It’s been a while since I last wrote, so there is a fair amount of catch up to do. Going back to early November, I had a chance to travel to Tallahassee, FL to take part in the Natural Areas Association annual meeting. This was my first professional conference and it fit very well with my project. I heard many lectures on policies protecting natural areas (ranging from domestic parks, wildlife refuges, to the amazon), LOTS of information on invasive species, and several talks of other interests to me. Along with these lectures, I created a poster to display during the week regarding my project on Great Lakes invasive species. There were plenty of folks to talk with on the myriad issues that inevitably evolve as do the lists of invasives. One of the days we left the conference area and went to St. Mark’s wildlife refuge south of Tallahassee. This was unquestionably my favorite experience of the week. This refuge is extensive, covering habitats supporting red cockaded woodpeckers and gopher tortoises, long leaf pines, and shorebird (and alligator!) communities. The amount of new habitat I had a chance to explore in only a few hours was truly awesome. The biologists who manage the refuge provided a lot of insight into another realm of land management, foreign to me from my desk job with the NPS. This week was a great chance to get out and remember the wonderful diversity of positions available for me to pursue down the road.

After getting back to Fort Collins, it was back to work on the final bits of my project. I finished the design of the website housing the database, edited the species lists one more time, and began working on my webinar presentation for December. Work went well on this, and after a few more weeks, I presented the webinar. I will be spending my last week and a half cleaning up errors corresponding with comments we receive(d) on the database, writing an article for InsideNPS, and reporting on this project for my division’s annual report.

Another great travel experience I recently had was over Thanksgiving weekend when I traveled to visit my roommates family on the western slope of Colorado. The drive through the Rockies was as spectacular as I could have hoped, and seeing the San Juan Mountains on the other side of the state was a treat. While both the Front Range and western slope are significantly drier than I am used to in New England, it was great to see some trees on the drive over the mountain passes along with the pinyon-juniper “forests” of western Colorado. These trees were short and the ground was dry, lacking much of an understory other than sage brush; I suppose it’s like that from west of the Rockies to the Sierras, though. It certainly had its own beauty, though with open viewscapes and the jagged mountains surrounding the otherwise farmland. Upon returning to the Front Range, I stopped in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP for a bit. It was extremely impressive, and all the more enjoyable because there were no other visitors in sight. I’ll mark down Sundays in winter as the prime time for visiting parks as they should be seen– in solitude.

Only another week left, this has been a very rewarding and fast way to spend my first six months post graduation.

Staminate Poa atropurpurea

Pistallate Poa atropurpurea

With all this work, I’ve been putting the ol’ social life on the back burner. This weekend is shaping up to be a winner though. On Friday I will be attending the Big Bear black tie event of the year, a 10 year anniversary party for the Big Bear Hot Shots—our wildland firefighter hand crew. Saturday I’ll be getting my first day of snowboarding in of the season and Sunday I’ll be heading to Joshua Tree National Park for rock climbing adventures!

Well, I am still here. It’s been snowing from time to time, and field work for me is scarce. Mostly I spend my days on GIS mapping projects and summarizing sage grouse count data, but occasionally I get to help out with a field project controlling invasive Russian olive and salt cedar with herbicides. There’s just nothing like good old fashioned manual labor in zero degree temperatures! Then again, although it’s hard work carrying around a backpack sprayer that’s almost half my body weight and made to be carried by broader shoulders over uneven terrain in the winter, after about 20 minutes of walking around that way we’re all toasty warm. Sore shoulders aside, it’s good to earn your supper once in a while.

Another work activity has been sending out letters to past volunteers for the Mid-Winter Eagle Survey to see who is game for participating in the survey next month. Responses keep rolling in, and soon it will be time to send out route maps and information and contact the people who haven’t responded yet. The survey will be on the last day of the first part of my internship, and I can’t believe it’s coming up so fast.

Volunteer activities with the Greater Yellowstone Raptor Experience program and the local animal shelter continue, which make me all the more excited to come back next year after my 2 month break in January. I anxiously await the arrival in the mail of my very own raptor glove for working with the birds at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center here in town. That has been one of the coolest things I’ve ever done, and I have the CLM program to thank for placing me here for this internship where I get to do all these cool things! (at work and beyond) It’s been a completely satisfying, valuable, and irreplaceable experience.

Now that most of the seed collecting is coming to an end and most of the plants around here have gone to “bed” for the winter,  I have been inside for most of the time. There are still a couple of seed collections that we would like to complete, but now it is a race to see who will get to them first – us or mother nature. We will see who comes out ahead. We even got snow here in Safford, AZ.  I was surprised by that, granted it didn’t last very long. But moisture is moisture, and we could use it. And maybe we will get enough winter rains to get some spring flowers and other annual plants up this coming spring. We can only hope. But for now things are calming down, but there is still work to be done.

The intern team is shrinking rapidly. Our 9 person crew has now dropped to 3. Though I still have two months left, I’m constantly aware that the end is rapidly approaching and that I need to figure out what’s happening next. Whatever it is, I’m sure it will require a move. And while there’s always some excitement about getting to see a new place, I really hate moving and would like to find a good place to settle down for awhile. In the meantime, the ski season at Tahoe has begun, and I can now get to work on becoming a less awful skier.

Here is a random batch of semi-recent internship-related photos:

Showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa) seed pod

A section of the recent Burbank Fire. Pine Nut Mountains, NV.

Offset of depositional layers exposed in a diatomaceous earth mining pit.

A pretty big juniper and a pretty small intern. Peavine Mountain, above Reno.

Transformation in the desert: sagebrush sheds its seed, as I do the last seed collections of the year in the biting dry wind of the southeast Oregon winter. No significant snow yet, perfect for my final excursions around the resource area spent searching and reflecting. Passing along all of the places I visited for the first time this field season and trying to remember how it used to be warm and even hot. It’s pretty quiet now, and most plants are pretty much hibernating. I’m sure I’ll feel like hibernating too once it starts to snow and gets below zero. But for now I’ll just coast along the empty highways with plant press handy and watch the sun reach all of the beautiful places.

Lisa

Lakeview BLM

As the days keep getting shorter (where did my evening sun go?) I’m beginning to accept that the transition from the field into the office is real. We’ve been managing to sneak in a few late season seed collections (prickly pear, rabbit brush, a few sages), after each one saying “this is our last collection.” But the weather, in its seemingly typical bipolar fashion, has been swinging back and forth between windy, cold, snowy days and beautiful, sunny, 60 degree respites. On these days we’ve grabbed our plant press and dashed into the field, for “one last collection.” We’ve made it to 34 collections, and all I wanted to do was get one more, for a nice round 35. On Wednesday we attempted what would have truly been our last collection. After a beautiful drive into the mountains we discovered that sadly, the sages we’d come to collect had already dropped their seed for the winter. The trip was still useful though, because we discovered a great new site for potential collections next year! I’m sad to see the end of the field season, but happy with the collections we did make, and happy to have participated in SOS this year.

In the office, my winter project is to conduct a literature review of native pollinators. I’m looking at it as the thesis I never wrote, and am glad for the opportunity to conduct a lot of research and prepare a document that reflects that. My mentor’s ultimate goal is to use my recommendations in writing a state-wide policy regarding the width of the buffers that need to be placed around rare and endangered Colorado endemics, so I’m also excited that my work could be part of something so far-reaching. To date, the results of my research are a 15 page bibliography-style document of references that I think will be worthwhile to read, and a large spreadsheet where I am compiling information about all documented pollinators of the 15 rare, endangered, or threatened plant species that I am focusing on. I’ve recently found a new program that I think will be extremely helpful to me as I read and take notes on all of these sources, so I’m in the process of learning how to use Scrivener, a powerful note-taking, organization, and writing program. There’s an incredible amount of data and research to sift through, so the project seems overwhelming at times, but I’m confident that I will be able to come out of it with a meaningful understanding of the issues that play into buffer distances and hopefully be able to make realistic and knowledgeable recommendations for future policies.

One of our late-season collection sites (Photo by Jeffrey Flory)

One of the little guys I'm studying...

Smallest bee on the eye of the biggest bee (found this pic on the internet)

Sama Winder
BLM State Office, CO

What up Nevada

As the field season winds down, the dwindling number of employees leaves our office a ghost town. The good news is that those of us remaining are banding together to stave off Lonely Office Syndrome (LOS). This reminds me how similar humans are to some of animals we manage in terms of behavior and sociology. Generalizing- we exhibit scattered distribution in the plentiful summertime while concentrating into groups in the winter.

I wonder if this simple observation is just skimming the surface and if much more of what we do is unconsciously engrained. As you may have guessed, I am a proponent of sociobiology and all things EO Wilson.

Consider the field of ecology. Current teachings describe a complex relationship between all parts of the environment resulting in a healthy ecosystem. Under the guise of scientific objectivity, we have labeled ecosystems suitable to ourselves as “healthy” and written off less-complex systems.

And as a result we are often surprised to find that the world is not as we projected. Consider how genetics has upstaged our understanding of evolution. Phylogeny shows that osprey have little genetically in common with eagles, despite their physical and functional resemblance (Hackett et al. 2008). It was in becoming apex raptors that ospreys and eagles took similar form, because common qualities made them fit. In other words, good ideas, if they really are good ideas, will arise independently throughout history. Say whaaat?

I guess the point of this tirade is that I am rediscovering the unconscious decision-making of the human brain which we often ignore. And although sobering, this whole new world, and the possibility to better understand myself, has me asking more and more questions.

Thanks science!
-Justin

Our second round of seed collecting is going full-force right now. Its been really cool revisiting sites we collected from in the spring, and seeing a whole new group of plants in flower. Fall colors are something I looked forward to every year in the Midwest, but the Mojave offers something special in a whole other way.

We’ve also been able to see more wildlife out and about, doing their pre-winter preparations. While collecting seeds all day, the aspiring naturalist in me gets distracted easily by any movements other than my own. Its exciting to see new wildlife every week, like the kit foxes and coyotes in the dunes, the multitude of insects and spiders (and my first tarantula!), and the migrating birds flying overhead, making their way south.  I have definitely had my share of mini-photoshoots out in the field. Here’s a little taste of autumn in the Mojave:

As the work progresses and the desert begins to cool down, what seems like a desolate land springs to life.  In the Lower Sonoran Desert we have continued
to work on our tortoise study.  We are using ground data and literature to refine spatial modeling to help better predict tortoise locations.  We are also helping through field work to make sure that valuable wildlife resources like
water drinkers are being maintained and not in need of repairs.  Having the opportunity to hike in bighorn sheep country is astounding.  The country in which they inhabit is truly challenging and show just how amazing they are.  That is all for now but more to come soon…