Temperatures are dropping rapidly in Idaho, and I’m ready to flee before my long route back to New England starts getting snowy.

Our work truck one chilly morning. Freezing cold in October is normal in New England. Freezing cold a week after 90 degree averages is just one of those Idaho things.

When I was first offered a CLM position in Shoshone, ID, I was honestly very hesitant to accept. I didn’t know anything about Idaho, and it was frightening to consider living in a remote area so far from everyone and everything I’ve ever known. Looking back now, I’m grateful to my past self that I took that leap! My time with the BLM was an incredibly valuable experience with awesome co-workers, and Idaho has been a beautiful place to explore.

I’ve been doing some last minute projects for the past month. We wrapped up our assessments of 5 Year ESRs – areas that burned 5 years ago and were seeded to hopefully maintain a healthy habitat. This was absolutely my favorite project of the summer – other CLM interns and I worked together judging whether seeded plants had successfully established in old fire areas, and wrote reports discussing our findings and recommending further management actions. It was awesome insight into how the BLM makes large-scale management and funding decisions.

The last few weeks have been given to sagebrush mapping, which is pretty dull work, but vital to sagebrush seed collection efforts. We often drove 7-8 hours a day checking on isolated sagebrush populations – whether we had the right species, how big the population was, how productive the plants were, insect damage, etc. We found ourselves alternating between confidence and complete confusion in regards to sagebrush ID, but I think we found our groove by the end. Hopefully we found enough good Wyoming big sagebrush populations for seed collection, which will be carried out later this fall.

Mountings of my SOS co-workers specimens, plus sagebrush mapping specimens to confirm which species we found. Many that we initially thought were Wyoming turned out to be Big basin, a less desirable species. Oops.

I recently got to check out a juniper treatment project – large swaths of juniper are removed to increase sage-grouse habitat, with the added benefit of reducing fire risks in mountain areas. It was a bit shocking to see the destruction and desolation created by the machines, but the result will hopefully be healthy sagebrush slopes with plenty of habitat for sage-grouse. Sometimes environmental management isn’t pretty, but the results are worthwhile.

These machines grind up juniper and reduce it to shreds – scary! But the downed juniper will insulate seeded plants through the winter.

Temporarily ugly. What was once a low diversity juniper forest will soon be prime sagebrush/sage-grouse habitat.

Learning about all of this management and project assessment stuff was great, because I’ve been leaning more toward a professional career in natural resources management than botany. However, I am disappointed that my botanical skills weren’t noticeably strengthened this summer. Working with a fuels crew meant that we saw pretty degraded habitats that were recovering slowly from recent fires – a whole lot of cheatgrass, Sandbergs bluegrass, phlox and not much else. It was awesome to learn a lot more about grasses, I was lucky enough to attend a Carex identification workshop, and we searched for rare plants on several occasions, but more opportunities to botanize would have been great to help me learn the families better. It’s something I’m determined to improve upon in my own time.

Like I mentioned above, working with the BLM helped me develop a lot of confidence in natural resources. But I’m 100% certain that my choice to live away from my known world for a while did more for my confidence than all of that (valuable as it still was!). To anyone who might be reading this blog after receiving a similar offer from CLM, do it. Leave your big city world, or rural corner of the country, and test yourself with something new and maybe a little scary. I moved from Boston to rural and very-much-on-fire Idaho, made friends from strangers, and learned a whole new set of plants in a whole new set of environments. Kinda doubt that anything’s gonna seem insurmountable after this.

Bye Idaho! I look forward to seeing your scenic vistas again someday.

It’s hard to believe 5 months ago I was fresh in Twin Falls, ID, starting my first botany tech job, adjusting to a new landscape that felt unknown and alien. 5 months ago I couldn’t see the end of it. I felt so far away, geographically and otherwise, to the things and places and people that felt like home. It was a rough transition, and to be honest I never quite adjusted to it. But people told me, and I knew, it would fly by. And it did. I leave Idaho in three days and could not be more excited, and am also grateful for what this experience has given me. It’s so important to step out of your familiar bubble- it challenges us to grow and communicate in different ways. It introduces us to new plants and ecosystems. It reminds us of how big the world is.

I spent a good amount of time kayaking on the Snake River. I <3 water sports

Kayak parking spot

It was an interesting experience to be the guinea pig of having a CBG intern on the fuels crew in the Twin Falls office. My official title was “botanical specialist,” though half the time I felt like I was floundering in plant identification in a place completely new to me, while having the people on my crew look to me as their expert. I was learning and teaching at the same time and it really didn’t make me feel very confident. I’m skilled in taxonomy but the speed in which I was expected (or felt like I was expected) to know these new species felt overwhelming at times. I also had almost no experience in grass identification, which was a huge percentage of what we were looking at.
There were a couple crash courses in plant ID of the area in the very beginning, but after that I felt mostly left to my own devices. There weren’t a lot of people I was able to turn to in the office. At least people I was introduced to- as the season went on I would randomly meet people to ask when I had an unknown, but it wasn’t facilitated.
It got easier, and I felt more confident as I saw plants more often, and honestly forb diversity was pretty low in most of the areas we monitored anyway, so there weren’t many I needed to commit to memory. I guess I was just expecting more of a botany mentorship.

Mimulus nanus looking adorable

Bitter root (Lewisia rediviva) is one of my favorite flowers and I got to see it more than I ever have before this summer. Look at those stamens dang.

Overall though, I did enjoy working in the fire program. I’m interested in fire ecology, and reading old reports on fires and then using them in conjunction with the new data we collected to write new reports was fascinating, and gave me a taste of what it takes to make management recommendations. It also inspired me to go out and get my Red Card next year, because I am interested in prescribed burns.
I also familiarized myself more with ArcGIS (my arch nemesis), learned to use Avenza and Collector, got better at reading maps and using compasses, learned techniques for rare plant monitoring, got really good at driving a 4wd truck for crazy amounts of hours on crazy back road mazes, and  learned how to navigate the bureaucracy that is work in the federal government. I feel more confident in applying to jobs now.
I still do wish I had been placed in the Pacific Northwest, not just because it’s familiar, but because it is where I plan on putting down my roots, therefore finding jobs. Monitoring sagebrush steppe is very different than monitoring coniferous forests, with it a whole other host of necessary skills specific to that ecosystem, which I didn’t gain here. But I do believe that my baseline knowledge and skills, along with obviously being able to quickly pick up necessary monitoring techniques and botanical skill, will be enough experience to help me find a job for next field season.

City of Rocks Natural Reserve. I got to work around here for a day last week.

City of Rocks

Truly the gem of this season though was being able to be in a part of the country that I would otherwise spend very little time in. I fell in love with the Sawtooth Mountains to the north. I got to explore Yellowstone. I met badgers and coyotes and moose and three bears (one of which I watched make off with our bag of food). I’m not much of a geology nerd, but I was constantly in awe of the canyons and valleys and volcanic history and crazy rock formations. There may not be jutting mountains or towering trees around Twin Falls, but there are beautiful swimming holes that you don’t see until you walk through farm fields and look into the canyon; and small, fleeting, beautiful flowers; and the stillness of being in an expanse of sagebrush. I appreciate the secret beauty of southern Idaho. I don’t know if I would come back on my own accord, but I am glad I got to know it, even briefly.

Secret lake, hidden from view by expanses of cornfields and pasture. My favorite swimming spot this summer.

Box Canyon- where the water is mesmerizing but frigid

The Bruneau Canyon

Dave’s Creek,The Jarbridge Wilderness. We had a work camping trip here to collect tree data.

I am obsessed with the Sawtooths

OBSESSED I TELL YOU

Monitoring Castelleja christii- a Paintbrush endemic to the top of Mt Harrison.

Anemone patens looking real good with my mani in SE Montana

So did this adorable Lewisia pygmaea- Pygmy Bitter Root

Seas of Erythronium grandiflorum in SE Montana (Glacier Lily)

Ok I did some pretty cool things this summer.

Sofia V

Well the time has come to leave the sagebrush expanse and be welcomed home to by the colors and smells of autumn in Pennsylvania.

Once upon a time I thought I couldn’t get anywhere without a GPS. Using maps was a long-forgotten memory… where my parents tried their best to plan our summer vacation, but there was always the sound of scrambling papers when we inevitably got lost. But out in no-service-land, maps were A MUST to navigate the Nevada wilderness. And now, with these brand new skills to navigate roadways, I remain biased and will never choose maps over a GPS (when there is a choice).

Shout out to Payton’s playlists and audiobooks. They have kept us sane when we spent an entire workday in the truck.

We usually saw Nevada wilderness through the windshield.

The Nevada wilderness conditions Payton and I have been exposed to makes me appreciate what we have taken for granted. I will never look at paved roads the same way, even with monstrous potholes. Once you’ve had to navigate narrow dirt roads sprinkled with sharp rocks and half-meter-deep channels overlooking a 200 foot drop, paved roads are a blessing. And let’s just say toilets with plumbing… toilets in general really are human’s greatest invention.

A shortcut through the Sillwater mountain range in central Nevada took us to anxiously high places.

I find it odd that I feel like I know western plant species more than I know eastern ones, and I shouldn’t resist this idea of change. I feel like this entire internship’s theme revolved around change. I’ve immersed myself into a new ecosystem, a new workplace, a new community and culture, and a new field experience. Adjusting to change has its benefits: I have a whole page of new skills to take me to my next job, internship, and future career.

Kalmia microphylla, western swamp laurel, is a reminder of home and PA’s state flower, mountain laurel.

Our work is only a small piece to the large puzzle, but progress is not made in leaps and bounds.I’m grateful to contribute to a program that promotes long-term restoration and conservation efforts.

It’s been fun!

Alyssa Hay

Yesterday, Susan, Virginia and I went back up to Heber Springs, AR, about 2 hours north of Hot Springs. Heber Springs is the location for the Arkansas Native Plant Society meeting this weekend, and we went to scout out a couple of trails that Virginia, the president of ANPS, and Susan, the president elect, will be leading plant walks on.

Virginia and Susan key out an aster.

The first trail we went to was Collins Creek, where a pipe from the bottom of the Greer’s Ferry dam shoots icy water into a stream and creates artificial trout habitat.

Pipe from dam shooting cold water into Collins Creek.

It hasn’t rained much lately, so there isn’t too much to see botanically. Susan and Virginia searched for plants they could tell ANPS members about on the hikes. Our second location was called Bridal Veil Falls. When we arrived, the falls had dried to a tiny trickle.

Susan and Virginia at the top of the dry falls.

In the top left is a viewing platform, in the bottom left you can see Susan standing at the top of the falls. I was on a cliff above, taking pictures of moss.

Don’t you think there is a tardigrade in here somewhere??

We managed to find some noteworthy plants, including Castanea ozarkensis, Ozark Chinquapin, which is a sensitive species. We also saw several Spiranthes or ladies tresses orchids at the top of the falls.

Spiranthes sp.

And a more common oak species, recognizable by its unique gesture.

Quercus falcata, Southern red oak

And the ever stunning beautyberry.

Callicarpa americana, beautyberry.

We will head back up to Heber Springs this Friday for the meeting, which will take place at Quality Inn conference center and kick off with a potluck and plant auction, ANPS’s biggest fundraiser. I have less than 3 weeks left in my internship, so this will be a good finale of sorts. I hope everyone is having fun!

G

Wow. What a summer this has been! I will try to succinctly summarize the last two months and reflect on the CLM experience overall:

First, I’d like to say thank you to Fall for coming. Although it was a rather abrupt shift, the outdoor temperature in the Twin Falls District is FINALLY tolerable and I have (for the most part) stopped sweating 24/7. YESSSSS. Swee(a)t relief.

The post-blowout pile of lovely invasives accumulated under the explorer

Second, the primary seed collection season (for forbs at least) in southern Idaho wrapped up in late July, so lately Patricia and I have been mapping sagebrush populations throughout the entire district in hopes of finding the “perfect” site for collecting Wyoming big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata wyomingensis) when it eventually sets seed. This has proved to be tougher than expected as Wyoming big sage and Basin big sage hybridize in certain habitats, making field identification tricky.

We’ve also thoroughly tested the BLM road-appropriateness of the 2009 Ford Explorer to find it handles far better than one would expect! Shout out to the Explorer for fording streams, climbing mountains, dealing with rock after rock after rock, straddling ruts, and most of all, having A/C. Oh, and not catching on fire (see above).

A recent view from a potential Wyoming sagebrush collection site near the Nevada border

Some cute LBM’s amongst the sagebrush on a damp summer morning (I wish my fungi identification skills were better but plants provide enough confusion and frustration for the time being)

More views from mapping (seconds before a nasty thunderstorm)

5 AM wake up calls are not too bad when you’re blessed with witnessing sunrises with clouds like these!

A friendly resident of Bench Lakes (Sawtooth National Forest)… photogenic lil’ bugger

One of the few beautiful late summer bloomers: Eriogonum microthecum. Thank you for brightening my day!

A fellow explorer of the sagebrush steppe… horny lil bugger

Disappointed that I couldn’t capture a better representation of Bruneau Canyon’s beauty. It is truly exquisite.

Dierke’s Lake Park: the provider of tricky overhung climbing routes, questionably sanitary swimming, and cotton candy sunsets

Third, besides navigating BLM roads and staring at sagebrush all day, we were able to work on other projects including: riparian photo points of the Little Wood River, scouting Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and Pinyon pine stands (Pinus monophylla) for potential collections, and monitoring the effectiveness of juniper thinning and post-fire restoration projects which allowed us to camp near a scenic creek. We also journeyed 2 miles into one of the longest caves in the continental US, rock on!

When you spend 8 hours each day looking at sagebrush, you’re bound to find one that looks like a tree– thus a new species was discovered: Artetreesia tridentreeta

The cone and needles of Pinyon pine (Pinus monophylla)… sappy lil bugger … only took 2 hand sanitizer and 4 hot water rinses to be rid of the stickiness

You could say that camping out for Idaho Mountain Festival at Castle Rocks State Park was a bit colder than expected. However, gathering with fellow climbers with breathtaking views was well worth only getting up one route.

Overall, the CLM internship has been an absolute blast. I feel incredibly grateful to have participated in various projects and explore the most special areas of the district. I had the privilege of not only collecting seeds in stunning surroundings for work but also leading a nature walk for 4H’ers, camping along a remote creek, exploring the Chicago Botanic Garden, and keying several of my favorite plants (Carex and Juncus species). I was able to vastly improve my GIS skills using ArcMap, my techniques in creating herbarium specimens, and ability to drive on unmaintained roads.

In addition, my overall botanical knowledge increased tremendously as I am now fairly comfortable using Intermountain Flora and Plants of the Pacific Northwest, much more familiar with family characteristics, and can confidently identify (at least to genera) most of the Southern Idaho native forbs, shrubs and trees while also understanding their seed anatomy and phenology. After completing countless collections for Seeds of Success, I have such a profound appreciation for the tenacity and triumph of plants and their seeds.

It is so rewarding to see all of our hard work pay off! Some of my favorite SOS species.   Top: Penstemen cusickii.                                          Bottom: Chaenactis douglasii

Lastly, I would like to thoroughly thank my supervisor Danelle for her thoughtful guidance and support throughout the internship, CBG for making this experience possible, Patricia for putting up with me for way too many hours every week, and each of the individuals who made this an unforgettable chapter.

Farewell sagebrush and wide open spaces… the forests are calling!

Greetings from Baker City, OR!

I am writing this as I finish up my final day of my internship. For the 5 past months I have had the opportunity to work in Baker City doing forestry work. I have always missed the trees when I move from Michigan for the summer so I was excited about working in the trees. After completing my internship I am still excited about that. It has helped me to define more of my career goals and help me to realize that I would love to get a job working with forestry. It also would be a way for me to hopefully find a job closer to my home state. While I greatly enjoy being able to more to new places and experience new ecosystems, I miss my family and friends.

I finished up my forestry duties with about 2 weeks left so that gave me the opportunity to do other things and expand my learning and experience. Since we had a week of rainy, wet weather that was not great for field work I had the opportunity to visit a project that will be started next summer. I got a chance to see some of the early planning that goes into setting up this specific project. With our projects complete I also got the chance to go out with the new forestry person and pick her brain for knowledge. She transferred over from the west side of Oregon where the forestry program is run differently and their methods vary. We set up a day where we went out in the woods and I just asked her questions. I was able to see how other areas of the country practice forestry and gain a lot of useful knowledge. I also got the opportunity to go out with other people in the office to see what they do and get some experience with other areas of work.

The Project area for next summer’s work

Our main project area for the work we did this summer

Overall, my internship has allowed me to gain some valuable real life experience that will be beneficial for anybody wanting to work in the federal government. You also have the freedom to tailor your internship to your liking. If you have an interest in something you can go out with an employee who works in that area. Its a great way to help narrow down your career goals without getting stuck in something you end up disliking for the whole summer.

Farewell,

AZ

Baker City BLM

It’s crazy to think I have one month left until I end my internship here in Wyoming. After four months I have gotten pretty settled in here. I’ve learned a lot from my mentors, co-workers, and the people I have met in this small mountain town, and it is going to be a lot harder to leave this place than I imagined when I first moved here (even though I don’t consider snow and freezing temperatures to be a welcoming fall climate). I have honestly fallen in love with:

• Collecting data for habitat assessments and wildlife management.
• Long drives on sometimes difficult terrain through the mountains.
• Snowcapped mountains, even if it’s only September and this already feels like winter to my Kansas pansy self.
• Gannet Grill pizza (for shame, if this wasn’t included in my list).

Recently snowcapped mountains of South Pass, Wyoming. They will stay this way until near the end of May.  It’s a love hate relationship, really. Love the beautiful mountains, hate the cold. Although, the longer I stay here, the longer enduring the cold feels worth it.

In addition to the town, my office has been great, and I have gotten to meet some remarkable humans. The people I have met here have been so kind and willing to share the knowledge they have gained from years of experience. I have had opportunities to go out into the field with the Fire and Fuels Lead, the Botanist, the GIS specialist, and the Archeologist in addition to both of my Wildlife Biologist mentors. I have learned that the path to a permanent position, or a long term career, is often a winding road, and that sometimes, you don’t realize you love something until you try it.  Many of the people I have had the opportunity to talk with in the office had started out on a different path before finding what they wanted to do, and it is often not what they expected. And my mentor, Leah, is more than supportive of the different avenues I was to explore. She has also put up with our quirks and eccentrics all summer, and proudly wears the matching “Wildlife Lead” shirt we made her (ours say “Wildlife Crew”). The design, representative of our yet to be grasped hopes of seeing a bear this season.

From Left to Right: Coli Huffman (Shadow), Brittany Culp, Leah Yandow, and Caitlin Ryan (Me).

Hearing the stories of how others were lead to the positions they now fill has opened my eyes to an even broader mindset in how I search for jobs in the future. I have realized that getting your foot in the door is usually the biggest obstacle, and that sometimes, it might look different than you think.  I have enjoyed working with the many different specialists in my field office and I feel substantially more confident in my pursuit of a career in conservation as I have continued this internship. The group of interns I have been blessed to work with this summer has also been something that will stick with me. I love learning where other people come from and sharing experiences we have had before and during this internship. We have made a lot of memories in the field together. With the support this office has shown, I know that when I wind down my internship in a month, that I will be leaving with great connections for the future.  Below, a documentation the intern crew braving South Pass, on the first day of snow.  Only the strong survived. Just kidding, we all survived.

A very cold, snogwy day in the mountains. The name of the game is layers, layers, layers.

A less snowy, but still cold day in the mountains. Myself, Brittany Culp, James Noyama, and Coli Huffman (no longer a shadow).

Well, all things must come to an end, but it is certainly hard to imagine how quickly this summer flew by! My time here in Idaho has come to an end and it’s about time I head back to home to Mississippi for a short break. Before I make it back home though, I’ll be sure to stop by a few national parks and forests on the way that I just can’t go without seeing!

Awesome tree haven found during a holiday trip

This summer was filled with a lot of new friendships and some unexpected lessons to be learned. While unfortunately I didn’t get to certify myself for wildlife fighting, I still grew as a person and renewed a few of my other skill sets. I was able to re-certify my CPR training in the beginning of the summer and throughout, I was able to continue practicing my bird, plant and invertebrate (as well as other organisms) identification skills. Even though I don’t feel like I’ve necessarily learned any new skills, I feel it is still important to keep practicing skills essential to one’s profession, which I am certain I have. The training provided throughout the summer was very valuable and I was happy to add new knowledge whenever I could, whether it be sage brush identification, or riparian habitat training. Also, learning your way around a GPS model that is new to you can take some practice. I had no idea that GPS units could vary so much! In addition, I also feel like whenever you are given the opportunity to work so closely and continuously with people from different backgrounds in your field, it provides an opportunity to grow and this should not be taken for granted. Socialization and teamwork are skills and attributes that continuously grow throughout your lifetime and I believe each year and each new field partner I receive adds another chapter to my growth. I wouldn’t have enjoyed my summer experience as much as I had if I didn’t have a field partner I could relate with so well on a professional and personal level. Experiences and friendships formed such as these are something I cherish forever and will always be grateful for. You really don’t know how much you appreciate a great field partner turned friend until you’ve experienced working with someone in the past who was a total nightmare! Details like these can make all the difference and can make working your dream job either a living nightmare or a dream-come-true depending on what attitudes and energy you are surrounded by. Thankful to be on the lucky end of things!

the CLM crew electrofishing in Ketchum

burrowing owl

Hera buckmoth found near Malta, ID

little garter snake with a water droplet beard <3

What was rewarding to me was being able to give a helping hand to the BLM, as well as other government entities, whenever I could on a variety of projects. Not only did we assist with sage grouse monitoring, but the BLM also got us out there to pursue studying other organisms of interest whenever they could. From raptor surveys, monarch tagging and jewel beetle wrangling to electrofishing some impressive trout, I feel like our field office tried it’s best to fit in as much wildlife experience as they could in addition to our time in the field studying botany. I found it very rewarding to be able to do both whenever possible, as I have a natural tendency to prefer wildlife over botany. There were a lot of first sightings for me in both the wildlife and botanical realm this summer, and that’s always a plus for me too. 🙂

white lined sphinx caterpillar

the smallest of monarch caterpillars during our search for adults and larvae 🙂

Lycaenid butterfly

I wanted to highlight these experiences that I mentioned above because I don’t want to seem ungrateful at all for the time and experience I gained this summer. The Burley field office has a very welcoming crew and I feel like they did whatever they could to preoccupy us with as much biological surveying as possible. It’s an honor to be the first batch of interns they received from this program and hopefully they will continue to do so in the future!

Beautiful rainbow trout caught while electrofishing with USGS

wood river sculpin also found while electrofishing with USGS

However, I would like to be honest and highlight some expectations that were not met, as requested by the CLM program employees as hopefully this can help other interns in the future. Before accepting the position, it was my understanding that this internship would be majority botany and/or wildlife related. After interviews and questions were all said and done, I went into this thinking that I would be utilized the majority of the time for botany field work. While I did end up working outside more than in the office(which personally, I always appreciate), I feel like the botany aspect was not as prominent as advertised. All in all, the data collection for AIM (habitat assessment for sage grouse) plant surveys, which I understood to be at least 3 out of 5 months of my internship, only lasted about a month. On the other-hand, my field partner and I spent nearly two months placing plastic markers on cattle fence in order to lower sage grouse mortality. While I am not refuting the importance of going to these locations to make sure the fencing is safe for this species, my understanding was that we would be doing majority botany work and I would get a greater opportunity to practice my botanical identification. However, we also got the chance to be involved with the data management aspect of AIM, which is just as important. After the field season for AIM was over, we were also involved with some habitat assessment projects which is a great skill and experience to have, especially if one wants to be involved with ecology. So while I am not trying to knock the internship as a whole because I definitely had some great experiences and cherish this opportunity to look into how the BLM functions, I feel like there is room for improvement for the CLM program.

Coming here as a 3 year alumni from another internship program (Student Conservation Association), I feel like I already had a certain expectation for internships working alongside DOI , which should certainly be taken into account. While working with the people at the Burely office, I could feel that they were doing their best to try and give us as many interesting surveys as possible and I really appreciate that they went out of their way for us, even though they have plenty of their own work to do. This critique is not something that I feel is unique to our field office, as I spoke to other CLM interns in other offices and they had similar thoughts. On the contrary, I feel lucky that our office worked so much to give us as much experience as possible because I feel like compared to other offices, we had more opportunity to work with wildlife and botany surveys. As with many things in life, I am sure this a matter with a multitude of layers and is not something to be pointing fingers at one particular thing. I realize that CLM and BLM are different from other internship programs and government entities, and my only wish is for both of them to continue to flourish despite any obstacles or critiques.

All-in-all with that being said, I know a part of me will certainly miss Idaho and the beautiful views and natural wonders it granted me while I was here. Thanks to this summer, I feel ready and prepared for my next endeavor, which is to attend graduate school, and look forward to what the road has awaiting for me.

Much love to the sagebrush steppe xxxx

-Izzy

City of Rocks reserve near Alma, ID – a must-see if you’re in the area

Field work is really hard! Especially in the desert!

Sometimes it feels like the desert is playing tricks on me, warping my perception. It has been a struggle finding viable seed to collect for our seed banking efforts. Many of the plants that are most important for post-wildfire restoration have produced little to no seed this year.

About a month or so ago, Mike and I took a walk through the site of the recent Long Valley fire. It was pretty spooky. There was no sign of any herbaceous plants and all that remained of the shrubs were blackened twigs. At first glance, the area looked like a desolate wasteland. Then I looked closer. Ants scrambled around the charred gravel. A lone mushroom stood, flushed by all the water from the firefighting effort. Desert peach sprouted from the bases of charred bushes.

What had appeared to me as a lifeless landscape was actually full of vitality and regeneration. It reminded me that the apocalyptic rhetoric that we conservationists often use to galvanize support for our cause can overlook the innate regenerative potential of threatened ecosystems. How often have seed banks been billed as “doomsday vaults”? I think that this sort of apocalyptic thinking is not only destructively pessimistic, but also endows us conservationists with a false sense of self-importance. As soon as we start believing that the earth is dying because of us, we start believing that we alone can save it. Not to say that we haven’t caused irreparable damage to this planet. But I think it is important to acknowledge that ecosystems are incredibly resilient and that they will recover from our impact regardless of whether we welcome a few sacred species onto our ark. Granted, this recovery might not take place on a timescale that is acceptable to us as users of the land. It will probably be millennia before natural antagonists evolve to put a check on invasive organisms.

On a lighter note, I went to Lake Tahoe this past weekend. Such beautiful, such wow, such boats. We went on a gorgeous hike to the top of Twin Peaks, visited an “authentic Scandinavian castle” and swam to a small island in the middle of the lake.

As we are more than halfway through our seed collecting internship, I have once again revised my list of favorites among the sites in which we collect, and Mast Rd Natural Area in Epping, NH has consistently been near the top.

Mast Rd Natural Area is turning into quite a friendly space for the weekend hiker. It is a forested site containing a few wetland areas and a meadow and is currently undergoing restoration to make it more accessible to pedestrians. When we first visited the site, the felled trunks and the tire marks revealed that Mast Rd Natural Area used to be an ATV trail system. The construction has been apparent with each visit and the trails are starting to take shape; gravel has been lain and bridges have been constructed over less than solid land.

Both the weekend hiker and the seasoned field worker will find plenty of fascinating sights here. That is part of the beauty of Mast Rd Natural Area. Though New Hampshire rises to mountain elevations further inland, this natural area is rather flat, providing for an easy walk that will allow hikers to focus on what they see along the trail instead of whether they will reach the end.

As seed collectors, we love this site. We have made thirteen collections here to date, which speaks to the range of diversity among the habitats that support a variety of native plant populations. The Carex species are well represented, with different ones growing in different areas, depending on soil wetness. We have collected Sparganium americanum and Eleocharis obtusa, which generally grow in standing water. We have also collected species that are typically found in bogs with acidic and moist, spongy soil, like Rhynchospora capitellata and Triadenum virginicum. We will probably collect a grass growing in a drier part of Mast Rd Natural Area next month, Schizachyrium scoparium. Also, we never made an official collection of Vaccinium angustifolium or Vaccinium corymbosum, but we taste-tested these highbush and lowbush blueberries to our heart’s content and mostly agreed that the highbush is more delicious. You too can pick wild blueberries at Mast Rd Natural Area in the summer months.

Bog habitat at Mast Rd. PC: E. Tokarz

Every time we have been to Mast Rd Natural Area, we have also noted a spectacular nature sighting. Once we saw a grasshopper molt its exoskeleton. It unfurled a large abdomen as it waddled away from its skin, its back legs still glued together. We gaped in wonder at the shell it left behind, which looked to be less than half its new size. Another time, we nearly stepped on a quail. It sat unfazed by our near step as we reached for some Scirpus, seeming to be more curious than concerned. We all agree there is always more to explore and to notice than we have time for, and that we can best appreciate this natural area on foot.

The exoskeleton of the grasshopper at Mast Rd. Natural Area, NH. PC: E. Tokarz

P.S. This site has a bonus. It is only ten minutes away from the Lindt chocolate factory outlet store. You’ve never seen so many truffles in your life!