Since my last blog, I’ve been trying to keep busy. My main task around this time of the year at the Cosumnes River Preserve is to manage the weeds that we have around the wetlands and the visitor center. However, there’s always something else new to work on. That’s what I like about this job, it can be unpredictable sometimes. Just today, we had someone from Wilderness Inquiry spot a possible mountain lion. The preserve manager, Harry, and I followed up on the lead and attempted to track the lion through dense oak woodland full of mosquitoes. When we were back from our search we started working on our plant identification. We saw Orgegon ash, box elder, curly dock, valley oaks, and blackberry bushes for sure. Afterwards, we set up a camera trap so see if we could get pictures of the cougar later on.

Also during this week, I assisted with showing 6th graders about the macroinvertebrates that are in the wetland ponds. It was nice to see the kids having fun at the canoemobile event. A part of their activities is the paddle down the Cosumnes River, an experience that many kids get to have for the first time.

I was able to help out with the specimen collection a couple of weeks ago down at the Merced River, the wildflower displays were gorgeous. We had Dave, a BLM employee who showed us where all the plant species were. It was a good experience get to know more about the SOS program and too bad we we’re only at the river for roughly two hours.

Funeral Mountains

Hello Blog readers!

I hope to once again effectively highlight my journey here in the sunny place that is Ridgecrest, California. A nearby sign reads ‘100 miles to anywhere’ that seems aptly placed. This past weekend (4/22-4/24) we (My fellow intern, Erin, and I) attended the Owens Lake Bird festival in the wonderful little town of Lone Pine, CA.
This little town was once famous for its role in cinema production. Many of the old west hit movies were shot here. As well as “Tremors”!!! This little town should deserve more recognition for its natural beauty than those films indicated. In fact, many of those old west movies were set in other states entirely, yet all share the same backdrop that is the beautiful Eastern Sierra and adjacent Owens valley.

Owens Lake is important to note on an ecological scale, as it has recently been reformed into a lake. In the 90+ years previous it was more of a playa. However, it has recent history as a lake. All the way up until when the aqueduct was constructed. This is the lake from which Los Angeles receives the majority of its water. In the early 1900’s some clever engineers developed and implemented a water diversion scheme known as the LA aqueduct.  The aqueduct runs over 300 miles from Owens lake near the town of Lone Pine to LA. So crazy!!

This was a lucky week of work for us as we got to work with a real botanist doing seed collecting. The wonderful Sarah De Groot took us out to the Funeral mountains to help show us some proper protocol for seed collection. It was so educational to be out with a field botanist. Everywhere we turned we uncovered a new little plant hiding from view. From some plants that have no leafs, or at least ones appearing as they don’t, to some very strange shrubs, to a skin irritating phacelias several new plant friends were made and several seed collections as well. The most challenging aspect of it for me was realizing how allergic I was to the Phacelia (Boragaceae) genus. Almost every one I’ve touched leaves me with some minor dermatitis. I wonder if this is an issue for any other interns out there?

Today we helped teach an outdoor environmental education class to some 4th graders at the lovely sand canyon.

By far, another exciting couple of weeks here in California. Hoping to make more collections while they are still viable. Finding proper timing can be the most difficult part of collections I’m learning. Aside from identifying a population, one has to then figure out when the best time to collect seeds will be and hopefully the weather cooperates!! One day we had 40 mile gusts come down on us while in the middle of collecting. Anywho..
Best Wishes,
Robbie Wood

Alabama hills with MT. Muir? The mountains aren’t labeled in real life

Alabama hills- Mobius Arch

Cholla in the Turtle Mountains

Beautiful plant with an unfortunate common name… “Bladderpod” (Peritoma arborea)

Botanists botanizing Penstemon in the Kingstons.

Cadiz Dunes Wilderness

Psorothamnus fremontii var. attenuatus

Happy trails,

Kate Sinnott

Needles Field Office

Bureau of Land Management

April 27, 2016

Hello to all my loyal readers!

I am writing my final CLM blogpost now with two weeks still to go in my internship here at the San Bernardino National Forest. The next two weeks will be very busy, so as I have a moment now I will finish up my blog, paperwork, etc.

Next week I will be in the Mountaintop greenhouse and heading down to Lytle Creek. One of the Restoration Program’s new hires starts on Monday and as she will be working in the greenhouse, I will be showing her around. On Wednesday we have a pesticide use training and on Thursday I will be in the greenhouse planting pollinator species and transplanting buckwheat with a volunteer and probably my sisters, who are coming to visit for a little while.

Corethrogyne filaginifolia (common sandaster) coming up in the greenhouse. It was planted a week ago. So cute!

During my final week as a CLM intern here, I will be traveling to the Los Padres National Forest to work with them on setting up their greenhouse, which has been out of use for a few years. I will also get to help teach high schoolers how to plant milkweed. I am sure it will be interesting to experience work on another forest, and I hope I can be of use. They plan to plant the same species of milkweed we have in our greenhouse, Asclepias eriocarpa and Asclepias fasiculatum for monarch habitat enhancement.

CLM Intern, Brandon, planting milkweed in our Mountaintop greenhouse last week.

I have really enjoyed my work here because I have learned a lot of new skills and the staff are great. I have gotten to do a variety of work and projects including restoration monitoring, HMP monitoring, field plantings, fence construction, managing the greenhouse, working with AmeriCorps crew and volunteers, and being able to attend the Colorado Plateau Native Plant Conference using the CLM alternative training funds. The staff have been so helpful, especially Mary (current Biotech and former CLM intern), and who are always looking out for another training or skill to teach me.

Hannah attaching wire to a fence during a recent training.

I am ending my internship two weeks early from my original end date because during the third week of May I will start in a Forest Service Botany position. I am very excited to be staying on here for longer! I have loved the work so far here, and I am looking forward to spending more time examining plants in the field (I have a lot to learn) and surveying for rare species. This is such a cool area to explore! After moving around constantly for a year and a half, it will also be nice to stay in one place for longer than 5 months.

An introduction to rare plant surveying this week: Oopuntia basilaris (intermediate characteristics). Thanks, Mary!

Thanks to everyone at the San Bernardino National Forest who has been involved in procuring funds, training me, and answering all my questions. Thanks also to Krissa, Rebecca, and everyone else at the Chicago Botanic Garden who makes these internships possible. I have had two great experiences with CLM and hopefully I am on my way now!

Erigeron parishii (Parish’s fleabane): a California endemic. Many more interesting plants to come!

Cheers!
Marta
San Bernardino National Forest Restoration Program
Fawnskin, CA

Hello everyone,

Since my last CLM blog this past October, the site’s traffic has plummeted and the servers have been gathering dust. I have decided to take on the CLM Internship once again so that I may blog about my experiences and appease my horde of botanically-inclined fans. In short, I am back by popular demand.

This year, I have decided to take my talents to the Prineville BLM in Central Oregon. The drive out from Chicago was tiring, as usual. I brought my dad (who hasn’t been on vacation for nearly 10 years) with me to witness the beauty of the West again. During each tank-up, he windexed bug splatter off my windshield so that he could take clear pictures of the land along the way. Fortunately for us, we got to stop and explore too. After unpacking my belongings in Prineville, we visited Crater Lake National Park, drove down to California and saw the redwoods, then took the 101 all the way up the coast
to Cannon Beach before going to Portland. I explained to my dad, who is very much still a Polish immigrant, what a hipster is. It was such a culture shock for him to see skinny, bearded, flannel-shirted, beanie-donning guys riding around on unicycles, double-decker bikes, or using an antique typewriter at a cafe – although I’ll admit that last one was a shock for me too. He called them “hippos”.

The views were beautiful, the beer was good, and the Subarus were plenty, but now it was time to drop dad off at the airport and head back to Prineville to get some work done. I’ve been working for about two weeks now. There were a lot of formalities during the first few days: paperwork, necessary vehicle training, getting my workstation set up, and meeting many of the fine folks that I’ll share this space with. I am helping my mentor, Anna, prepare for our monitoring plan this season. To do this, I have been ordering equipment, testing sensors to make sure they are calibrated correctly, and using GIS to identify candidate sites for field visits and ultimately selection as part of a permanent monitoring program. The protocols we’ll be employing are called AIM (Assessment Inventory and Monitoring) and MIM (Multiple Indicator Monitoring) of streamside channels and streamside vegetation. They are used to collect data to determine ecosystem health. From there, the BLM adjusts its land management and resource allocation to make sure short- and long-term objectives are being met.

We’ll be in Utah for two weeks in mid-May for AIM training and then for one week in Prineville for MIM. That’s a lot of learning right there – but I’m excited for it. So far I haven’t had the chance to actually get out into the field. I’m at a standing desk in front of dual computer monitors in a cubicle right now 🙁 And I’m tall so I see a sea of cubicles just like it 🙁 🙁 🙁 but when Jessica (my fellow CLM-er and roomie) gets here next Monday, things will pick up and we’ll actually be outside so much that I hope we get sick of it. And I’ll be identifying everything as I usually do. And I’ll have beeee-autiful pictures to share with all of you, my devoted fans.

Thank you CLM for another awesome opportunity to learn and grow. I’m excited to work hard this summer and hopefully make some friends along the way!

Best identifications,

Michal

This past week I had the opportunity to attend a Recreation Management Conference for the state of Wyoming Outdoor Rec Planners. I attended this instead of the training at Chicago Botanic Garden, as I had previously attended it. Also, since my internship is not botany based, this gave me an opportunity to attend a related training.

The conference had speakers from within the BLM as well as outside speakers. The BLM speakers talked about a variety of subjects including cave management, wilderness study areas (WSAs), law enforcement, recreation management information system (RMIS), and other recreation practices. The outside speakers spoke about subjects such as the Tread Lightly program, off-highway vehicle use and trail design, as well as the socioeconomic effect recreation has on the surrounding community. It was great to see how people from within the government as well as outside sources come together to improve recreation for everyone.

Another part of the conference that was beneficial was when all of the field offices had a chance to share some of their accomplishments as well as some of their challenges. This gave me an opportunity to see some of the real-life things affecting rec planners. As a person not having a lot of recreation experience, this was a way for me to understand more of what a rec planner does. Many of the rec planners in the state of Wyoming are fairly new at their position, so many of their questions were the same questions that I had and it was a great way to learn from the rec planners who have been in their position a lot longer.

Overall, this was also a great way to get a crash-course education in many of the tools I will be working with this coming summer. It will help me be able to do my job more efficiently as I will not have to have so much time training. It also gave me a great way to network with other rec planners that I can connect with if I have questions or need help with anything. I also got to explore a part of the state that I had never been to before, which is a neat experience.

That’s all for now, hoping to get out and do some field work soon, but that might be difficult as they are forecasting 7 inches of snow for today!

AZ

BLM Rawlins Field Office

I had the opportunity to visit a new part of Wyoming last week. It is with great honor to present to you one the most cherished recreational spots in Lander.

Johnny Behind the Rocks (area view)

Johnny Behind the Rocks (trail view)

Johnny Behind the Rocks is a mountain bike trail system on BLM land that finally got well established about 3 years ago. Last week I had the pleasure of running on this trail with recreation planners around the state. This was after a full day of learning the hardships and struggles that come with being a recreation planner at the Recreation/NLCS workshop.

Recreation planners have several different jobs to take on including outreach, inventories, permits, as well as maintaining recreational sites just to name a few. It can be a heavy load for one person. That’s were my co-intern and I come in. We are supposed to help relieve some of the work load by doing some WSA (wilderness study area) assessments. Only thing holding us back is the weather.

Since I’ve been here (Rawlins, WY) it has snowed more than it has been sunny. Every weekend has not had even the slightest amount of sun. I dream of sun when I go to bed. I long for the days in the office to grow smaller just to be able to go into the field and learn new areas, wildlife, plants, and hike on some trails. The season is a slow start, but my hopes run high that the weather will give us a break and we can go out, show our potential and make an impression on the BLM we work for.

Hoping for sunny days

RR
BLM (Rawlins Field Office)

A month gone — and I am gratefully sunburned and flower saturated, as any naturalist living another unfolding California Spring hopes to be! My internship, at the BLM Field Office in Arcata, CA is off to a diverse and rolling start! The rain fell strong and the sun shone bright during these past weeks, taking me from the coast to the upland oak woodlands — from North Spit to South Spit, around Humboldt Bay and back again!

As I outlined in my last blog post, a recurrent and rather large project we have going here is vegetation monitoring, at five different sites across BLM properties on dune habitats in Humboldt County. I have completed 12/14 30.5-meter transects, each with approximately 200 individual quadrats aligned along 20 benchmarks. Within each quadrat, I quantify the amount of vegetation, identify and record the occurrence of every species, and count the number of Layia carnosa, a federally endangered annual dune plant. This week I will finish dune monitoring!

This all said, one of the most exciting logistical things about my position (many reading this know how and what truly excites me — those living/flying/blooming multitudes!) has been the diversity of my work. A whirling selection to prove it:

I have visited many of the prominent Arcata BLM lands. This is a remarkable task because one unique aspect of the BLM in Humboldt County as compared to other BLM offices in the nation is that our office has very few large tracts of land, and hundreds of smaller parcels. In these visits I am swept by the magic of blooming coastal dunes, struck by sun shining on wide rivers, listening for sparrow songs or watching the Norther Harrier glide low, pulling non-native pines high above the roiling northern oceans on coastal prairie, or lost in a wind-waving sea of European beach grass!

I am working on a project to teach 7th graders from Freshwater Charter School about the epic adaptations of the dune-forest plants, while they film me and create public service announcements on Ipads! I had my first scoping meeting at the site with local filmmaker Barbara Domanchuk and in the next month will lead the field trip and make a classroom visit! Gulp!

I also had the opportunity to attend the National Association of Interpretation Regional Conference! This weekend I will help lead two field trips for the Arcata’s Godwit Days Birding Festival!

The next large project at the office is our contribution to Seeds of Success, a national native wild seed collection program. Our office intends to contribute collections from 7-9 species, which is quite involved! First, we scout out locations and possible target species and in my office, where the program has been running for several years, it takes some creativity and work to keep it fresh! For each species, we collect, press, mount and accession 2-3 voucher specimens in Spring. In summer, we generally begin collecting seed, making sure to collect AT LEAST 10,000-20,000 seeds from 50 or more individuals. In Fall, we groom the data collection and send our seed collections to be processed and cleaned in Bend, Oregon. For now, I am happily emulating Willis Lynn Jepson and easily fantasizing that I am an important rare plant explorer! Too much fun!

Throughout all of this, the plants have led the way, and I have expanded my botanical knowledge widely — I won’t bore you with the big list of new plants I have seen recently, but see below for several lovely pictures of my favorite recent sightings. I am also adding several of my new sightings to: my inaturalist account!. This is the gracious and heartful ground of our naturalist path, the pure enchantment of coming to know parts of our world, beautiful parts, that we never knew were in existence prior to that moment of revelatory discovery.

Beyond the work frame, I have been spending every possible moment in the field, exploring and delighting on a fresh and personally unexplored region of California. I made a quick backpacking trip to the King Range, remembering the value of even the shortest backpacking trips and delighting in the thickest Iris douglasiana blooms I have ever seen. The most notable creature was a moth…a very, very notable moth, Saturnia mendocino, (get the close up) which I took a very sloppy and overly excited photo of:

Saturnia mendocino — note that it had landed (incredibly briefly, let me assure you) on a burned and recently re-sprouting Manzanita burl.

This moth, part of the impressive silk moth family, is an elusive creature, flies in the day on the edge of chaparral and madrone/mixed forests. Some professional lepidopterists in California have never even seen it! In addition this this little trek, I also made my way north to see the serpentine bogs home to the California Pitcherplant, Darlingtonia californica! What a world!

That’s all for now! Enjoy every second of Spring from where ever you are reading this from!

Dune monitoring, Mattole Beach, Humboldt County, CA.

My first Calochortus of Spring! Calochortus tolmiei.

Calypso bulbosa!

Freaking out about my flower find

Erythronium oregonum

One of our field sites in classic form — South Spit, Humboldt Bay.

A field site, Ma-le’l Dunes, another wonderful day at the office!

Kaleb A. Goff

Arcata, CA BLM Field Office

The last two days were a double-feature in the John Day Fossil Beds. First, it was finally time for our first SOS collection of the year! We set off to collect Lithophragma glabrum (bulbous woodland star), a little annual that had shot from flower to seed with the help of two hot weeks. Secondly, we were to pull 3-7 ft tall sweet clover carcasses (Melilotus I think officinalis) from a BLM enclosure surrounding a Prineville district sensitive species (Thelypodium eucosmum; not pictured here as they weren’t yet in flower, but imagine little basal leaves with a tint of red down their midribs in the Brassicaceae family).

The view from our L. glabrum site.

I knew coming in that our L. glabrum site was also populated by L. parviflora (smallflower woodland star), but I was pretty confident about telling them apart – the bulbous woodland star, after all, has bulbs stuffed into the nooks of its inflated petioles and just below the flowers (pictured to the left). I also remembered that our site, when we made our pre-collection visit two weeks ago, was by far more populated by L. glabrum. So come collection day, when I looked at little stems that had blown petioles that looked large enough to have once held little bulbets, I thought winner winner chicken dinner. They probably had just fallen off, my addled field-brain rationalized. But then I came across many, many fried plants that were all stalk and bulbs and realized that L. glabrum loses its flowers and fruit capsules before it loses its bulbs… which meant the first 300 capsules I collected were irrevocably contaminated with L. parviflora. L. parviflora‘s life cycle was apparently just a week behind L. glabrum‘s, meaning it was now the more populous and visible of the two.

Oh well, 300 down. Starting again.

Just around then the blue-gray skies cracked open and let down sparse but fat rain drops, a mollifying gesture of amnesty for my trespasses. My SOS partner and I sat in the rain for a while, enjoying the reprieve from the heat while looking to the skies to see if the rain would let up. When it did, we got back to work. (A nice thing about the high desert is that things dry up almost alarmingly fast.)

On the second day of collection, after I had squatted up and down our north-facing hills to tease off the little capsules off these 5 inch stalks, my partner reminded me (with a cocked brow, or so I imagine, though she was across a hill so I can’t be sure) that our mentor had told us that we could pull the entire plant since they were annuals and the Bend Seed Extractory would do the rest. I vaguely, vaguely remembered the part of that AM conversation the day before but it hadn’t stuck. Whoops.

3570 capsules later between the two of us and we called it a collection. It feels great to finally have one of 40 down. My glutes are going to be rock hard after this summer.

Beautiful Lewisia

My SOS pard’na showing that clover the business.

– Vi Nguyen, Prineville BLM