the ash will be banked in order to provide a genetic repository and a means of replanting after the devastating ash borer insect moves on out of the area.  Brent Steury, a Natural Resources Program Manager from the Park Service who we worked with on this project, filled us in on the threat.  The bugs seem to be just beginning to move into the area, but due to their exotic origins, the trees have little to no defense against them and almost 100% mortality is expected as they begin to prey on area ash populations.  The future looks grim for these trees, but it was gratifying to know that we are working well ahead to ensure that the genetics will not be lost.

The crew wading around outside our collection boat at Dyke Marsh

During a quiet moment before the rain hit, we collected Polygonum arifolium in the surreal beauty of this baldcypress swamp at Pettigrew State Park in NC.

The week after that, we had to face the threat of Hurricane Joaquin!  Most of the state of North Carolina was already expecting heavy rains for the few days that Joaquin was cooking up in the Atlantic to our southeast.  As my collection partner and I prepared to head to the Outer Banks, we packed extra rain gear and continuously monitored the coastal weather to make sure we weren’t driving into a dangerous situation.  As it was, we got lucky and didn’t work in anything worse than a light drizzle.  We drove north to Currituck Banks, to check on the maturity of the Sea Oats (Uniola paniculata) that we are planning to collect in that area.  We were greeted by a tumultuous sea and high winds.  We stayed only long enough to take a peek at the Uniola and see that where there is normally a wide, flat, beach that 4×4 trucks use as a road, there were only angry gray waves breaking just below the primary dunes.  We had only spent one day at the Outer Banks when rain, high tides, and wind-driven currents started to flood the roads.  We quickly decided to get off the barrier islands before anything could happen that would leave us stranded out there on what is basically a very thin strip of sand off the mainland.

Winds whip a “No Swimming” flag as the ocean becomes tumultuous ahead of Joaquin’s arrival.

We kept watching Joaquin, not sure yet if he would hit the coast or veer east out to sea.  We headed north to Virginia and got a head start on the storm.  While we were there, the rain subsided a bit, but again, high winds, heavy rains in the area, and higher-than-normal tides were causing minor flooding all over the place.  We had to cancel visits to all of our National Wildlife Refuge sites, as they closed due to flooding.  We went to a few more sites during the week, but high water made some of our potential collections impossible.  In the end, we headed back to Chapel Hill early and spent more time than normal working on species research and keying out some unknowns.  It was actually great to spend the time identifying some of the unknown plants we have been encountering.  Now we know more of the species that we are looking for in our seed scavenger hunt.

Next week, the weather is supposed to be clear and I’m sure we will be very busy collecting everything that we didn’t get to last time around.  I hope everyone else is staying safe as the weather becomes a bit more tumultuous this month.  Until next time, peace outside!

Emily Driskill

SOS East: North Carolina Botanical Garden

Greetings from the Ridgecrest Field Office! Over the last few weeks the temperatures here in the Mojave have become more “reasonable” by my standards, and today it is even chilly and raining! Seems like we’ll get two days of “fall” weather before it’s back in the 80s and 90s. So that’s been nice. What else has happened around here? Many things! We’ve made several seed collections over the last few weeks, but that activity (as you can guess) certainly is waning. Our field office now has a wildlife biologist, and I’m quite excited for the opportunity to work with and learn from her.

Recently I was able to visit a wind farm with the biologist, along with BLM employees from another field office and some folks from the Fish and Wildlife Service. The purpose of the visit was to examine the wind farm’s proposed system for California Condor detection and emergency turbine shutdowns. It was very interesting to see the collaboration between the company and agencies.

It turns out, if you look close enough, plants really do have hearts. These are some leaves from an Atriplex species from which we recently collected seed at Olancha Dunes.

The week before last, I attended my alternate training opportunity, which was Fire Ecology of the Sierra Nevada put on by the Jepson Herbarium. It was a 3-day workshop at Yosemite National Park, and it was fantastic. I went up a couple days early to camp, hike, and explore the park as well–which was fortunate timing because one week later, the high elevations are now covered in snow and Tioga Pass closed.

Our workshop was led by several grad students from UC Berkeley, each with research pertaining to different aspects of fire ecology. The first day was about historical fire in the area, changes in policies over the decades, and the effects of fire suppression. The second day consisted of talking about fire regimes and field visits to places where the fire regime has been restored, to look at the forest structure/vegetation communities found there. We also heard about pollinator responses to fire, which was interesting. An aha moment from that day: thinking of “rare” plants/wildflowers, how many of those are really just early successional species that we rarely see because of fire suppression? And when an area finally burns, in some areas the fuel load is so high that the severity of the fire kills the seed bank.

Our final day was spent with one specific case study: the Rim Fire from 2013. We heard from Kelly (with BLM Fire) and June (a fire archaeologist). They were incredibly interesting to talk to. Kelly led us through Tuolomne Grove (where I got to see my first giant sequoia!!!) and talked us through their strategy for preventing the Rim Fire from ripping through the area–which was a combination of having treated the area previously with prescribed burns so that recurring burns were mostly of low severity, protecting the giant sequoias through duff removal and wetting, and backburning starting at the grove and letting it continue onwards to meet the head fire. June told us what it was like being a resource advisor on fires, the processes and considerations that go into planning strategies when fighting fires or deciding to allow them to burn. Ultimately the Rim Fire burned ~250,000 acres of land in Yosemite NP and Stanislaus NF, and the areas of high severity burn were very substantial. Here, we are at a site in Stanislaus talking about how landscape, weather, and fuel load affect fire severity, the difference between low/moderate/high severity burns and what that means for stand replacement, as well as post-fire salvage logging.

I had the opportunity to volunteer for the BLM in the Great American Outdoors exhibit at the LA County fair. Most of the day, we worked at the game table where people had to answer trivia questions to win prizes. I got to hold a rosy boa as we were sitting on the float waiting for the parade to start; and we got to ride with Mohave Maxine, Woodsy Owl, Smokey the Bear, and Seymour Antelope. It was a really fun day.

During a field visit last week, I saw my first Mojave rattlesnake. Unfortunately, he was quite crispy.

After just over two months, I am still seeing new things almost every time we go out into the field. Last week we went to collect information for an EA that is being written. We went out to Robber’s Roost (pictured here) to see if cattle access to a state threatened plant would be reduced by the proposed fenceline.

 And something I was personally excited for: I finished creating the digital record of the RIFO Herbarium. I think this was the prettiest sheet I saw.