My first paycheck of the CLM Internship just arrived, and I still find myself somewhat in awe of the fact that I’m actually being paid to work outside in such a beautiful area. Three weeks ago I moved to Denver, CO to begin working with the Colorado State Botany Team to monitor rare plants and collect seeds for the SOS program. Unlike many of the other interns, I’m originally from the West (Idaho, to be precise), so the ecosystem here is not completely unfamiliar. Neither are the mountains, though the Colorado 14ers certainly do make me reconsider scale. Going to school in Vermont I became used to deriding the mountains there as hills, but living here is making me wonder whether my beloved Idaho mountains are also better described as hills. I’ve decided that because they’re part of the Rockies they still count as mountains, but this was only the first of my assumptions that I had to rethink after arriving.

Coming into my internship I wasn’t sure what to expect, either from the work or from the BLM as an organization. I suspected that I would be working with the ESA, and was worried because I didn’t know how I felt about protecting plants at the expense of recreation or other land use. Though I knew that the government tends to be a conservative entity, somehow I’d gotten it into my head that I would be playing the role of an environmental organization, defending rare plants at all costs. While plant defense will likely be a part of my job, I’ve been surprised and impressed at how aware everyone here is about all of the issues involved in responsible land management. On my tour of the office the first day, a word I heard over and over again was “balance.” Everyone recognizes that the BLM is an organization that is committed to multi-use land management. Not only do we have to protect the plants, but we also must allow ranchers to graze their cattle and outdoor enthusiasts to drive their ATVs. These goals are not always compatible, and it is when they conflict that we must be able to find the balance between them.

So far, our team has been spending a lot of time gathering data that will allow more informed management decisions to be made. My first week we traveled to the other side of the Continental Divide to monitor Penstemon harringtonii, a wildflower that is only found in the greater Vail Valley region of Colorado. This species has been listed as a sensitive species by the USFS and the BLM, and has been given G3/S3 status. However, very little quantitative data exists regarding the size and density of various populations, and so it has been impossible to say whether the populations are steady, declining, or even increasing. We worked with Carla, an ecologist from a local field office, to set up plots and determine densities. She’s particularly interested in learning more about P. harringtonii because she suspects that there are far more individuals than has previously been estimated. If this is really the case, it may be possible to lower the status of this species to G4/S4 and/or remove it from the BLM sensitive species list, thereby allowing more leeway in future management decisions.

First Field Site

P. Harringtonii

Working towards less protection for a species was certainly not something I expected to be doing during this job, but the next week I found myself in a very similar circumstance. We traveled to the southwestern portion of the state to help a different field office monitor Sclerocactus glaucus, a small endemic cactus listed under the ESA. Again, there was very little quantitative data, and again the local office was hoping to prove that it was doing better than had been claimed. In this case, the known range of the cactus happened to coincide with areas that contained a number of grazing allotments. Environmental groups had seized upon this information to claim that cattle were trampling the cactus and should be excluded. However, we wanted to find out for ourselves whether this was the case. We set up several plots in areas of different grazing intensity and sampled and marked individual cacti within the plots. While this study will require multiple years of data to determine how the populations are doing over time, we saw almost no evidence of trampled cacti. Once again, real quantitative data will give a better idea of how to balance different management objectives on a single piece of land.

Sclerocactus Field Site

S. glaucus

Collared Lizard

I’m looking forward to seeing how my internship continues to grow, and to learning more about how the BLM manages its many millions of acres of land. I am now fairly certain that I won’t be stepping in front of any bulldozers, and am becoming confident that management decisions are made based on data, rather than on political (be they liberal or conservative) agendas. And, now that I’ve accepted that the Idaho mountains are smaller but still noteworthy, I feel free to enjoy the beautiful scenery here to my heart’s content.

Wow, time has flown by. Only a few weeks ago I was still in college, I didn’t have a job, I knew nothing about sagebrush or junipers and I certainly had no idea where Alturas, California was located. I grew up in South Florida where both buildings and people are abundant. I attended college in Maine (Unity College) and fell in love with the state, the forests and the people. After graduating I really didn’t want to leave the beauty that is Maine, but like many others I understood that to get experience you have to be willing to go where the jobs are. This job just happened to be in Northern California.

After a 10 day cross country extravaganza, I finally rolled into Alturas.  A bigger town than I went to college, but far from a metropolis. At the only blinking red light I veered left and found my way to a glorified warehouse, also known as the Alturas BLM field office. Mike Dolan, my mentor, then proceeded to introduce me to everyone in the office. Talk about overwhelming! I think one name stuck with me that day. I moved into a fire barracks about 20 miles south of town in an even smaller town called Likely where cows outnumber humans at least 3-1. My first few days continued that overwhelmed feeling. I’ll be honest, I was terribly homesick for trees and greenery and the Sage Steepe ecosystem did not impress me much. Since it rained/snowed for my first and second week I didn’t have much opportunity to explore. Instead, I spent hours staring at Herbarium vouchers trying to learn the native fauna. After my first month in Alturas my views and attitude towards the area has done a complete 180. While from afar all you can see is acres of sage and juniper, when you actually stop and look down there are tons of tiny flowering plants and patches of diverse grasses and bugs. Alturas is in a valley and to either side are mountains with towering Ponderosa and Jeffrey pine trees. Just south of town is the Modoc Wildlife Refuge which is home to hundreds of birds. Only an hour and a half north there is Lava Beds National Monument where you can see ancient lava flows. Driving two hours to the west there is Lassen National Park – another completely different ecosystem! In my tiny section of California life abounds!

Ancient lava flow at Lava Beds National Monument!

This past week about 50 other interns and I attended the CLM internship conference in Glencoe, IL. Here we participated in mapping and seed collection demonstrations. The setting for all of the lectures and demos was the Chicago Botanic Garden – a truly beautiful location. After listening to the Seeds of Success lecture I feel excited about doing seed collections as well as proud to be part of such a worthwhile program.

Like others have said before me, “I can’t believe I get paid to do this!”

Cayce Salvino

BLM – Alturas

Just one example of the beautiful tiny flowers that are scattered throughout the Sage Steepe Ecosystem.

This is the llama I saw my first day out in the field riding with the BLM Ranger. It was just wandering around in the sage.

4 am and its hot, hot already
sun peeks up over henderson suburbs
sleepy neighbors with daschunds in tow
NPR and coffee on the long drive
north of vegas traffic chaos
to the peace of the desert,
red tinged in early morning light

Pile out of the car, yawning, rubbing sunscreen
lace boots, don hats
treck off, avoid cactus, plow through creosote
find plots, get data
Each task memorized through months of repetition
laughing easy lunch under Joshua Tree
Sweet shady relief

End of day, car in sight
out of water
throats parched and Bromus socks
Lazy return
Flurry of last minute tasks
Organize data
Early bedtime

Nora Talkington

Field partner Leslie Parker poses with a Joshua Tree and one of the many balloon bunches which float their way hundreds of miles from Vegas

My name is Justin and I began my internship this week with the training workshop at the Chicago Botanic Garden. This week-long clinic not only teaches skills to succeed in a Federal agency, but is also a blast! About 50 interns attended the workshop, which provided a great opportunity to make friends and share experiences about life in a field office. Solidarity was evident immediately. Arriving from all across the west at O’Hare airport, we issued a collective sigh of, “ahhh, TREES.” Stationed primarily in arid Federal lands, the lush Midwestern ecosystem was a nice perk for the week. Days consisted of intensive classroom sessions on Conservation Genetics, Plant ID, Field Monitoring, Seed Collecting, Management Legislation and Field Safety, supplemented with outdoor activities. Evenings we were set free to enjoy the extensive culture of Chicago and the beauty of Lake Michigan.

Armed with new knowledge and connections, I am confident in my preparation for the BLM field office in Carson City, NV. Can’t wait to apply these new skills!

Today marks the second month of my internship. I am writing
from the hotel, after proudly losing to a watermelon-smashing competition, and
I am wondering where the next month is going to take me. This last month has
been truly inspiring. Rolling over hills covered with Oak and Pines, standing
on top of a mesa where the first Navajo families settled, witnessing my first
New Mexico sunrise- all these simple things that one could do any day if
feeling so inclined, yet is apparently different and altogether unique from daily
mundane life. I am starting to get a sense of what this new land means to me,
beauty in simplicity.

The ball has started rolling; I spent most of the first half
of June monitoring populations whose seeds seemed to take forever to ripen,
then suddenly demanded our (Jamie and I) collecting the week prior to leaving
for the workshop. There was a sudden shift and we found ourselves
passing the day feeling worth and seeing yield in our work. I realized soon
after collecting our first population that there is something so therapeutic about
tuning everything out, focusing on the task at hand and enjoying the landscape.
I only hope for this to continue.

This last month of work has challenged my skills as a
botanist; being able to recognize the common plants in the area now has shifted
most of my attention on searching for target list species and determining viable
populations for collection. A nice change of pace if I might say, and one that can’t
come at a better time now that many species are beginning to take to seed.

It is near the end of the week and I fly back to Farmington
soon. This workshop has been more than amazing; it has been an absolute
pleasure to see the faces of this program and where CLM Internship came from/is
going. To be able to come out to the Chicago Botanic Garden is such a privilege
and I feel lucky the resources are available to do so. Now it is time to head
back and continue working my way through this internship. I am sure many more
species are ready to go and the workload is piling. The simpler life waits and
is only getting more beautiful. Enjoy!

Anthony Wenke

My first month with the BLM in Missoula, Montana has flown by! I have learned so much in the last month, and have seen some beautiful parts of Montana. The primary task that we have been working on is inventorying a sensitive plant species Keeled Bladderpod (Physaria carinata). This sensitive plant only occurs on very steep, south facing slopes so I have been getting a very good workout as well as finding the Bladderpod! One of our other main tasks is vegetation monitoring. We have mostly worked on pace transects and in a few weeks we will be doing Daubenmire transects. I have always thought that grasses are some of the hardest plants to identify and have wanted to be able to look at a grass and be able to identify it. Well I am almost there! I can identify most of the native grasses in this region. My co-workers have really been patient with me and have shown me some of the main characteristics to look for. We also had the opportunity to take a workshop on native grasses which helped as well.

Last week I had the opportunity to plant Aspen trees at Garnet Ghost Town, an old mining town northeast of Missoula. The BLM had done a thinning project in the past few years to protect against fire damage to the ghost town. They recently created an interpretative trail where the the thinning project had been, and wanted to populate the area with native trees. The seeds were collected a year ago and were sent to a local nursery to grow! A thousand trees were planted that day, and we have more to plant in the following weeks.  I am looking forward to seeing what it will look like in a few years.

Bitteroot in bloom

I also had the opportunity to go back to a few areas where we found Bitteroot, Montana’s state flower in bloom! They are such small flowers you really have to seek them out. Once they bloom they loose their fleshy leaves and only the flower is present. We also found more Camas in bloom, a culturally important plant in this area. On our way to this area we were lucky enough to see a black bear cub and a great gray owl.

Camas

This experienced has already enriched my knowledge and life, who knows what the next months will bring!

In my last blog post, I wrote about the discovery of blowout penstemon in Wyoming. Briefly, blowout penstemon is a Wyoming and Nebraska endemic that grows only on blowout sand dunes; it’s federally listed under the Endangered Species Act. A big part of my internship is helping to find and document more populations or lack thereof.

Since I wrote last, I had the chance to do some field work documenting the number of individuals in the Wyoming type locality population and searching nearby sand dunes for more. I was in the field with several people who are very knowledgeable about the history and status of conservation of blowout penstemon. I learned that the populations in Nebraska face different threats than the populations  in Wyoming.  Land management in Nebraska has promoted “healing” of the blowouts by promoting vegetation growth in the sane and in some cases reshaping the dunes.  The blowout sand dune habitat is inherently unstable; it is subject to high winds that can erode some vegetated areas and bury others. Healing the dunes makes them more stable and deceases the chance that the dunes will shift and cover a road or otherwise interfere with development. This practice, however, significantly decreases suitable blowout penstemon habitat. This penstemon needs sparsely vegetated, relatively recently disturbed habitat to survive. Harsh weather and shifting substrates are barriers the plant has evolved to deal with, but competition is not. Habitat decline due to blowout healing is a major threat in Nebraska, but in Wyoming there have been no attempts to heal dunes. Because the populations face different threats, the effective management is different for each state.

I had a great time censusing one of the known populations with my mentor from the Wyoming Natural Diversity Database, the Wildlife and Botanist person from the BLM, a Biologist from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and another CLM intern. We also looked for new populations but have found any more – yet. Here are a few pictures from the dunes:

Hello from the land of sunshine, south-central Oregon. I had never been anywhere west of Wisconsin before coming to work at the BLM in Lakeview, so this month has been quite an adjustment. For the first few weeks, my sense of place and knowledge of botany was pretty confused. The high desert of Oregon isn’t a place that people in New York hear a lot about. Pretty much everyone who I told about my plans to move to Oregon talked about how gross and wet and rainy and green and beautiful it would be. And although I assured them otherwise, I still didn’t know what kind of things to expect. Once I got here, I only knew one or two plants, and marveled at the lack of trees and at the amazing huge wide spaces you have to travel through at least an hour in your truck to get anywhere. I’ve never seen so many livestock in my life. Or so many eagles. Being from New York, I have a lot of wildlife bragging points out here whenever I call someone from home. I remember the first week I was here I made a list of the animals I had seen already and it made everyone jealous… bald eagles, golden eagles, marsh hawks, sandhill cranes, 10 different kinds of waterfowl, qails, more quails, antelope, bighorn sheep, mule deer, not to mention the dozens of less charismatic fauna like all of the burrowing rodents and a bull snake that got sassy with us one day. It’s sort of unbelievable, considering all my life seeing an eagle was something really rare.  Also I quickly realized that most of our field sites would have almost no shade, but first I got some nasty sunburn. Only 2 weeks earlier, on Memorial Day, It snowed about 5 inches, and when the other intern, Diane, and I went to go hiking at Crater Lake National Park one weekend, it was under 12 feet of snow. The high desert weather was one of the hardest things to get used to.

Crater Lake with 12 feet of snow! No Hiking for us...

Working here is pretty illuminating though and I’m really enjoying it. The concept of localized ecosystem management is something I had hoped to understand better here because I came directly from a very theoretical ecology academic program. Everyone here at the BLM office has plenty to say about it, so that part is working out just fine, and I’m learning a lot about what it’s like to be in the middle of the social/cultural/economic playing field when it comes to environmental issues on public land.

Things I have learned here that I never would’ve thought would be so important to the career of an ecologist: riding an ATV, driving a 4-wheel drive truck up a mountain, changing that truck’s tire, learning to navigate using incomplete maps with roads that don’t exist.

Lisa VanTieghem

Lakeview BLM

Hanging out at 6,000 feet - Black Cap Butte overlooking Lakeview

Coming from the tall grass prairies of Nebraska, I was surprised to see how totally different the short grass/shrubland of eastern Montana was in comparison. Life in Miles City, MT is definitely different from Omaha, NE. This is great experience, though, and I feel like I’m starting over in learning to identify what grows in the area. After weeks of researching potential target species and then driving extensively to find big enough populations, we finally found a patch that met the requirements and picked our first batch of seeds (pasqueflowers). What a thrill! I am keeping quite busy exploring the area and checking out what it has to offer, so I will keep this short. I am grateful to have this internship because it has given me all sorts of opportunities and experiences I would not have had otherwise.