I Have A Need, A Need For Seed! : Our Collective Greed For Collecting Seed

The great war of me v. seed had started long ago when I choked on some sunflower seeds when I was a kid. And now I get my just retribution by taking 20 percent of some Zizia aurea seeds. Admittedly I would have liked my revenge to be more decimating, but I’ll settle for 20 percent. 

Zizia Aurea

I’m now getting into the swing of things and I think I’m shining as Midewin is a wondrous place is what I’ve been finding, not only am I surviving but I am thriving. Along with seed collecting we did dinner brush cutting where we took very scary power tools that had a whirring buzzsaw to some shrubs. While in the field I found a bone, whether from a human post them being brush cut or some animal I don’t know, but it is in my home now as a trophy for surviving my brush with brush cutting. 

After massacring the shrubs with sharp edges we switched from physical to chemical via the use of a chlorine swimming pool blue gooey herbicide covering of the cut stumps. Carrying the thorny shrubs to the dump trucks left our arms scratched red, but overall the whole experience was so fun and I’m glad we did it! 

We also spent some time vegetation monitoring which involves standing around a quadrat and identifying every single plant in that square. No cutting corners with the square every plant must be recorded. As we encircled the non-circle I learned the common and scientific names of all these plants that make their home in the prairie, such as Penstemon digitalis seen here in digital form.

Penstemon digitalis

I was born in 2001, the year of the serpent, so it was only fitting that I got to do some snake stuff while I was here. There are many metal and wooden boards all around the prairie here that could theoretically have snakes under them, but usually have wasp nests. I did get to hold and measure a snake.

Common garter snake

A beautiful specimen that I was honored to caress in my arms. I related very much to the snake because my own arms from a lack of lifting have the same amount of definition as a snake’s body. Along the way we ran into a large blackberry bush that stopped us in our tracks as we ate from the bush for a while. 
I don’t have any children and I don’t plan to anytime soon. But in the meantime my surrogate children have been the plants that I have planted at the River Road Seed Beds that we have. I make a home for these plants in the ground that includes Liatris spicata and I nourish them liberally with water. In time they have aged from babies to toddlers which has happened so quickly. They grow up so fast!

Fish & Wildlife July Highlights

Most of this month was spent doing mussel surveys, which is easily my favorite thing so far. The Klamath Basin is home to one of the healthiest Western Ridged Mussel populations, however this species is proposed for listing due to losing much of its range elsewhere. For these surveys, we floated the Sprague River in kayaks, watching the bottom for mussels. The intention was presence/absence reporting for data about the ranges they occupy. Nearly every section of the river we explored had healthy populations, which was an exciting find! Spending the day on the river, watching fish, and finding mussels is just about the best thing to get to say you do for work!

Mussel surveys on the Sprague River, featuring Maddie.

Another adventure we had the opportunity to take was to Ashland, OR, which is the home of the National FWS Forensics Lab. This lab investigates all international FWS crimes and holds an impressive collection of species samples used for identification in other cases. We toured the building learning about the different lab departments including morphology, genetics, chemistry, and more. We even got to participate in sample organization. The tour was an amazing experience, but bittersweet to say the least. While learning so much and seeing many species samples was a great opportunity, we also had to face the fact that many of those samples are obtained through illegal, unsustainable, and unethical trade practice.

The month was filled with more electrofishing as well! Brook trout removal is a never ending job, but one we have so much fun doing. Towards the end of the month, we also assisted in an inventory project on Five Mile Creek, recently recovering from the Bootleg Fire. This opportunity offered a different set of species to work with including redband trout, sculpin, lamprey, dace, and minnows.

Murder on the Grassland…

As our team finished the stem demography and aerial cover portion of our summer, we moved onto more solitary activities. Instead of working in groups or pairs on a single plot, we now work mostly alone. Pre-mow clipping was the first to come. We would lay out measuring tapes on each plot and place a small, plastic quadrat with long legs in the correct spot. From there, we roughly sorted the plant material by Bouteloua, warm season, cool season, and cactus. The rest went into a plastic bag to be sorted later in the lab. This continued for all of the other plots. After clipping, the plots were mowed to a specific height.

Then, the fun part came. In order to simulate the trampling from grazing cows, horses from the forest service were brought in to walk over each plot. I gained the official title of professional pooper-scooper. I counted the number of times the horses walked over the plots and removed any fecal matter that could alter the nitrogen levels.

Yeah…you could say I’m a professional.

The following week was forecasted to be in the high nineties, so Jackie opted for a week in the office sorting, weighing, and entering data. With my trusty tweezers in hand, I began the long process of sorting through each plastic bag for PASSMI, perennial forbs, annual forbs, and standing dead (along with any misplaced cool or warm season grasses). As we neared the end of the sorting, I weighed and entered data for the remainder of the week. It was a much needed break from the scorching badlands sun.

This past week, we returned to the great outdoors, now conducting post-mow biomass clipping. A few crucial things are different about this procedure. Instead of having legs for the quadrats, we are clipping a few centimeters from the ground. All of the plant material also has to be sorted in the field instead of partially in the A/C. Lastly, the mowing of the plots makes it more difficult to identify the grasses and forbs. As a result, the plots take much longer to clip than before, with my first taking me almost two hours.

Now, to the murder part… The solitary and monotonous nature of last month’s activities has been pretty enjoyable, actually. The clipping and sorting is pretty satisfying and almost meditative. However, the lack of mental stimulation was almost exhausting. My four nearly identical Spotify mixes were wearing thin. So, I decided to start listening to a podcast about historical murder cases and other criminal cases. It was well-produced and kept my attention on long, hot days. However, in an introspective way, I do find it somewhat humorous to be in the middle of nowhere, looking at grass all day, and learning about Lizzie Borden. In a somewhat symbolic way, there was a true murder on the grassland. My team and I were deceived, and the image of our favorite grass was killed right in front of us. BROARV, or Bromus arvensis, is an unassuming, fuzzy little grass. (See Below) Until recently, we thought he was our friend -“Good ol’ Arv”. As it turns out, he’s actually an imposter and he has to go. 🙁

Just a little guy :,(

Regardless, this month has been full of learning and new adventures. I can’t wait to see what the next few weeks have in store!

(Photo creds: Kyle)

A July filled with uphill hiking, bugs, seeds and ghost towns!

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Super steep slope with sagebrush bushwhacking

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.

Ghost town shootout reenactment

Seeds of Their Own Making

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.

Fireweed; Chamaenerion angustifolium
Stink Current; Ribes bracteosum

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!).

Our seed collection work station in the District Station’s Warehouse. Sign lists our collected species (by nickname) as of August 1st.
Spreading out Devil’s Club (Oplopanax horridus), to dry.
Sorting out and cleaning Devil’s Club (Oplopanax horridus) and Goatsbeard (Aruncus dioicus) seeds.

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.

A juvenile Bald Eagle’s feather

Help from Friends

In July, our team was joined by botanists in the field at two of our sites. With their help, we were able to identify and collect species of interest. It was good fun to hear their stories, puns, and have someone new in the field to interact with.

Our first guest was the director of the seed bank at Chicago Botanic Garden who regularly goes into the field to collect seeds. He has a wealth of knowledge about our region and was able to identify many things with one glance that we would have struggled through the dichotomous keys with. In addition to his knowledge of plants, he also provided us with homework to watch one of his favorite movies, Dances with Wolves starring Kevin Costner.


A new plant that I can identify! (Phryma leptostachya)
I have been seeing Monarda fistulosa all over gardens in the city so it was nice to meet its relative in the field (Monarda punctata).

Our second guest joined us in southern Illinois. Even though we remained in the same state, the composition and abundance of species greatly varied. Upon meeting him, we immediately walked to the side of the road because of his life motto that a botanist always has one eye on the road and one in the ditch. He was able to supply us with information about what is common or hard to find in this area and what might be of interest to restoration projects in the area. He also provided us with puns about what we were looking for. When we spotted spores on the bottoms of fern leaves, it was “a sight for soris (sore eyes).”

The plant our guest spotted from the roadside. (Ruellia humilis)
This specific species is more frequently found in the north so its seeds are of great interest for collection in the south. (Rhexia mariana)

Our team really enjoyed having two botanists join us in the field. It continues to inspire me when I feel overwhelmed by the many, many plants that I am trying to learn.

Full Day of Seed Collection

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. 

Thorsen’s pond in the Castle Mountains of the Helena-Lewis and Clark NF picture taken 06/15/2023 when the scouting point was taken.

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. 

A population of Geum triflorum in the Little Belts with a mix of flowers and fruits. 06/14/2023

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!

Bags of seeds. Geum triflorum to the left and Frasera speciosa to the right.

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!

A spider chilling in a Frasera speciosa plant, next to all the fruits. 08/02/2023

July is Floating On By

July has come and gone, and now it is time for the highlights!

Earlier this month I was able to join forces with the Lolo National Forest Weeds/Invasives Team in collaboration with the Montana Biological Weed Control Coordination Project. We netted Oberea and Flea Beetles in a large field, then sorted/packaged them up into cups to be put on ice for transportation.

The following day I joined the weeds team again on a scouting and biocontrol float trip along the Clark Fork River. We mapped Leafy Spurge populations and then released our bugs on the populations. We targeted these populations specifically since they were isolated from roads by the river. This makes the leafy spurge not only difficult to get to, but inadequate to treat with herbicides due to its proximity to the river. It was a beautiful day for floating, and it was my first time on the Clark Fork River! It sure is handy to have an ex-raft guide supervisor! Overall a super cool project I was able to be a part of.

Another exciting collaboration this month was being able to work with local youth crews in both the Missoula and Superior District areas to teach them about seed collection and rare plant surveys. Being able to meet local high schoolers excited about nature and working outside made for a fulfilling week of seed collecting. Having extra hands to help with seed collection wasn’t too bad either! It has been great being able to work with other ranger districts and learning more about different areas of the forest.

And finally… One of the best parts of July has been getting to know one specific local plant Vaccinium membranaceum!!! The huckleberry patches I have stumbled upon while scouting for seed have been a much needed break during long days in the field.

Until next month!

I can’t pronounce the name of my new favorite plant.

The hills are alive…

Summer means everyone is busy here in the Caribou-Targhee National Forest. The office has been mostly empty in the middle of the work days because most folks are out in the field. The flowers are filling the hillsides and just when I think the landscapes couldn’t possibly get more colorful, more beautiful, more diverse more comes into bloom. The land managers, the flowers, the wildlife are all busy making the most of the summer.

You know how there are just those plants that really catch your attention, that you see just rarely enough that you have time to miss them, and yet you see just frequently enough to remain hopeful to see them? Well, I’ve gotten to see some old friends again this season and I’ve gotten to finally see in person a few that I had only previously seen pictures of. Some of my favorites that I’ve seen this month are a mariposa lily, elephant head lousewort, and glacier lily.

…mine eyes have seen the GLORIA

I just returned from a lovely weekend in the Lemhi mountains for our local GLORIA project where I had the chance to work with a number of very knowledgeable botanists at various stages in their careers. A few of these botanists are retired and volunteer their time to this and various other botany project because they believe in the importance of and enjoy this work.

Setting up the survey area by laying out string along each cardinal and intercardinal direction.

I wanted to use this blog to do some of my own research on the background and scope of GLORIA. GLORIA, by the way, stands for Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments. I found a lot of great information online and everything I’ve summarized below comes from the primary GLORIA website: https://www.gloria.ac.at/home. It is a a global project to monitor alpine habitats over time to track the effect of climate change on alpine plant communities. The alpine is an interesting environment to collect data on for a few reasons. One is because it remains largely unaffected by other human-caused factors as it tends to have relatively low human traffic and land use. Another interesting factor is that mountain areas contain a disproportional high amount of biodiversity compared to the amount of land this habitat covers. Alpine habitat is particularly sensitive as the plant communities living there will not have much in the way of suitable substitute habitat while other species ranges are beginning to shift upwards in elevation and are beginning to encroach into alpine plant communities current habitat.

Surveying one square meter plots five vertical meters below the summit point.

One particularly interesting concept that came up while I was learning more about GLORIA is the idea of extinction debt. It describes a phenomenon where a local extinction may lag significantly behind the occurrence of habitat destruction or degradation (Kuusaari et al, 2009). This means that species may be occupying an environment that is already unsuitable for them and that they will not be able to continue to occupy (Dullinger et al, 2012). This is dangerous because when we see a species surviving in a disturbed area we are likely to assume that this means the species is more resilient than it is truly able to be or the the habitat change isn’t as impactful as it actually will turn out to be. These incorrect assumptions could lead to complacency and misinformed land management and policy decisions.

An earlier sign of local extinction than range shifting or shrinking is a decreased population size (Cotto et al, 2017). A big part of the GLORIA protocol is to create a comprehensive plant list for every summit surveyed and to estimate abundance of each plant. GLORIA is creating a long-term, standardized database of alpine plant communities that can provide us with vital information for addressing this issue, as well as many other conservation concerns for alpine areas.

Can you read that?

Some article I extracted information from.

Cotto, O., Wessely, J., Georges, D. et al. A dynamic eco-evolutionary model predicts slow response of alpine plants to climate warming. Nat Commun 8, 15399 (2017).

Dullinger, S. et al. Extinction debt of high-mountain plants under twenty-first-century climate change. Nature Climate Change 2, 619–622 (2012).

Kuussaari, M. et al. Extinction debt: A challenge for biodiversity conservation. Trends in Ecololgy & Evolution 24, 564–571 (2009).

Reaching New Heights: Alpine Hikes

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.