I am falling more in love with this part of the country each day, and believe that anyone who enjoys the outdoors would. My appreciation for BLM/public lands continues to evolve as I discover the hidden gems of the vast landscapes. I felt this gratitude especially on our trip to Canyonlands National Park, UT (see other post). Just outside of a state park lies a chunk of BLM land. The views were breathtaking, we were the only two people within miles, and it was free. I hope that those kinds of places will continue to be untouched by development for posterity to enjoy.

We are just about finished with our amphibian habitat project and will soon be assigned to a new one — Pygmy Rabbit and Lynx Surveys are in our imminent future. I also have had the chance to work with the rangeland management team, completing utilization forms and meeting with the ranchers that are permitted cattle grazing on BLM land. These utilization forms are a way for the range specialists to see whether or not an area is being overgrazed or, over utilized. This process is coordinated with the ranchers or their contractors, and is a cooperative effort to manage the grazed land in a more sustainable way. Our rangeland technician was calling out a dozen species of grasses with ease, and I felt fortunate to have learned a few of them. Slowly but surely, the flora of the West is becoming familiar.

We have also had the opportunity to join a project that is working to identify and eradicate cheatgrass populations, an abundant invasive grass.

I am currently reading Edward Wilson’s Consilience, and want to share a few of my favorite quotes thus far, as I found them to be both insightful and relevant to the work that we do.

“The economics of sustainable yield is still a primitive art, and the psychological benefits of natural ecosystems are almost wholly unexplored”

 

“We must understand nature, both around us and within ourselves, in order to set humanity on the course of self-improvement.”

 

“A balanced perspective cannot be acquired by studying disciplines in pieces but through pursuit of the consilience among them.”

 

“Every college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare?”

E.O. Wilson

Val Stacey

Pinedale, WY

Well, I think one thing that all the BLM internships out West here probably have in common is cows. Many cows. Every day. Everywhere. They stand in the middle of the road. They stare at us. They run away from us. They moo. They break through fences. They eat. And that’s where potentially the problem may arise. Could cows completely destroy a piece of land by over-grazing?

Thankfully, the BLM has measures in place to prevent this. And I was fortunate enough to be able to tag along to see what this entails. The protocol I got to witness is called utilization. Basically, in each allotment, there are six or seven points that are to be surveyed. At each point, we do an initial plant survey and compile a species list. We are especially interested in the grasses because that of course is what the cows eat. There is a list of the different grasses and which ones are of more concern/priority. Whichever one seems to be common and is also on the list is what we chose! Next, we measure the height of the designated grass. To do this, we take two paces and find the closest grass of our species of interest. Then two more paces, then measure the nearest grass. The person measuring must determine if the grass is grazed or un-grazed. Measurements cease when we have measured 20 un-grazed plants. Pictures are taken of course! We need pictures of the different species of plants that occur in the area, but more importantly, we need picture documentation of all the grasses that can be found in the allotment, both grazed and un-grazed. At the office, the numbers are crunched and the percent utilization of the land is determined.

Here are a couple pictures of some cool plants I saw!

Astragulus jejunus….weird seed pods!

Orobonche spp. Produces no chlorophyll-parasitic!

Utilization was very educational and enjoyable! It was wonderful to see another side of the BLM. As a primarily wildlife intern, I was also thrilled to be able to learn more of the plants that make up this unique landscape!

I caught this little chipmunk in my Frito’s chip bag, cheeks full

Congratulations to my co-worker and friend, Lara, for finishing her SECOND UltraMarathon, 33.3 miles, placing 3rd and beating her previous time by nearly an hour! You Rock, Lara.

This hike in Canyonlands was stunning and you should definitely do it if in the area. Make sure to bring at least a gallon of water for yourself, especially if you go in the summer!

rock scrambles into the canyon

an epic camping spot on BLM land near Dead Horse Point State Park

Life is Good

Val Stacey

Pinedale, WY

July has been a busy month in Lander, WY, on a personal and professional level. Starting off with an awesome Fourth of July weekend (think rodeos, parades, live music, friends, grilling, fireworks beyond belief), and ending with hikes through Sinks Canyon – an awesome geologic and recreational spot right outside of Lander city limits – with a dog I was dog sitting named Bean, July has been great. The 23^rd International Rock Climbers Festival happened in Lander, which provided many opportunities to win free goodies and dance to some awesome bands –The Whiskey Shivers were a crowd favorite! Though I’m barely a beginner boulder-er, I still had a lot of fun watching the bouldering competitions and being around incredibly buff and tan men and women. I’ve had many nice times with friends in town, playing pool, swimming in a local swimming hole, helping garden, and listening to live music. I’ve also been reading a lot of books from the library, playing Frisbee and tennis, and writing to friends.

Working as a rangeland monitoring technician at the Lander Field Office (BLM) continues to be fulfilling and satisfying. My work partner and I have fallen into a routine with the original monitoring work we learned; we’ve gotten much faster running transects and spying on cows.  These past two weeks we helped out a different rangeland specialist with long-term monitoring efforts. We learned new types of monitoring and saw new country. New grasses to learn, rocks to find and nuances to appreciate.

Left to right: replaced stromatolite mounds, replaced ooids and mossy agate.

A lovely outhouse and coyote skull found exploring new BLM land.

Since we’ve gotten faster at most of our daily work, we have a bit more time in the office in the afternoon. We’ve picked up some office projects – filing things, calling companies that need to renew permits etc. – to help out those around us. While being in the office pales next to working in the field, everyone is extremely friendly and makes the work enjoyable.

Can’t wait to see what August brings!

Abby

Lander Field Office, Wyoming, Bureau of Land Management

I am close to completing my second month working for the BLM here in Casper, WY. This second month has proven to be much busier than the first, with some exciting new projects and responsibilities.  Although we began to do some cheatgrass monitoring during my first month here, the other intern and I have largely taken over all the monitoring duties associated with that project.  This includes selecting sites to establish new permanent monitoring transects, with the intention of treating that area to remove the cheatgrass at a later date.  Once the monitoring is complete, I will analyze the data and make recommendations for a treatment plan based on the location and density of the cheatgrass.

The importance of removing this dangerous invasive has become more and more apparent as we have entered the main fire season here in Wyoming. The fire danger, posted daily in the office and on many highways, is consistently classified as “Very High” or “Extremely High”.  New fires are seen and reported daily, some of them burning areas greater than 20,000 acres!   The BLM firefighters at this office have been hard at work to control the situation, and have been in cooperation with many nearby fire agencies.  I recently heard that one of the larger fires had 12 large firefighting engines assigned to it, a very large number considering all of the smaller fires that also require attention.  Cheatgrass, being incredibly flammable, may have been a factor in starting these fires, and we are therefore hopeful that removing it will lower the fire danger in the future.

In addition to addressing the cheatgrass problem, I have been helping the wildlife biologists here wrap up the raptor and nest monitoring for the year. Although it may seem early, most raptors will only remain around their nests until their offspring have fledged.  The typical fledging season has ended, and we have observed that most raptors have now left their nests.  I am currently working on an end-of-the-year report to summarize our findings at one monitoring site encompassing 19 nests.  I will indicate which nests remain active and which will require monitoring next year.  The distinction between active and inactive is important because buffer zones are established around every active nest that prohibits any development in that area.  If no raptor activity is recorded over a certain length of time, the buffer restriction is removed and companies (typically oil and gas) are free to develop in that area.

I have also become involved in a number of other exciting projects. We have begun monitoring of Ute Ladies’ Tresses, a listed species of orchid that is endemic to the western United States.  I have observed one population begin to flower, allowing the wildlife biologists here to alert other biologists and contractors to begin searching a variety of areas across the state for more flowering individuals.  The consolidated data should give us an idea of the health of the species, and could potentially be compared to climate data to look for any correlations or trends.

Going forward, I have been talking with one of the wildlife biologists about beginning a project to establish substrate to encourage the nesting of wood ducks in suitable Wyoming habitat. This project would entail identifying areas of habitat that appear appropriate for sustaining populations of wood duck, building the artificial nesting structures, and developing a protocol for monitoring their efficacy going forward.  One of the challenges of this project is that many areas of appropriate habitat may lack corridors to provide feasible immigration by wood ducks.  Therefore, more research may be needed before beginning this project.

Outside of work, I have continued to explore the area and engage in various outdoor activities. I travelled down to Lander, WY to briefly check out a rock climbing festival before embarking on an overnight hike in the Wind River mountain range.  I spent the night at “Island Lake”, likely the most beautiful place I have had the good fortune to camp in the United States.  When not camping or traveling, I have spent a few weekend days floating down the North Platte River here in Casper, which makes for a very fun and relaxing time.  Overall, my second month in Casper has been fantastic both personally and professionally, and I look forward to continuing my work!

Well…here I am more than half way done with my internship in Escalante, UT, just now posting my first blog. Sorry about that; I have no excuse, really, other than the fact that I’ve been so enthralled by the beauty and power of my temporary home that sitting inside at a computer typing about it somehow hasn’t cut it. But here I am either way, hoping to make up for some lost time. This post will be an overview of my life in Utah:

On Saturday, May 14th, 2016 I arrived in the small, rural town of Escalante (which I quickly learned is pronounced es-ca-lant, or es-ca-lant-ie, NOT escalante in the Spanish sense. Anyway). I’d driven some 2,000 miles from Michigan and arrived in a strange country of white slick rock and red canyon cliff faces–a world I’d only read about and never imagined I would see for myself, let alone spend half a year exploring. That’s why I took this job, really. I wanted a new adventure. So, I graduated college on April 30th, filled my car with all sorts of unnecessary things, and drove across the country towards the land of sun and dust.

I’ve traveled a good amount, really. I’ve spent time in Japan, Chile, Wyoming, Colorado, Louisiana…but nothing really prepared me for Escalante. Here, there are more cattle than people. My neighbors walk by my bedroom window every afternoon moving their horses from pasture to corral. There are no bars, only a couple of restaurants, and a single main road through the center of town. (We do have a grocery store and three gas stations, though, a big deal around here.)

We are surrounded on all sides by the 2,000 acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (the space in which I work as a CLM intern), some of the greatest and last wilderness in the American West. The land is managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and it’s a multi-use space, that means that the tourists frolic down the famous Hole in the Rock road right alongside roaming herds of cattle. The Monument isn’t a National Park; some ranchers still make a living off this land and some are trying to find ways to continue that lifestyle for as long as they can. If you want to come and climb through the slot canyons, explore the gulches, and see the desert stars, you’ll get a taste of rural life in Utah whether you like it or not–

In short, Escalante is a town on the edge of the world; two worlds, really, an old world of ranching, cowboys, and rodeos and a new world of tourism and land preservation. Lots of people have opinions about this, about the American West–what is was, what it is, what it could be. Lots of people like to sit at desks in air conditioned rooms and talk about places like Escalante as if they really understand what’s happening here. I used to be one of them. Now I know better.

Three months in, I’ve become accustomed to this place and have settled in to the slow lull of desert life. My mentor, Terry Tolbert, has been amazing; our first couple weeks here, he drove us all across the Monument and the Boulder Mountain to the north to get us acquainted with the area. I quickly learned that the desert is all about respect and preparedness. You have to respect the landscape in order to love it, and even when you come to love it, you have to be prepared for all that it’s able to throw back at you: Between the red clay roads and unpredictable weather, you can slide right off a two track or get stuck in ruts as deep as your truck tires. You can take a wrong turn on the mountain roads and realize an hour later you have to backtrack three hours to get where you wanted to go. You can hike into a gulch you thought would have water in it, and there’s nothing but dust.

I have never lived in a place of such stark, desolate beauty. There is a quiet out here that seeps into you bones, a quiet that hangs about the canyons and penetrates the rainbow sandstone. Some people try to block it out with music and car engines and heavy footfalls of hiking boots. But you really have to let it in to understand Canyon Country. I’m still getting there, but I’m loving every moment.

More to come. -Kate

Escalante, UT; BLM

Hello from the BLM Mother Lode Field Office in El Dorado Hills, CA!

Much of my time in the last month has been devoted to pulling weeds and taking care of odds-and-ends in the office. The invasive species we have been hand pulling are yellow star thistle (Centaurea solstitialis) and stinkwort (Dittrichia graveolens). Though there are huge populations nearby that would take considerable management and effort to eradicate, hand removal of small populations is doable to prevent further establishment into rare plant communities.

There have been relatively small fires on or near BLM land within our field office recently. Rare plant populations do not appear to have been affected, and hopefully there is a seed bank of some rare plant species in the soil that will germinate in the burned area. In some of the areas of the Pine Hill Preserve that I frequently visit, there is such a stark contrast to be seen between adjacent plant communities that have differing fire histories. That has been one of my favorite things to observe during my internship.

Some other unique opportunities have arisen in the last month. I helped with a small construction project, using a soil auger for the first time and pouring concrete for a retaining wall. I recently had the opportunity to tag along with the botanist and wildlife biologist at my office for a raptor survey at the Cosumnes River Preserve. Though we only saw a handful of species on our route, I had fun and just spotting anything is good practice for an amateur like myself.

I visited the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven at UC Davis, a garden that supports bee populations and provides education about bees. It was great to see the garden promoting native plants to support bees and that many of the plant species we collected seeds from this year were represented at the garden. One coworker from my field office has been documenting and collecting pollinators found on species corresponding to seed collections. We must be a curiosity to many passersby, me collecting plants into bags and him wielding his net. I had the opportunity to help with the placing of Malaise insect traps, which when monitored over a sufficient period of time should provide a more complete list of the species present in an area and the relative abundance of each. Traps are being placed on gabbro soils associated with the rare plants within the Pine Hill Preserve, with other traps nearby but outside gabbro soils. Hopefully the results will lead to a better understanding of the endemic plant species and their associated pollinators.

John Woodruff

BLM Mother Lode Field Office

Hi all!

Month #2 is officially over (what!?). We’ve only four months left of this internship (hopefully all of them will be less hot). Instead of recapping the entire month, I would like to write about a few points.

We made a collecting trip in the beginning of the month. In this trip we went to Civil War Land Trust, Seneca Creek State Park, Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge, Gunpowder Falls State Park, Elk Neck State Park, Sassafras Natural Resources Management Area, Eastern Neck National Wildlife Refuge, Caledon State Park, York River State Park, Voorhees Nature Preserve, and the Vandell Preserve at Cumberland Marsh.  From these places, we made collections of Schoenoplectus tabernaemontani, Sambucus nigra ssp. canadensis, Viburnum dentatum, Carex vulpinoidea, Danthonia spicata, Schoenoplectus americanus, Eleocharis fallax, Deschampsia flexuosa, Carex lurida, Bolboschoenus robustus, Juncus effusus. Woooo!

We were ecstatic about finding the D. spicata and D. flexuosa especially, as these were two species that were not collected last year! I cleaned the seeds last week of Danthonia and it took FOREVER. But they’re so cute to look at, so it was okay. By the way, Viburnum is absolutely terrible to clean. It looks like chili and smells like, well, let’s just say – gross. However, elderberry smells divine, like a fine wine in the making. OH! Something else that is cute to look at? Conoclinium coelestinum, blue mistflower. The most magical, perfect name for the most magical, perfect plant! I remember learning this plant at the UNC Herbarium, but this was the first time I saw it in person – and I fell in love. Amanda spotted this tiny lady on our way out of Caledon SP. Jake says we will be seeing it ALL over the place… I can’t wait!

blue mistflower! 🙂

Another perfect thing about this trip – although not very plant related – is this adorable place. This, ladies and gentleman, is a little coffee shop in Chestertown, Maryland. It’s called Evergrain Bread Company, and they have anything from Nutella lattes to any pastry you could want. I got this perfect honey vanilla latte one morning for breakfast before we set out to Eastern Neck NWR.

The coffee shop in Chestertown!

My perfect honey vanilla latte

While doing some herbarium research last week, I came across a species on our list – Spiraea tomentosa, steeplebush – and again, I don’t know what it is about steeplebush and blue mistflower, but MAN! I can’t get over them! If you aren’t familiar with this species, look it up! I don’t have any pictures of it unfortunately! Love love love. I can’t wait to see this out in the field!

Rubus phoenicolasius, wineberry – although invasive – is also so delicious.

wineberries!

Here are some pictures from our trip:

Jewelweed in bloom

Right in front of where we collected a Carex species at Caledon SP

Caterpillars from Heaven

Some personal side notes:

I love summer, but I’ve been noticing myself thinking about fall and cooler temperatures while we are out collecting. It will be so nice!

Sitting in the grass on the side of the road while collecting Eleocharis in the rain and doing some mindful counting is probably one of the most refreshing and relaxing feelings ever.

Collecting Eleocharis in the rain. Sammy is fabulous as always.

Eleocharis seeds! So cute.

I’m really good at not scratching bug bites now.

Thanks for reading,

Melanie