My internship originally was a whirlwind of scouting areas for seed collection. While doing this I got to witness majestic views of the high dessert. So far I have sent off 24 of my 32 seed collections to Bend Seed Extractory with a total of 74 pounds of seed shipped to date. My supervisor and I have laughed many times about my hidden box collection in the garage that I use for shipping seed off. The dessert has gone from the annual and perennial forbs painting the dessert a mirage of purple, pink, red, yellow, and white, to now being a sea of green and yellow as the rubber rabbitbrush and various sagebrush species are blooming. Last week I joined the Friends of the High Rock/ Black Rock Desert with taking out old fence in the Little High Rock Canyon Wilderness. Next week, if the weather holds, I will be picking my first cone producing species, the Washoe Pine.

But as the season has changed I have been working on a water resource project that spans 2 states and 5 counties.  At first it was nerve wracking to come up with a way to find over 500 water resource sites and organize what paperwork was needed for each site. I also had to find what documentation was needed to update the out of date water resource files. For this project, I turned to ArcGIS and a pair of Trimbles in order to run the program that I established in ArcMap. Trimbles are great for field work and sometimes can prove difficult when they don’t always want to work. Learning how to program and use Trimbles has been a great experience for me and has given me another great skill to use for future field work.

Sometimes my sites aren’t where my GPS unit says they should be, so occasionally I end up going on a bit of a search to find them. On flat and open ground areas finding pit reservoirs, stock ponds, stock tanks, and other water resources are easier, but in dense vegetation or in mountains it gets a bit more difficult. Some of my favorite places to see are Graven Reservoir and Likely Mountain. Many of these places are very hard to reach by vehicle and most of the time I hike into the sites. At one of the sites I got within 100 yards of a coyote and at another site I saw an antelope with triplets. Now that fall has hit, the days are getting cooler and shorter. Today we had our first snow storm, though it rained in the valleys, and this change in weather is a signal that the seed collecting season is almost over and that it’s time to wrap up projects.

Graven Reservoir looking back at Likely Mountain Fire Lookout.

The pronghorn with triplets below Alturas.

Finally, I was ready to conquer a day of rain, hail, and snow on my quest to find stock ponds.

I hope everyone else has enjoyed the changing of the seasons where they are stationed!

Throughout this field season I’ve found myself questioning a lot of things, amongst them I’ve questioned why non-native species are where they are, how they’ve migrated, who brought them and the stories + logic that came with bringing some of them to where they are. I believe most species have explanations requiring nothing more than some time and online research to find answers. Other questions, however, will remain unanswered.

Recently, we were at a Pinyon-Juniper site and everything seemed so ordinary. There weren’t many plants out of their usual ecosystem, or prominent wildlife but there was something a little strange. As we evaluated the plot, we started to notice random burn scars on tree logs. These pieces were somewhat blended into the environment so the burn marks weren’t noticeable until I stood right in front of one. I found this all strange because clearly there wasn’t a prescribed burn, the damage wasn’t vast enough to say that there was a fire in the area. In addition, there was one burned log that upon further analysis appeared to still be rooted. This burned rooted Pinyon crossed out the possibility of down wood from a fire, since we were on a slope. So why in hell would this burned tree be here, in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. I sat there and pondered on the possibilities, the explanation I settle on was that lightning hit the one tree, setting it ablaze. If trees would talk, I’m sure the stories they’d tell would be fascinating, limited but fascinating. I picture them talking really slowww and with a deep monotonous voice, droopy bark mouth and bushy bark eyebrows all related to Sesame Street’s Snuffaluffagus. I remain in question but shift my outlook to he thought that maybe it’s better this way, helps my imagination fly as free as the birds overhead.

I’m generally a rather inquisitive person but questioning everything seems to be my theme this field season, I feel as though I’m 5 again asking why the sky is blue. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but these unanswerable questions sometimes make me feel the same way as I do when I try and key out the species of a plant and I’m not happy with my final answer. However, I look forward to more unanswerable questions that I can try and piece together answers to.

Cheers fielders!

While the field season is winding down and things may have started to become routine, I can promise you that I am not going crazy.  Instead, I am starting to work more with bats now.  For the past couple of weeks I have been putting out audio surveying equipment near water sources to collect bat calls.  The audio equipment records the calls that they use to echolocate and then software at the office can transform the call into a sound range that we can hear and even identify the species of bat making the call.  This is a part of an ongoing effort to learn more about bat distribution in central Oregon, especially determining the distribution and habitat of each individual bat species.  I have really enjoyed this break from my typical routine as it gets me to new areas.  

Audio recording device at a watering trough.

I am about to transition to working more directly with bats, but not in actual contact with them due to the threats of White-nosed syndrome that has recently been detected in Washington State.  We will be going through decontamination procedures, which are crucial in being able to go into caves safely and minimize and hopefully eliminate the possibility of disease transmission.  My supervisor has many years of experience working with bats, so I will get to learn more about bats from her and watch as she and other experienced professionals remove bats from mist nets and take some measurements that are used to conclusively identify the species.

Recently we headed out before dark to set up mist nets at a cave just outside of Sisters. We drove on Forest Service roads and then parked on a non-descript pullout.  We then proceeded to walk about a quarter of a mile and a cave suddenly appears out of nowhere. I was not expecting a cave out in the middle of the forest, but there it was.  We set up three mist nets near the mouth of the cave and then waited.  Shortly after the sun set (and I think that we even got a couple while it was still light) we started getting bats in the net.  I was not able to handle the bats as I don’t have a rabies shot, so I helped to record data. The bats were removed from the net, the sex, age and species was determined and then we tested them for Pd (white nose syndrome).  In the end we captured four different species of bats (California myotis, Western long-eared myotis, Long-legged myotis and a big brown bat).  This experience turned out to be much more fulfilling than my previous experience, where we were only able to capture one bat the whole night.

Big-brown bat caught while mist netting.

 Now I leave for a week of vacation touring the National Parks before heading back to work for the BLM and exploring caves and searching for bats.  I am really excited to be able to take a break from work and go explore the West, but I cannot wait to get back and start going Batty with the BLM.

It’s hard to believe summer is officially over! Though the weather supports the calendar. Temperatures have already dropped with most days lingering in the 70s while nights have become brisk. However, it’s even chillier outside the valley. We’ve done a couple of camping trips these last 2 weeks for work with more to come in the next couple of weeks and it’s dropped down to the 40s some of those nights. Fortunately my coworker and I have kept warm in our sturdy bags and tents, but it takes extra will power to part them in the chilly mornings, especially now that the sun refuses to rise before 6:30. Our work this week was the usual noxious weed surveys at an area called Watermelon Hill, but unlike what the name suggests, there is sadly no watermelons of any kind present (It was a bigger disappointment than it should have been). On the contrary to delicious fruit, the place was covered in noxious weeds. The area is roughly 1.5 square miles and nearly all of it had invasive weeds present. Don’t get me wrong, it was still a pretty area and if I had still been back in the days when I was blissfully unaware of what a noxious weed even was I’d surely find it an “ideal” natural area.  But regardless of the weed situation, the trip was a fun one and I could never complain about having to hike around all day.

Watermelon Hill (oh look, no watermelons)

Chondrilla juncea or Rush Skeleton Weed, a Class B noxious weed.

Taeniatherum caput-medusae or medusahead, a highly invasive grass.

Cynoglossum or houndstongue and you guessed it, another noxious weed and obnoxious to remove from your pants.

Next week we travel to another area with a fruit in the name, Huckleberry Mountain (it seems more realistic to hope for the actual presence of huckleberries this time). It’s supposed to be a beautiful area, perhaps even the nicest place we’ll see during our internship. And instead of the usual crew of two, two others will be joining us as well. It’s time to spread our knowledge of the ways of the weeds, as in I’ll take on a crazed Newman alter ego from Seinfeld “The weeds never stop! They just keep coming and coming and coming. There’s never a letup, they’re relentless. The more you take out the more that come! And then the Trimble dies and weeds consume you!” It will be a great time for all. Last week I helped out at the annual Salmon Festival that’s held at a salmon hatchery in Leavenworth (30 min north of here). Elementary school kids from the area come to the hatchery, where several different federal and state agencies have interactive setups to inform the students on a variety of subjects. Ranging from salmon life history and other cool wildlife (mammals, birds, other fish) to learning about Native American culture. Our booth was particularly popular, an obstacle course to represent what salmon have to go through to reach their spawning grounds. Kids had to run through the fish nets and hooks (streamers with hooks drawn on them), over the dam (slide), under the wildfire (more streamers), past the bear (cardboard cut out), over the rapids (speed bumps), and finally through the culvert (an actual culvert) to spawn at their nesting site (dropping a wiffle gulf ball in a kiddie pool filled with gravel). To make things more interesting, I hid behind the cut out bear and surprised kids by roaring and having it lunge at them. It always startled a squeak out of the first kid before throwing them and the followers into fits of giggles while they attempted to dodge me. It was actually really fun and I was sad when my shift ended!

Anyways, I brought this up to make another point but got carried away. One of the booths was run by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and they had an assortment of mammalian skulls. I got to talking with the woman running it and she mentioned that there is an established wolf pack up in the Huckleberry area we will be camping in next week. She said that if I wait until dark and do a little howling I may get some return howls from the pack! How cool would that be? A pack of wolves howling with me. I’m super excited to try it out, though the thought of being out in the woods in the dark being howled at by wolves even now makes my hairs stand on end. But she assured me that of all the wildlife out there, wolves were the least to worry about due to their extremely cautious and shy nature.

Howl ya later!

Kat

A little project I have been working on over the past couple of weeks has been organizing the field office’s herbarium. It doesn’t look like it has seen much love since the times when Apiaceae was called Umbelliferae. I have been working on sorting specimens, updating family, genus and species names as well as creating some new vouchers from materials us interns have collected over the season. I’m not an overly creative person, so I figured I’d lay out the process for creating an herbarium voucher for the purpose of this blog entry. I’ll be working with curlycup gumweed (Grindelia squarrosa), a forb, so other growth forms such as shrubs and trees will require different treatment.

Step 1: Obtain a specimen

Before you make an herbarium voucher, it is necessary to find the plant that will be on the voucher. To collect a good specimen, there are a couple of things that you will want to look for. Your plant should be an average plant (not uncharacteristically large or small), be generally free of disease and damage from insects or other predators, and contain either a flower or fruit to aid in identification. Once you locate a good one, rip it out of the ground. Just get down and pull. If the soil isn’t sandy or moist enough it may help to use a shovel or other tool to remove it, ideally you will want to get some roots, but just uproot that plant from all of its friends and neighbors as completely as you can.

Just a plant press, waiting to be given a job

Step 2: Press the specimen

Once you have your target plant, you need to press it so that the 3D organism can be preserved and stored as a 2D representation of itself. You will need a plant press, some sheets of blotter paper, a piece of cardboard, and a sheet of newspaper. When pressing plants, I like to do an initial press for 15-30 minutes to make the plant more malleable. Fun fact about curlycup gumweed – the common name actually applies to the plant as it’s very sticky and made some tears in the newspaper. Once the plant bends a bit better it is easier to pose it so that some flowers are visible, some leaves are upside down and others are right side up, and the stems and branches don’t overlap. Once positioned in a pleasing pose, press again and leave for a week or two.

Step 3: Manage your information

A good voucher will have a little piece of paper in the bottom right corner of the sheet that will give you some information about the specimen. Information that you want to put down includes the scientific and common names, where you picked the plant, the general habitat and other associated species, and a collection number. This information will be helpful when you want to find a population of Grindelia squarrosa but can’t quite find a disturbed area along a roadside anywhere else. Fun fact – Grindelia squarrosa concentrates selenium from the soil, which can make it toxic when ingested by mammals. In retrospect, maybe don’t trust the common name.

Step 4: Secure the sample and file it away

After the plant has spent enough time in the press and your information is placed neatly on small piece of paper, it is time to attach all of it to a larger, acid-free piece of paper. This is your chance to hone the skills you learned in kindergarten and use glue! If you posed the plant well before pressing it it will fit nicely on the acid-free paper with no parts sticking off of the page. When gluing, make sure to leave room for the information sheet in the corner: never shall the two touch. Fun fact – unlike Grindelia squarrosa, the glue you will be using is most likely non-toxic, so feel free to go to town on that if you so desire! Just be sure to check first! Once the glue dries and everything is secure, the voucher is ready to be saved in the herbarium to help teach next year’s interns what things are.

Sometimes you’ll have to weigh down some of the thinner parts of the plant

    `

Many thanks to Wikipedia for some of the information in this post

BLM

Shoshone Field Office

When I made the move to Utah’s Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument from a small college town in coastal Northern California earlier this summer, I had no idea what to expect.  Growing up I’d moved almost a dozen times and experienced a variety of environments and communities.  I had not, however, lived or explored in a region even remotely resembling the quickly changing landscapes of high deserts and canyon country.

When I first spotted this river, I was somewhat puzzled.  It was my first day in Utah and though all the scenery was completely new to me, this stuck out! I’d never seen a river flow such a rusty orange.  I remember assuming it probably always looked this way.  I pulled over immediately and snapped a picture- my first of the summer!

Flash flood!

After spending the last five months living and working closely with this land, I now know that this river was probably experiencing a much higher flow than usual.  The formidable clouds above meant it was most likely raining somewhere nearby and upstream.  The river was flooding and loaded with sediment from further up the river – hence the color.  It’s so obvious to me now, but I when I found this picture it was fun to remember how much I have learned this summer.

Now that monsoon season has arrived (yes you read correctly- our area of the desert experiences a monsoon season!), we know the best spots to go and look for the onset of a flash flood or a raging river.  One of the prettiest spots to be when the rains come in is a local area known as Long’s Canyon.  The water flows over the cliff tops and down into the canyon, and it’s just magnificent!  Usually the last place you want to be when floods could occur is in a wash/canyon bottom, but this spot happens to be safe Mom, I promise!

Temporary waterfall in Long’s Canyon!

It’s fulfilling to know how much the myriad of experiences I’ve had this summer have taught me.  The intricacies of an ecosystem that once seemed so foreign and unforgiving are less daunting and more exciting now.

Lauryl McFarland

Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument

The seasons are quickly changing in Lander, WY. It seems like yesterday I was in the hot summer sun IDing grasses and collecting production data in between gulps of water in a not-so-fruitful attempt to stay hydrated. The wildflowers that bloomed in the plains when I arrived in late spring have long seeded, and the lush grasses the cows desire have since dried out.

In early August, I went backpacking in the Alaska Basin (named for glaciers and grizzlies!) in the Tetons with friends. It was a spectacular trip! If you get to take a trip there, I highly recommend it. We came upon colorful meadows filled with wildflowers long after those in town had dulled.

Alaska Basin in the Tetons

Wildflowers in the Tetons

Then, at first slowly, fall came to Wyoming. Being from upstate New York, fall is one of my favorite seasons. On the first slightly chilly morning in Lander, I decided I needed to make banana bread, squash soup and tomato sauce. I went on another backpacking trip to the Cirque of the Towers in the Wind River Range. Fall had definitely come to the Cirque! We got the first rain I’d seen in months, with a little hail mixed in. Despite the weather, it was a beautiful hike, impressive landscape and had great company. As a bonus, I saw my first aspens starting to turn to a bright yellow!

Fall at Cirque of the Towers

A glimpse of sun at Arrowhead Lake outside the Cirque

This week it seems fall is really coming. Though we started with some 80 degree days, our nights are getting colder as will the days. Driving to my monitoring sights yesterday I saw splotches of turning aspens, willows, and gooseberries intermixed with various coniferous trees. The monitoring work I have been doing will soon change with the weather. Hopefully, I’ll begin other types of monitoring that revolve less around livestock movement, and keep my office time to a minimum. I sure have gotten used to, and love, spending my days outdoors.

I’m hoping to continue hiking despite the weather getting colder. I’m planning to hike Wind River peak this weekend, though the forecast at 13,000 feet is predicting snow… Spring and summer have been great in Wyoming and I’m excited to see what the fall and early winter will bring!

There is a depth to the grey around Humboldt Bay that is returning, announcing that summer’s regency is fading. It is time again for the rainy season, for the kind of turning inward easily imbibed through cool misty silver clouds hanging low. I walk the oxidation ponds in sandals with cold feet, watching the Canada Geese return.

Seeds have mostly fallen, generally making themselves invisible once again. But I am still looking, along the edges of the trail and between cracked pavement. When I find a few dusty seeds, I may search for their parents nearby, or hold them close to my face to marvel, or slip them in my pocket, or put a couple in my mouth if I am feeling confident in my twenty-something imperishability. Seeds are the flowers of fall, as wholly mysterious as we can ever imagine – profoundly alive under their protective seed coat.

These are the patterns of a CLM intern coming to close and reflect on an experience that is a seed itself. The seed coat, that encapsulating article of this experience, has been passion for the more than human world solidified in the leaping of flowers, dense tradition of seed collecting, joy of wind, fresh flight of birds, excitement of discovery gleaned in each step. The nutritive endosperm has been those that keep the CLM program running and the diverse, challenging, wonderful Arcata BLM Field Office. The embryo – with a radicle of duties traditional for CLM interns in my field office, and cotyledons composed of my own unique contributions – is my emerging career as a conservationist.

In the past several weeks my work as a CLM intern has revolved around completing my commitments to the survey work I have been involved in on the Humboldt Bay Dunes, the satisfying high ridge of art and science found in herbarium work, and a few forays to the field. In these two weeks preceding my last day in the office, September 23^rd, I am preparing a final presentation regarding my contributions to the Arcata BLM Field Office, spreading the final bits into their respective places and writing my experience into being.  Today I stop and stare at the seed that is my seven month CLM internship at the BLM Field Office in Arcata, CA. This is my final reflective blog post.

I began my internship with March rain, deep grey and cold northern Pacific Ocean winds. In the preceding two months, I drove from my parents’ house in San Diego to New Orleans and back again, living lightly in my dusty car; following the border looking for birds with a dear friend. In the ebullient life inversion of arriving in Arcata I experienced the gamut – animation, eagerness, beautiful uncertainty, powerful grandeur, loneliness, cubicle-shock, rampant existentialism. These are the salts of life! I learned extensively about the BLM, my field office’s place within a national context, nearly every plant species on the Humboldt Bay dunes, and a newly decadent version of the redwood forest I already knew deeply. I contributed to the BLM Arcata CLM intern tradition of monitoring threatened and endangered plants on the Humboldt Bay dunes. I completed the 14 transects totaling ~2,800 individual quadrats and loved every moment of salt spray, morning fog, and cascading blooms as the dunes awakened for spring. I also contributed to my field office during this period in my own unique ways: teaching 7^th graders about botany, leading Godwit Days Birding Festival field trips and logging botanical discoveries. Before I knew it I was sunburned and flower saturated.

My CLM internship furthered in gaining density as spring turned to summer. I came to reflect on the etymology and place of my stewardship, beginning in the simple and prosaic act of pulling broom along roadsides. I continued these pragmatic acts, which in themselves represent the traditional aspect of my CLM internship, because my mentor has been pulling from many of the same sites year after year. These acts coalesced in a week long backpacking trip with the Mattole Restoration Council along the Lost Coast, where we focused on invasive plant removal. I also had the extreme pleasure of spending my birthday in the backcountry. What seemed at first to be an unpoetic act of stewardship fed my inspiration to explore these acts of care, compassion, responsibility, and atonement.

Near this time I also began two of my most significant contributions to my field office, following the theme of traditional and unique contributions.

First, I began collecting for the Seeds of Success (SOS) program, which I began early, my first collection falling on April 20^th. In my field office, each SOS collection season is an entirely new endeavor, as we strive to collect species and populations we have never collected before. With over six iterations of CLM interns in my field office, all collecting for SOS, finding new species and populations that fit the SOS criteria (>10,000 seeds from >50 individuals) is a journey of discovery! Gratefully, I managed to collect from 9 species that had not been collected from before in an area that had received very little previous study. To this end I was responsible for finding the plants/populations, identification, monitoring phenology, collecting, packaging, shipping, pressing and mounting! Managing the SOS program at my field office was a fantastic experience, training the skills of project management and implementation.

Second, I began to make weekly (and sometimes bi-weekly) trips to a BLM property known as Butte Creek, an area that had previously received little botanical attention. Butte Creek is magnificent, resting in the Klamath Mountains foothills region, containing a number of diverse habitats, threatened by the cultivation of cannabis from all sides, and under-botanized on a regional scale. I used my strengths in field botany to create a plant list for this area, thus far containing 159 species, with more to add! I also made 31 of the 46 herbaria collections I contributed during my internship to the Arcata BLM Field Office (part of the California Consortium of Herbaria) at Butte Creek, making several interesting and unique finds.

Discovery and botanical exploration have been a cornerstone of my internship experience, a prevailing wind that is both deeply part of the seed and intractably nourishing to it. In the simplest of terms, we cannot steward that which we do not know exists. As cut up, mowed down and paved over as our country can at times feel, we still live in the wild wild west; a place constantly unfolding where wildness is all around and in between that fallacious hem of the civilized. It stands that we have a relatively poor understanding of the plants occurring on our public lands, even in California. I had the great privilege to continue to develop my skills as a field botanist while creating botanical inventories and contributing to our understanding of where plants are, a basal node to protecting them.

The collective gain composed by the CLM internship program is staggeringly ingenious. Each year, hundreds of interns with a seed of experience, hundreds of repeated tasks and hundreds more entirely new, hundreds of thousands of seeds collected… Field offices imbued with new enthusiasm, light, life, perspectives, inclinations. Moreover, the opportunity for powerful mentorship is a core aspect to the CLM program — speaking for myself and my cohort at large, mentorship is what we need. Mentorship from those who truly care and are willing to at times travel between the realms of how to key plants and the different ways to live a life. There have been several recent calls for the urgent need to train the next generation of botanists, plant conservationists and herbarium managers. CLM is certainly a potent answer to that call.

Traditional and unique contributions by each intern, in each field office, in each iteration. This has been a wondrous aspect of the CLM program — just how heterogeneous it is, there is a staggering distinctness in every intern, every time, at every office. If each CLM internship is a seed, and that seed is the bolstering of a life in relation to conserving our natural heritage, this is seed collection — for the long haul.

That wonderful internal fluttering has returned again, my heart making its own seven-month turning back to where I began, arriving at another life-transposition. I will soon be travelling down to San Diego to see my marvelous parents, and packing, before setting off for Argentina on October 3rd. I am heading to Central Patagonia, to a region known as Neuquen, to a ranch I visited 2 years ago during a course on the botany and natural history of Central Patagonia. I will be working there as a gardener, ranch hand, carpenter, mill-worker, tutor and naturalist — it is sure to be a rich and diverse time! I am deeply looking forward to life immersed in a different country, and a simpler, more rough-hewn sort of living. The ranch is called Estancia Ranquilco (http://www.ranquilco.com/). Come on down for a visit!

Beyond that? I am returning to California on March 27th, just in time for the bustling spring. I hope to work as a botanist during that time, and continue in the coming seasons my post-baccalaureate work in botany and plant conservation before starting graduate school in the next 1-3 years. The greatest question in my life at this moment is: “how can I make the greatest impact in conservation with my knowledge, privilege and particular talents?” CLM has certainly influenced that question, but as we know, there are no clear answers. Down the path we wind.

My limitless gratitude for this experience — to all those in Chicago making this program turn — Krissa Skogen, Rebecca Johnson. To my mentor, Jennifer Wheeler and the entire Arcata BLM Field Office — this has been a warm and wonderful home. To my academic mentor Kathleen Kay, and all those who supported me at UC Santa Cruz. Gratitude to those who made my journey on the North Coast bright, my brother Gabe, my parents, the lovely Sierra, and all those I shared a house and town with. Gratitude to plants — giving us all we have — food, air, companionship, discovery, joy, satisfaction. Gratitude to wind, air, blood, feather, bone, sun, the innumerable endless self-replete processes…

“I had no idea as I lay on those caribou skins that evening precisely where wisdom might lie. I knew enough of quantum mechanics to understand that the world is ever so slightly but uncorrectably out of focus, that there are no absolutely precise answers. Whatever wisdom I would find, I knew, would grow out of the land. I trusted that, and that it would reveal itself in the presence of well-chosen companions.” — Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

All my best, see you in the field!

Kaleb Goff

Arcata BLM Field Office, California

We got a tropical storm today and it brought actual rain. The forecast called for an 80% chance of rain today due to the incoming system. As I arrived at the field office at dawn you could just smell it in the air, the smell of imminent rain and here in the desert that familiar smell is also accompanied by the smell of the creosote bush, which is very distinct and sort of sweet. On our way out to the field site by the Salton Sea the rain began.

(Video was too big to upload :'(  )

We also completed our vegetation surveys for the season, got all wet, soaked boots, and enjoyed a day that was so very nice (not the usual 100+ degrees that we are used to).

Doing these desert riparian surveys in a desert riparian/marsh habitat during a rain storm really made us all feel like we where anywhere but in the middle of the Sonoran Desert!

Yours truly

One of our survey sites

The plant list and an unidentified tree

18 m radius of our releve transect

Out in the field

An interesting unidentified spider

Clouds condensing over the Orocopia Mountains

When we returned to Palm Springs we found out that power was out in parts of town and had only just came back on in our office. When I left and drove home there was flooding on the streets.

Driving home through Palm Springs, Ca

And now it’s still raining!

Looking out the window of my apartment towards the San Jacinto Mountains

I love the rain and feel so lucky to have witnessed a desert storm.

Crystal Neuenschwander

Palm Springs, BLM

It is now mid-September, and signs of Fall are finally becoming evident. More crisp days, it is feasible to drink tea in the morning and start out the day in a flannel.  Tree lines on our drives are turning gold and red and looking more like classic New England. And not having still, hot summer air makes fieldwork even more enjoyable.

This past week, we embarked on a two-day collection near Providence, RI, and it was quite different than any other we had done. Spartina alterniflora, or smooth cordgrass, has to be collected generally before the first full moon in September, so that the seeds don’t get washed out with the high tide. (Here’s more info about it from the NEWFS GoBotany website: https://gobotany.newenglandwild.org/species/spartina/alterniflora/ ). So with clippers in hand and full-size garbage bags tied to our waists, we set off for the marshes of Rhode Island.

Our mentor Michael proudly wielding his scythe in a stand of Spartina alterniflora.

We met with a woman from the Save the Bay program in Rhode Island, who is working on this project alongside us, as well as a few of her volunteers. The S. alterniflora collection is just one of the many restoration projects they are a part of. The seeds from last year’s collection were immediately grown and planted at Sachuest National Wildlife Refuge in Middletown, RI, to restore a degraded salt marsh there. We were able to see this project a few months ago – several plots composed of about 20,000 plugs, on their way to becoming a salt marsh again. It was so cool to see what our work looks like when it comes full circle! The S. alterniflora seeds we collected again this year will go to that same project. The main reason these seeds have been used right away (besides restoring a degraded marsh as soon as possible) is for a very practical reason – they smell HORRIBLE. This is because seeds are mostly composed of lipids, so the fats start to decay as soon as they are detached from the plant. If the seeds become too moldy, the viability will drop off drastically, and the collection would be in vain. Additionally, these plants came from a salt marsh, so naturally the salty leaves that got into our five full garbage bags smelled like it. By the end of the day, we definitely did too.

One of our five smelly full-size garbage bags of Spartina alterniflora seed heads.

The first day we were in some very dense patches of S. alterniflora, mostly bushwhacking through it, and it was mostly at eye-level or above our heads. That day felt more like trying to mow a lawn with a pair of scissors, although we had a beautiful view. These sites also had sidewalks or trails going through them, and we were able to show many dog-walkers, photographers, and people hunting for treasures with metal detectors what we were doing. It’s always a good day when we can raise awareness about the native plants to people who live right by those populations!

The beautiful view from our lunch break at our first collection site. The grassy-looking plants down on the beach is the Spartina alterniflora!

The site on the second day was a less dense population, and was best reached by sloshing through three feet of ocean it grows next to. Especially on a warmer day, overtopping hot rubber boots is so refreshing. The coastline here was also being degraded by invasive fiddler crabs, which created these sort of mudflat islands right before the S. alterniflora populations. If you’ve ever played “the floor is lava”, it was a very similar situation in trying to determine which patches of mud I could balance on to snag some more seeds, and which would just suck my leg down into three feet of mud – needless to say, I was having a grand old time, although I am definitely sad about the dieback of the saltmarsh.

Our final collection site. The S. alterniflora is the taller grass farther away – I didn’t get a closer picture for fear of falling in!

Krista Heilmann

Seeds of Success East Intern

New England Wild Flower Society

Framingham, MA