Over the past month, the New England SOS team’s seed collections have surged from 32 collections on 8/25 to 120 on 9/25–just about everything is fruiting in the narrow growing season of America’s northeast.  A month ago we were collecting about one species per day; now, we collect about six or seven.  Consequently, all four interns are bursting at the seams trying to properly dry, de-pest, and package the seeds for cleaning following collection.  Though the weather is now cooling down and the salt marshes are a little less rife with mosquitoes, our apartments, though booby-trapped with dozens of no-pest strips, are getting buggier and looking, well, seedier:

Scene 1 – Dining room table, from left: Eutrochium maculatum, Limonium carolinianum, Carex lupulina, Asclepias syriaca, Iva frutescens (top right), and Panicum virgatum (bottom right)

Scene 2 – Living room, from top: Scirpus cyperinus, Iva frutescens

Scene 3 – Dining room round table (aka the Graminoid table), clockwise from top right: Schizachyrium scoparium, Cyperus diandrus, Echinochloa walteri, Schoenoplectus acutus, Cyperus strigosus, Schoenoplectus pungens

Since we also have to collect specimens, our plant press is also very full:

Ran out of blotting paper…newspaper will have to do.

Despite the sudden rapid pace of collection, we are working hard and I think we are much more efficient at finding all the target seeds that we need on this giant plant scavenger hunt.  The time is flying by…soon it will be November, we will have made >200 collections, and our two dozen aluminum trays will be filled with–not seeds–but turkeys and stuffing.

If there’s one thing about this internship that I wasn’t quite expecting, it’s the driving. Harney county is the largest county in Oregon in terms of area, and much of the land is owned by the BLM. Driving to field sites takes hours upon hours on black top, gravel, dirt, and rocks. The single activity I have done the most this summer is to drive or ride in a pickup truck which is the single most valuable tool I use to get field work done.

The last apple:

Back during the first week, we had finished field work for the day. There was still a little bit of time before we had to head back, so some of the guys we work with were driving us out to see Krumbo Reservoir. I had been sitting in the truck for what seemed like forever. I had a little motion sickness, but felt like I could handle it. Then we turned down a slightly bumpy and curvy gravel road that led down to the reservoir. By the time we reached our destination, I was about dying and ran to the bathroom to lose the better part of my lunch.

Right before we were about to go back, I ran over to a trash can just to make sure I was done. When we climbed in the truck to head back, Kyle asked if I was sick. I said it was just motion sickness. He looked kind of concerned and said we were going to be doing a lot more driving this summer and I should get some medicine or something. He asked if it would help if I drove, and he let me drive the rig home.

I knew my mistake though. While they aren’t solely to blame, apples generally make me car sick for whatever reason. So now I eat oranges at lunch. That was the last day I brought an apple.

Randy:

Learning to navigate in Harney county was a bit difficult for me at first. The dirt roads all looked the same, and the rolling hills of grass and sage looked the same. When giving directions, my boss would use phrases like “you can’t miss it”. Needless to say, the four of us interns all missed that spot the first time and started driving to Nevada. Even the guys who weren’t new had to backtrack occasionally when seeking out our field sites.

Into this sea of navigational troubles walked Randy. Randy, a salt-and-peppered fifty-something was born and raised here in Burns. Randy spent much of his life exploring the backroads of Harney County, and has been driving to BLM field sites for five years now.

Randy drives through a herd of cattle

A coyote watches us stop for some typical scenery

ArcGIS and the Disappearing Roads:

ArcGIS, the most prominent program for mapping and geographic analysis is all the rage these days. There is even a version of the program called ArcPad that is made for use on a tablet. We have ArcPad on our fancy Trimble tablet GPS units, and are therefore able to track out position relative to the expansive network of back roads without too much difficulty. You would think it’s impossible to get lost with this technology.

This past week, we were assigned to mark sagebrush seedling establishment plots in several specific patches in the Miller Homestead Fire region. We set out with a map, a GPS, and Randy. We were making good time and had gotten three sites marked when we hit a lovely stretch of road heading for the fourth site. The road curved up and over a patch of rim rock, and was entirely made of rocks. At one point, I had to get out and roll a particularly large rock out of the way, and another time we went up a stair of rock that was larger than an average stair. Both sides of the road were lined with more rocks sticking out and threatening to rip up our tires. And that was the site we made it to. Randy just gritted his teeth and drove. We got back to the office an hour late that day. Randy looked at the tires and pointed out where a chunk of rubber had been gouged out of their thick tread. “I thought these tires were new; didn’t you get them a couple of weeks back?”  “Well they ain’t new any more.”

The sites we didn’t make it to came the second day. We came to an intersection and the road we needed to take completely disappeared. There was another road present which was not on the map and went off in a different direction. This happened again on the third day. While GPS and ArcGIS are wonderful technologies, they have limited usefulness without regular updating. Even when a map has a road drawn on it, that doesn’t make the road a reality. Navigation would also be easier if a measure of road roughness were included on the map.

Hello from Utah- one final time! Last week was the end of my time here in Vernal. In a couple of days I will be packing up and heading to northern Minnesota, where I will be collecting MORE seeds with the University of Minnesota-Duluth for two months. I’m very excited!

It has been a blast getting to know all the botanists at the Vernal Field Office. I will treasure all my memories of this summer, including hacking away at teasel, wandering up mountains surveying for rare plants, floating down river rapids on an inflatable kayak, and navigating the truck through some questionably well-maintained roads. The town of Vernal itself was not my favorite place, but the nearby recreational activities were seemingly endless. I have visited 10 national parks and five state parks this summer, along with countless hikes and scenic drives. I would definitely recommend having a car if you are planning on working in Vernal, because the town itself is not that spectacular, but the surrounding public lands should not be missed.

This internship has helped me to cement my knowledge that I am obsessed with plants, and that I would be perfectly happy wandering around outside all day looking at plants… probably for the rest of my life! I thought I might get bored collecting seeds after six months, but I really haven’t. Each plant population is unique and interesting in its own way, and it makes me realize how much more I’d like to know about plant community ecology. I am planning on attending grad school in the near future, and the workshop at the Chicago Botanic Gardens earlier this summer was incredibly helpful in teaching me the next steps of applying to grad school.

So, that was my summer in a nutshell! I will never forget my time here in Vernal, and I hope to cross paths with some of the amazing people I have met here again in the future.

Go plants!

Probably one of my favorite pictures of the summer… one of our teasel-spraying expeditions!

Jinny Alexander
BLM- Vernal, Utah Field Office

They say that in your twenties you meet alot of temporary people. Immediately that may conjur up a lot of negatives — best-friendships,  romantic relationships, the removal of bad vibes and people from your life —  but as an ecologist, temporary people are an integral part of our careers. The early stages of our careers are often seasonal and short-term, which is a hinderance and a blessing. As soon as you learn to identify all the grasses on the range it’s time to move on, by the time you get to really know your co-workers – adios the next place is acallin’.  We become a jack of all ecosystems (learning a little about each place we visit) and are yet to be masters at any. But, we see some of the most scenic and beautiful places and by understanding how our interactions with nature shape the land, we gain a greater appreciation for where we live. This transient-ness in the prime of our lives allows us to connect with a lot of new people, reshape and modify our opinions, and challenge ourselves in ways we may have not expected.  As I enter my last month of working in Burns, OR I’ve been reflecting on how lucky I am that this is one of those temporary places. Therefore, I dedicate this blog to some of my favorite moments. 

Seriously, one of my favorite parts of living in Oregon is living out on a farm. Every evening I take a walk in the fields and feed treats to horses, donkeys, and cows. Pictured above is Fuzz, one of the barn cats.

some of the critters we see at work:

Moments with Friends:

Hiking the Strawberries. My First Back Country Camping Trip

Fishing at Delitment Lake my first weekend in Burns

Hike to Wild Horse Lake on the Steens

:

Work at the fish evaluation station came to an early close at the beginning of September. The number of suckers being caught at the station made a dramatic decrease, so it was decided to stop our efforts. The peak in their numbers must have happened earlier in the season. Now we’ve begun our final reports on the project, with mine focusing on the recirculation aspect.

Research down at the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge has also continued with water quality measurements, trapping of predator fish, and other predator surveys. So far we’ve mainly caught fathead minnows (Pimephales promelas) and Sacramento perch (Archoplites interruptus).  These pose threats to suckers by either being predators to young fish or competitors. These fish end up in the ponds from the water being supplied from other sources, such as Tule Lake. We did get a surprise in our traps, two suckers.  They were placed in the ponds last winter from salvage operations. It was exciting to see that they had survived.  Both still had their PIT tags, making them easy to identify. Some larval suckers that were raised in captivity were placed in net pens down at the ponds as well. These will serve as experimental fish and answer questions such as growth rates and parasite loads. While visiting the ponds we also continued trapping at  Tule Lake for suckers released last year.

One of the suckers caught at the LKNWR ponds.

At the beginning of September I was able to get some time off to travel up to Olympic National Park for a week. There I got the opportunity to volunteer for the park on their Olympic marmot surveys.

Moose Lake

The Olympic marmot (Marmota olympus) is endemic to the park. They inhabit isolated sub-alpine and alpine meadows, or on montane scree slopes. They are a burrowing species and live in colonies. Spending most of their lives in hibernation, from about September to May. While hiking, you’re most likely to hear them “whistle,” which is actually more of a scream and is a warning to other marmots about predators. The population has suffered a huge decline, which has since stabilized but is still of concern. The project was started in 2010 and aimed to estimate population numbers. This was the last year of surveying before the data collected will be accessed by the parks wildlife biologist. Hopefully this data will reveal whether management actions might be necessary.

Marmot laying out and relaxing.

In order to survey we had to backpack into a remote part of the park and setup base camp. Our camp was at Moose Lake (even though there are no moose to be found in the park) in the Grand Valley just below Grand Pass.  From there our day hikes traversed most of the valley and parts on the other side of the ridges. Some of the surveys required off trail hiking on some steep slopes.  Marmots sure don’t make it easy to get to their burrows.  Overall it was a fantastic trip!

Base camp.

A view from Grand Pass.

Marmot!

Greetings again from the North Carolina Botanical Garden!  Actually, greetings from the field on the Southeastern Coastal Plain, where my crew has been spending 95% of our time.  The last time I wrote, we were waiting for a lot of our target species to develop mature seed.  That time has passed!   It’s hard to believe, but Autumn is already here, and we are staying very busy with our rounds of seed collections in North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland’s coastal plain areas.  Our crew of four has split into two teams in order to cover the most ground possible.  My teammate, Lauren, and I have decided to take on a schedule starting in September where we work 8 ten-hour days in a row, and then take off 6 days in between.  This schedule is intense, but rewarding, because it gives us enough time to really cover a lot of ground and make a ton of collections in a week, and then have a nice long chunk of off-time at home before doing it all over again.  Because we do a lot of driving across a three-state range, it makes the 6-ish hour drive to Maryland and some parts of Virginia worth it, and we don’t feel like we have to turn around and drive right back immediately.

My crew has now obtained permits and visited over 75 sites in our range.  By the end of the season, that number will top 100.  It is interesting to see that the parcels of land in conservation are much, much smaller and spread out here on the East Coast than what I observed while living out West.  Instead of working on one or two enormous tracts of Forest Service or BLM land, we have been contacting and scouting dozens of National Wildlife Refuges (managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service), The Nature Conservancy Preserves, State Parks, County parks, and various land trusts.  Some of my favorite sites we have visited have been the National Wildlife Refuges.  These sites tend to be a bit larger, allowing for a diversity of micro-climates and habitats, which seems to provide more continuity for the plant and animal species that make their homes there.  In addition, these Refuges tend to have some spectacularly beautiful views!

A view from shore at Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia

Salt flats at Chincoteague Island National Wildlife Refuge

An advancing storm over Chesapeake Bay as seen from Eastern Shore National Wildlife Refuge. Luckily, we were done with work for the day!

Another interesting thing about these conservation lands in the East is their proximity to developed, urban landscapes.  Occoquan Bay NWR, which has become one of our favorite sites, is only minutes from the urban sprawl that extends out of Washington D.C.  While we are there, the hubbub and traffic (OH, the traffic!) is far from our thoughts as we listen to the gentle lapping of the waves on the shore.  One of our recent collections at this site was Strophostyles helvola, annual sand-bean, or wooly-bean, a cute little viney legume that pops open its pods and hurtles the seed every which way when mature.  Using a bag with a wide opening helps while collecting this little guy!

Strophostyles helvola, with an immature fruit

As September breezes by, the onslaught of hunting season is upon us as well.  When considering that turkey, deer, and bear hunting is allowed on National Wildlife Refuges, one may wonder if the term “refuge” is really appropriate.  I’m sure this is one of the main reasons these Refuges were set up, though, and how they continue to maintain funding.  I know the managers of the lands are doing their best to keep balanced populations on their properties, especially considering how close most of them are to developed areas.  They must be doing something right, because the list of wildlife we have seen while working this season includes bear, deer, bald eagles, osprey, groundhogs, beaver, snakes, lizards, and even an alligator!  This doesn’t even include the countless species of smaller birds or the numerous pods of dolphins we’ve spotted while working along the coast.

Although all the driving and nights in hotels can become a bit of a grind, thinking of all these experiences helps me realize just how lucky I am to have such a fabulous job.  While most of the people of Washington D.C. or Raleigh might think of nature as something “other,” not a part of their everyday environment, I have the privilege to walk within it every day, and witness its everyday moments of radiance and tranquility.  I get to behold the glorious skies and beautiful blooms of her shining moments, and the stinking muck and terrifying venom of her darker side.  And all of these things help to make me who I am, someone a bit outside the norm of this “civilized” society, perhaps, but also one who is in touch with the pulse of nature and the rhythm of the seasons.  I’ll leave it on that note.  Until next time, peace outside!

Emily Driskill

SOS East: North Carolina Botanical Garden

One of the many projects we have going (while we wait for fall seeds to mature) is to find an adequate site to apply soil microbes for the biocontrol of cheatgrass. Did you know there is a microbial control of cheatgrass and other winter annual grasses? It’s pretty neat. Research scientists from Washington State University and USDA-ARS have painstakingly isolated the bacteria Pseudomonas from the roots of yellowing winter wheat. This bacteria produces a toxin that targeted the winter cultivar, which they then (through a long process) applied to a few of the invasive winter annuals that plague the arid west. The cost per acre is equivalent to the lower price end of herbicides, and can be delivered by spraying or coated on (wanted) perennial seeds. They are working with many agencies to put this method into widespread practice.

But in the meantime…

Cheatgrass. It’s everywhere! Why not use it to our advantage? I’ve noticed its natural tendency for its seeds to work their way into everything, so I thought, “Heck, just go with it.”

To make all-natural, (somewhat) organically grown socks:

1) Go to work. Preferably fire monitoring at the ol’ Spring fire, which was not seeded.

2) Let it in. Roll your pant ends up once or twice, just enough to expose your ankles. If your pants are a little on the short side, like mine, you can skip this step.

3) Walk. And walk and walk and walk. It’s that easy! You can just walk to your site, and continue your daily work routine. If you want to go the extra mile though, then do so (probably on your lunch break). Don’t worry about taking off your shoes to get the cheatgrass seeds all the way to the toe of the socks. They’ll get there, trust me.

4) Admire the tenacity of cheatgrass. It really is everywhere, isn’t it?

5) Launder. You might think this would remove the seeds, but it actually helps them weave deeper into the fibers. Make sure to turn your socks inside out! Wash and dry. Cheatgrass likes high heat, and your fancy wool socks don’t, so do that.

6) Re-evaluate. Stop for a second and think about what you really want.

6a) If you’re still thinking “WOAH, cheatgrass socks! What a great concept!”, then repeat steps 1-5. Eventually, your sock fibers will be entirely replaced by cheatgrass seeds, and you will have killer calluses covering your feet.

 6b) If you’re starting to miss your old, soft socks that didn’t constantly poke your poor feet, you might want to think about reversing the process. This will take 1-3 hours and must be done by hand with excellent lighting. Good luck!

Sincerely,

orps

Carson City BLM

Well, it’s already the 22nd of September, and we are wrapping things up here in Boise, Idaho.  The pressed specimens need to be affixed to their respective pieces of paper, and the labels need to be typed, printed, and glued in place nicely.  In addition to this exhilarating office task, we have been entering, analyzing, and organizing the data required for a GIS layer that will have points for every Habitat Assessment Framework (HAF) transect for our field office that has been entered into our Access database since the beginning of time.  This has proven to be a bit tedious, but rewarding once we looked at the (almost) complete Excel file ready to be converted to a practical, all-encompassing GIS layer.  Well that sure was boring; let’s look at some pictures of some stuff  that relates to the bad title that only fans of The Decemberists will (maybe) understand.  Here are some hazards that we have faced with poise and bravery throughout our rather varied internship:

Watch out for those arm spikes!!! (not to mention the invasive medusahead!)

Always make sure to take a drink of water before you start looking similar to this guy.

Always make your best effort to avoid getting run-over….this poor guy didn’t fare quite so well in the rather dangerous parking lot at our office.

That’s a fairly large rattlesnake.

That’s a scary dog.

That’s a smaller rattlesnake hiding under an Arrowleaf balsamroot only making him(or her)self known by rattling.

Now don’t sell this guy short…just think how hazardous it would be to step on this guy with no shoes on. OUCH.

…and those, my friends, are The Hazards of Work as presented by The Septemberists.

Thanks for reading and until next(the final) time.

Dan King

Four Rivers Field Office – BLM – Boise, ID