Unlike many of the other CLM internships, my work in Klamath Falls, OR began in March.  Sampling in Upper Klamath Lake and its tributaries for Lost River and Shortnose Suckers, two species of endangered fish, begins in the spring when snow still covers much of the landscape and icy winds make field work difficult. Despite these conditions, fish biologists at the USGS Klamath Falls Field Office are conducting mark-recapture studies using PIT (Passive Integrated Transponder) tags in order to determine recruitment and monitor the status of the fish species. PIT tags, also known as ‘microchips’, are a type of RFID technology which enable researchers to track individual fish. Based on recaptures, whether remotely with automated antennas or manually in nets, USGS has been able to estimate mortality and recruitment rates for Lost River and Shortnose Suckers.

The fish weir on the Williamson River in March

My role in this project has been to assist in capturing suckers as they make their annual spawning runs from Upper Klamath Lake to the pebbled shores of springs and rivers. Once captured in trammel nets or a fish weir, fish are identified, measured, sexed, and scanned with a hand-held antenna to determine if they are recaptures. Newly captured fish receive a PIT tag, injected under a pectoral fin with a syringe. Once the fish are released, many are re-detected at remote antennas, placed around spawning grounds and across the Sprague and Williamson Rivers. Helping to maintain these remote arrays was another of my duties.

A view of Upper Klamath Lake

Although I have participated in some field work for biology classes, this has been my first intensive field experience. Luckily for me, I have been able to jump head first into this new experience. The most rewarding aspect, both personally and professionally, has been the sense of competence that arises from absorbing new information and tackling new challenges every day. For example, battling the weather in March and April has been an incredible adventure. Since suckers stage in Upper Klamath Lake before their spawning runs, boats are used to set trammel nets to capture the densely packed fish. Through trial and error, fish biologists at USGS have determined that maximum catches can be attained after sunset, which means this work must be conducted at night. Often times temperatures would dip below freezing, icing up our boot laces and numbing our fingers. Despite the discomfort of the working conditions, it was incredibly rewarding to adapt to the conditions in order complete the task at hand.

A bald eagle flying over a spring along the shore of Upper Klamath Lake.

And on those rare days in early spring when the weather cooperated, I was often rewarded with some incredible sights; bald eagles perched along the railroad tracks, the sun setting over the lake, or a sky full of stars. There are many times over the course of this internship when I pause, take in the incredible environment around me, and can’t believe that I get to do this for my job.

Sunset over the lake- time to get working!

Oh my, what a beautiful place to be living. I moved to Carson City, NV back in February so that I could start my work with the Carson City BLM field office. On the road for 8 days and driving my Vermont registered Subaru Forester; I finally rolled into town just as the sun had sunk below the mountainous horizon. I was taken back as I gazed at the enormous snowcapped peaks of the eastern sierras. The sun danced and played off of the snowy summits, giving true value to the color of gold.

When driving west, out of Carson City and into the sierras, the road is instantly engulfed by the craggy hills, winding upward to Spooner Summit. Rounding over the top and into the Lake Tahoe basin you can feel yourself flowing down to the bluest, most captivating lake. The waters are beyond clear; it felt as though I was at some ridiculous high alpine Caribbean sea.

Working for the Chicago Botanic Garden out here has been quite a treat. The true treasure of Carson City is not its Casinos or the high statured state buildings; it’s the remarkable location that, for the time being, makes this a place to call home.

The initial excitement of accepting the intern position in Lakeview, Oregon, accompanied a feeling of ambivalence about moving to a remote town with a population of 2,500. I am in no position to feel superior to a rural lifestyle. I was raised in the country, attended high school in a town of 4,500 and spent the past four and a half years of my life in a Brookings, South Dakota, a university town of 20,000 (not counting the students). I am from South Dakota; a state with more cows that people. What I actually felt nervous about was leaving the life I had established in South Dakota, leaving my friends and family, and venturing out west on my own.

Although I was anxious about the move, I was absolutely stoked about the job. I recognize that I am one of the fortunate college graduates entering a paid position in their career field. I would just like to thank the stimulus money (ARRA), the SOS program, the Chicago Botanic Garden, the BLM and the Academy for this great opportunity. I have been given the chance to apply the knowledge that I have so laboriously crammed into my skull the past four and a half years. In addition, the whole making money instead of spending money part appeals to me.

Fast forward to my first month in Lakeview. Every day I find a new reason to like it here. The establishments in this town are classic; from the Adele convenience store filled with more animal heads than a Cabela’s to the local diner complete with mismatched chairs and homemade carrot cake. The people are classic too. Friendliness is not an optional personality trait in Lakeview: it’s a requirement. Strangers will literally yell something out to you on the street, if they think it’s pertinent, and pertinent is a relative term. For example, one day I walked past an old man washing his car in the heat of the afternoon. He offered, “a shower“ from his water hose. I politely declined. He muttered, not too softly, “chicken” and sniggered at me.

My job has turned out to be as wonderful as I had hoped. To put it simply, I get paid to walk around and identify plants all day. As I am one of those rare souls who enjoy physical labor, and keying out plants, I can’t wait to hike the field sites each day. The sagebrush steppe of eastern Oregon is a completely new ecosystem to me, and the landscapes are breathtaking. There are flat basins with lakes that exist one month, and the next are a torrent of dust devils, plateaus of solid sagebrush that seem more like forest than steppe to my 5’2” frame, distant mountains, pine forests, exposed fault lines and sassy creeks that wind through jagged valleys. This job has me excited to go to work each day.

I know this job won’t be all unicorns and rainbows forever. But lets hope the novelty doesn’t wear off too quickly. My mentor had a great response after the third day when I exclaimed, “Getting paid to be outside all day? Geez, this job is awesome!” He replied, “Yeah, it’s great. Let’s hope you’re still saying that by the end of the September. “ All I could do was laugh and agree.

I just finished my ninth month working at the Bureau of Land Management in Tucson, Arizona. I moved to Tucson last September to work with the ecosystem planner at Las Cienegas National Conservation Area; located a few miles south of Sonoita, Arizona. I was not prepared for the unrelenting sun and harsh desert landscape that was about to become my home. Las Cienegas is composed of both upland grasslands and mesquite bosques or riparian areas. The native grasses and cacti of the upland grassland are extremely resilient plants as they must be adapted to withstand unpredictable precipitation patterns and blazing temperatures as well as an occasional brush fire. A perennial creek runs through the conservation area making it an ideal habitat for many species of birds, fish and frogs. This rare perennial water source makes Las Cienegas a truly special place in an unforgiving land where water is scarce. People from different organizations and agencies have been working for over twenty years to restore and make this picturesque landscape as resilient as possible in the face of a changing climate.
I jumped head first into this community of conservation and landscape restoration. My mentor and I decided that as one of my internship projects we should start a partnership with the local high school to help these students learn about conservation and land restoration in a changing climate. I started working with these students back in January when we went out Las Cienegas to collect native Sacaton grass seeds. Sacaton is a unique grass that grows in bottoms between the upland grasslands and the mesquite bosques or riparian lowlands. Sacaton bottoms characterize the transition from uplands to the riparian areas. These hearty grasses that are normally taller than me are extremely important in holding the landscape together. During the monsoon season which is characterized by torrential downpours, Sacaton roots that can reach up to five or six feet below the ground play a critical role in preventing all the soil from eroding away and leaving huge scars in the earth. At Las Cienegas; there are disturbing bare areas devoid of Sacaton plants cropping up in the Sacaton bottoms. We decided it would be excellent to start seed saving and growing our own plants to restore these bare areas.
The students liked the idea of created their own Sacaton restoration areas that they could watch for years to come. After we had collected seeds from the Sacaton plants, we planted them in one gallon containers in their classroom. The students watered them and watched them grow for two and half months. Some of the plants that were planted in smaller containers did not fare so well over spring break. Finally in April the students took all of their new Sacaton plants that they had grown from seed and planted them in one bare Sacaton bottom area near the side of the road. I helped the students water the plants during the planting event and strategically used a product called DriWater to help the seedlings survive. I am excited to return to Tucson in the fall to see how the Sacaton plants have fared.

I left my winter wonderland of a home in Minnesota for the desert Southwest in California about three months ago to begin my new Seeds of Success internship. What was to come was uncertain, and I knew I was in for an extreme learning experience in a brand new…everything. And I was right. Almost. My work prior to my CLM Internship was in the prairies and oak savannas of Minnesota. It was daunting to think of all the new plant species, and even new plant families, I would need to learn in the California Desert in order to appropriately monitor sites for seed collections. However, while working in the field, surrounded by an overwhelmingly new landscape, that I realized I knew more than I had thought about the desert plants. I actually recognized plants (!!!), even if just to the genus. Once you think about it, it only makes sense that there would be some parallels between prairie and desert plants. But it was such a great feeling to have familiarity in the unfamiliar. And now, after three months of desert adventures and daily pop quizes in desert botany (most of which I pass), I feel almost at home in this new landscape. Almost.

“You haven’t experienced Wyoming until you have lived through a Wyoming winter.” That is the message that everyone in my field office kept telling me last year. Well, I got the chance to do so. A few weeks before my internship had ended last fall, the lead wildlife biologist had offered me to come back to the Kemmerer Field Office as a wildlife intern from February through July. He had explained to me that I would have a variety of projects, but most importantly, the office needed more data on the winter habitat for the Greater Sage Grouse. I would be out in the field during the winter mapping pockets of sage brush that were above the snowline along with mapping perimeters of the leks (areas where the grouse group together to mate) and lek surveys in the field office. There would be cold temperatures and 3:30 am wake ups. (Sounds enticing doesn’t it?) Still, I couldn’t pass up another amazing opportunity like this. I got used to the extreme cold temperatures (mornings of -15 degrees) and the gorgeous early morning sunrises. I had a great time snow shoeing and snowmobiling in the back country of Wyoming-things people pay to do…and I was getting paid to do it. After many cold days outside and long days at the computer, I have recently finished the GIS analysis of roughly 3 months worth of data and I helped the office go from 0 acres to over 130,000 acres of mapped winter sage grouse habitat. I am glad it is finally warming up. When the landscape dries out I will be mapping Mountain Plover habitat, conducting Mountain Plover and Burrowing Owl surveys, as well as checking up on raptor nests. I cannot wait! I am thoroughly pleased that I came back!

Larry Ashton
Kemmerer, WY BLM

My name is Vince and I have been a CLM intern for about 3 months.  It had definitely been a bumpy ride getting used to a new life.  I moved from South Carolina to Palm Springs, CA, and I have never lived anywhere other than South Carolina before, so this was definitely a change for me.  I work at the BLM South Coast Field Office working on the Dos Palmas Project.

Dos Palmas is a preserve that was created by the Coachella Canal, the Canal was lined and is no longer providing water to several Palm Oases in this preserve.  Basically, my job is to help restore these Palm Oases by planting existing vegetation that is no longer growing there because of the lack of water.

This experience has been great and I love it out here.  I have met several amazing people and made friends; I hope to stay in contact with.  I have also learned quite a bit during my internship.  I took a course on GIS, something that everyone seems to know and now I do too.  I have learned several different desert plant species, and seen several different desert animals.

The summer is finally approaching and today the high was 115 degrees, sweet, I survived it!  Hopefully I will be able to survive all of it, I am sure it will be a challenge that I have yet to conquer.

I found this oasis on one of my first visits to Dos Palmas!   This is an awesome place.

I arrived in Southern California with my life condensed down to a couple suitcases and a feeling of excited anticipation that only comes from beginning a new adventure.  I had flown across the country for an internship with the Seeds of Success (SOS) project at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont, California.  I was excited and a little anxious about beginning my new job in a place I’d never been before.  Like the majority of CLM Interns, I majored in environmental science in college.  The focus of my studies and previous employments was sustainable agriculture – researching methods to produce food that is both healthy for people and the planet.  I know a lot about the environment in controlled settings, like on a farm, but haven’t had much exposure to studying natural lands.  The SOS internship sounded like a prime opportunity to learn about an ecosystem that was completely different than any I had ever been exposed to and a chance to apply my background in environmental sciences off a farm.

Over the first few weeks on the job, I was inundated with new information.  For example, the preferred language of botanists is Latin; I had forgotten this wasn’t truly a dead language.  I had to quickly adjust to not using the common names of plants.  I sometimes had difficulty placing the plant I was looking at in the correct family I was learning, let alone using Latin to name it.  Rancho Santa Ana has a huge herbarium, which was also a new thing to me.  I had been in one once before, but never appreciated all the work that goes into to making a useful herbarium specimen.  Desert plants are obviously much different than those of the deciduous forests I lived amongst my whole life.  At first glance, everything seemed so spiney and prickley.  Once I learned to look beyond the defenses, I saw the wonderful beauty these beings exude .  For a while, everything seemed so new that I felt I hardly knew anything.

I’m now in the third month of my internship and I have happily realized I recognize a lot of the plants I see.  I even know some of the other plants I can expect to be close by.  And because I spend about 25 hours a week working in the field, I’ve also learned a lot of the reptiles, mammals, and birds that are fortunate enough to call Southern California home.

It’s been a refreshing change to apply what I studied in college to new landscapes and to ecosystems that aren’t manipulated by man the way agroecosystems are.  Now that I’ve began to make my way up the learning curve for Southern California botany, the HOT weather has arrived and the plants are drying up.  I hope I can maintain what I’ve learned and continue to build to it.  I want to be the type of environmental professional who knows how all the parts of an ecosystem are connected.  This internship is helping me connect some strings of the web of life and I am enjoying the experience.

I have been at the Carson City BLM district office for about 5 1/2 months now and it has quite the experience.  We started seeding the grass Poa secunda in an area that had recently had a fire go through.  Then the snow came and we were inside the office for about a month and a half doing trainings and computer work.  Eventually were able to get back into the field where we finished the seeding project and started working on invasive plant control especially of Tall whitetop.  We just recently finished a long term project that called for our team of nine interns to plant and cage 21,000 bitterbrush seedlings for deer to graze on.  With the temperatures rising and the field season in full swing, we are starting to do some weed monitoring and surveys for multiple rare plant species.  The jobs change from week to week so there is always something new to do and new places to go see.