I spent this month working on seed collection and surveying penstemon, white bark pine, and pollinators. All of these missions required our team to conquer rough terrain going up steep grades of elevation. We had a rough first week after the 4th of July, where we seemed to run into roadblocks along every step of our long commutes. We were turned away by downed trees, flooded roads and even getting stuck in the mud. After this week our luck seemed to shift, and we began stringing together some extremely productive days catching bees and counting penstemon. We hosted a “botany blitz” where we welcomed volunteers, youth crews and other forest service teams to help us count and categorize Lemhi Penstemon.

We are always looking for diverse meadow settings for potential seed collection sites, but also for pollinator collection sites. Specifically, we are on the lookout for penstemon wasps and western bumble bees. Though we didn’t find any of these species this month, we collected a beautiful variety of pollinators!

Seed collection began to pick up toward the end of the month, when we were able to make three collections of Poa secunda. Grass ID is tedious, and there was a bit of a learning curve, but our seed populations seem to be high quality. Since pictures of grass are a bit bland, I decided to include some cool things below that we found along the way while looking for seed populations. I was excited to hear that monotropa could be found in Beaverhead-Deerlodge but didn’t expect to be able to spot one. They tend to be hidden in forest litter, but definitely stand out with their white color. The Monotropacae are considered myco-heterotrophs, relying on parasitism on fungus for energy rather than photosynthesis. Next to that photo are some bright red lupin seed pods, a beautiful member of the Fabacae family. The last picture is of a curious grouse, who seemed to enjoy looking right back at the camera for a photoshoot.

I’ve been attending as many local events as possible during my free time. A highlight this month was Bannack days, an event where the popular ghost town gets revitalized. Historic arts and crafts, fiddle players and community members came to provide a glimpse into what life may have been like during the gold rush days. It is not uncommon to see similar prospecting sites on forest service land on our way out to our survey sites.

Ross Gay, in his collection of essayettes, The Book of Delights, ruminates on the nature of delight. He believes delight is a type of invitation to notice the things and events happening and unfolding around us, and find joy in their spontaneity and sorrow, their strangeness and their beauty.

Which is to say… seeds are here! Across the Tongass, plants are teeming with seeds of their own making. And we are taking some of them. Collecting seeds is a delight, which means it is about paying attention. It is also a meticulous and at times, tedious, act. For this post, I will revel in this delight: the detailed beauty of fruits, capsules and pods, and their accompanying seeds.

Western Columbine (Aquilegia formosa) is an elusive forb that often stands alone or in smaller groups, making it difficult to find an extensive enough population to collect from. But, early this month, we encountered a steady group of them on the side of a freeway on Prince of Wales Island. Only a few bowing red and yellow heads remained — most had hardened and browned and were full of tiny black seeds. These seeds became our first collection.

Blueberries, (Vacinium sp.) with their sour notes of blue, are packed with 20-30 seeds per berry. There are subtleties in the varieties of blueberry — the bog and dwarf blueberry are smaller, and sweeter than these traditional, larger wild blueberries. Vacinium alaskensis are abundant in this forest, pops of blue and purple carpeting the forest floor. And they were our second collection.

Foamflower (Tiarella trifoliata) keep their seeds close. They go to seed so quick, it is easy to miss the event: tiny white clusters of flowers that, when blooming, look like mini constellations of stars mirrored onto the forest floor, elongating into seed pods, each filled with sometimes three or five, but more often one, single black seed.

By and large, this month was berry month.

Devil’s Club (Oplopanax horridus) are bright, flat umbrellas of green. Their stems are full of sharp spikes, and they balance large triangles of red berries atop their leaves. Bears relish them; we take a few from every plant we can get close to.

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis) pack themselves tightly into stream systems and along roads and trails. This month, droplets of plump berries hung from their branches, coming in colors gold, red, or sometimes a combination of both. They taste like water, but bitter too.

And the Fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium) — the most vibrant shade of purple-pink you will ever see, brightening the road systems and stitching up the slopes of tall mountains. We collected their seed pods just this morning — sleek and slim green-bean-like capsules, pink on top with a green underside, each filled with up to 8,000 seeds. Abundance.

Stink Current, Ribes bracteosum, leaves your hands smelling of lemon and mint. These delicacies became our most recent collection.

It is clear that each plant and their seeds are exceptionally designed to work for them, their morphology, their pollinators, their eventual dispersal. Everything about them is carefully and thoughtfully designed. They produce seeds of their own making.

After harvesting comes drying, sorting and cleaning the seeds for storing. This is a tedious process, one that is also all about detail and care (especially when everything is soaking wet!).

As seed collectors, we are one mode of transport, one of these plants’ dispersal units. In the process, we try to ensure that we are leaving enough behind for the bears, for the birds, for the plant’s own survival and promise of future generations. If we take, we must also give back.

Seeds are gifts from the earth. They are plentiful, but they are also limited — a resource we collect in the case of needed restoration, which is also plentiful.

Joy and sorrow. Seeds are delightful.

On a walk down a trail at the end of a long day, exiting dense stands of red cedar and western hemlock, just entering a muskeg, there, delicately dropped in the middle of the trail: a speckled eagle’s feather. An offering. A delight.

Like every other work day, my seed collection partner, Tori, and I planned out a route through the forest to travel. Most of the first couple months working in the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest involved scouting out populations and exploring new parts of the forest, but this time would be the first day dedicated solely to seed collection and brought along two Montana Conservation Corps interns who were stationed at the same forest as us this summer. The population we would be collecting from was near a small pond in the Castle mountains of the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest. Tori had scouted it out at the end of last week and said it was ready to collect. The aim was to spend the whole day collecting Geum triflorum, or prairie smoke. 

We drove for an hour and a half, stopping along the way to check on a population of Phacelia hastata, before arriving at the intended collection point. Strangely enough, we did not easily see the wispy fruits made by Geum triflorum and got out of the truck to inspect closer – in case they were blending in with the other plants in the area. On closer inspection, there were not nearly as many of the plants as we had seen when the population was first noted.  Looking around the area, we realized that this location had been destroyed by grazing cattle based on the many cow patties around the area. We also noticed that the other side of a nearby fence was far more lush  than the area around the pond – evidently the cows had not crossed to that side. Because of this, we decided to adapt our plan and move further down the road looking out for Geum triflorum outside of the intended collection point as well as checking on a Frasera speciosa (Green Gentian) population that we had recorded before. 

Soon enough, we reached a scouting point we had made for Frasera speciosa and the population was perfect! The fruit pods were dried up and each fruit was full of mature seeds. Then we each armed ourselves with double-bagged paper bags and started collecting Frasera speciosa seeds. Each of us had our own preferred methods – either picking off the entire dried up fruits filled with seeds, sitting by a plant and dumping out the seeds, or bending over the top half of the plant into the bag and letting the seeds fall out with a few shakes. We continued for a couple hours before returning to the truck for lunch and then moved down the road a little more where we saw a moderate, ready to harvest, population  of Geum triflorum too! To get both species at the same time, I tied two double-bagged paper bags to my belt, one for Frasera and the other for the Geum, and continued to collect both species for a few more hours – moving down the road just once more. A couple of us had earbuds in and were listening to music or podcasts while collecting and, since I had forgotten my own earbuds, I listened to the fire team talking over the forest service radio. At one point the clouds looked pretty ominous,but luckily they passed over us without any droplets and the rest of the time went well. 

After returning to the station, we weighed each bag in order to calculate how many seeds we collected and set the seeds in a container with a no-bug strip for the weekend. After doing some math, we figured we collected about 50,000 viable Geum triflorum seeds and about 70,000 viable Frasera speciosa seeds on this one trip!

This was just the third day of actually collecting seeds for me, and I was happy with how it went! It was a little sad that the original location we planned to collect from had been destroyed, but sometimes things happen and we have to be able to adapt. So many things can prevent seed collection – from cows eating and trampling over the plants, missing the sometimes short fruiting times, a lack of fruiting (as we have seen so far with Frageria virginiana (virginia strawberry) and Berberis repens (creeping oregon-grape)), or the abundance of invasive species causing us to not be able to collect in an area. Even so, we were successful in still collecting the planned species as well as another in the same area and are hoping to switch over to mostly making collections for the rest of the season!

Clouds come and go, but the mountains remain. The dew point temperature in the morning is typically always reached here with the cooler mornings. The increased condensation in the atmosphere makes the mountains invisible, as the surrounding clouds block your view for miles. But now that we’ve finally had 70 degree days up here, the warming temperature deviates from the dew point temperature, and all the clouds evaporate to leave a stunning view. This is one of the best ways to experience the Alaskan alpine hikes, almost as if mother nature is revealing a secret to you.

These have been my favorite places to go on the Chugach, although the flowers are still barely emerging. As my eyes scan across the land, surprisingly it is the smallest plants that catch my attention. Drosera angelica, the English Sundew, is inconspicuously about 5 cm tall and found in most peatbogs in Southcentral Alaska. This interesting character is a carnivorous plant, that uses leaves covered in red mucilaginous glands with a resin tip to lure in their prey. Once the unlucky insect is trapped, the tentacle like structures then bend toward the prey and center of the leaf to maximize contact. This unique adaptation is a survival technique to live in nitrogen deficient areas, such as bogs.

Another plant we had to get down on our hands and knees to search for is the rare Aphragmus eschscholtzianus, or Aleutian Cress. This mustard is so small, it was first described in the last 75 years. One of the terrestrial crew’s projects is to monitor the subalpine valleys saturated with snowmelt to observe long-term population change. This involves going to previously mapped plots, finding due north and due east from a monument stake, measuring a 5×4 m plot, and using quadrats to measure Aleutian Cress abundance in a given area of the plot. This work also involved traversing the hillslopes off trail to ideal habitat areas to find new populations. At first I hated it, as this work is like finding a needle in a very large haystack. After hiking all day, our crew finally found a population of about 5, giving us all a euphoria and sense of accomplishment. I thought I could rule out rare plant monitoring from my career goals but instead, this experience has only made me more indecisive.

“What are they looking at? They’re botanists! They should be looking at the ground!”

The botanists in question were standing on the summit of Mt. Jefferson, where we would be conducting an alpine vegetation survey for the Idaho Peaks Project. We had already seen a great amount of diversity on the four mile approach to our survey site; we passed Phacelia sericea, a relative of one of our target species (Phacelia hastata), Frasera speciosa, and a thriving population of Erythronium grandiflorum, which Alex and I were very excited to see.

One forb stood out from the rest during our hike to the alpine zone: Castilleja puberula. This species of Indian paintbrush is not only beautiful, but it is a rare species endemic to alpine zones along the Continental Divide and had previously only been sighted in Colorado and Montana.

This plant is especially interesting because of its relationship with surrounding individuals. Plants in the Castilleja genus are root hemi-parasites, meaning that they obtain water and mineral nutrients from a host plant using a specialized root called a haustorium. This structure connects the Castilleja to its host like a kind of suction cup and produce digestive enzymes to siphon away essential nutrients and water from the host. This evolutionary strategy has proven very effective: research done on eleven different species has shown that plants growing parasitically reach greater heights, show greater branching, and flower earlier in the year than non-parasitizing plants of the same species. But the benefits of this parasitism is not restricted to the Castilleja alone. When Castilleja target the dominant plant in an area, reducing its fitness, it opens up an opportunity for more plant species to move in, increasing the biodiversity of the whole area. The relationship between Castilleja and its host plant impacts the whole ecosystem.

As we move higher in elevation and closer to the timberline, we meet another noteworthy plant: Pinus albicaulis, or Whitebark Pine. Like Castilleja puberula, Whitebark Pine is one half of a fascinating symbiotic relationship.

Unlike most conifers, Whitebark Pine has indehiscent cones, so even when the seeds are ripe, the cones do not open to disperse the seeds. Why would a tree evolve to its seed stuck in a cone, completely inaccessible for reproduction?

Clark’s Nutcracker is the answer to this ecological mystery. It uses its shark beak to break open the hard scales of the pinecones and stores up to 150 of Whitebark Pine’s nutrient dense seeds in a sublingual pouch. The birds will then create seed caches of three to five seeds, typically in disturbed or open areas like a recent burn, burying them a few inches deep in the soil. Each year, an individual Clark’s Nutcracker can cache up to 100,000 seeds and rely on their amazing memory for finding their caches again later in the year- they will return to approximately 60% of their seed banks! The caches that are not returned to, and that survive predation by groundhogs and other scavengers, will germinate and grow into saplings in the years following their being planted.

Whitebark Pine populations rely on Clark’s Nutcrackers as the only animal to disperse their seed. As WBP faces increasing pressure from threats like blister rust and beetle infestation, their relationship with Clark’s Nutcracker is more important than ever. As a keystone species, they are crucial members of Idaho’s ecosystems, providing nutrition for countless species of wildlife as well as soil stabilization and runoff regulation. Conserving both species is essential for the protection of western ecosystems from irreversible changes.

Our journey up Mt. Jefferson gave us an invaluable look into the diverse and beautiful plant communities present in southeastern Idaho and the wildlife species that they rely on and serve. Working with several experienced botanists to complete an intensive botanical alpine survey and help fill gaps in our understanding of alpine plant communities and Idaho’s rare plants was an immensely rewarding opportunity and, although I didn’t think it was possible, I came out of the experience with an even greater love for the wildflowers we are working to conserve every day.

-az