Hey everybody!  It is crazy to think that the summer is almost over.  It seems like it has just started.  For me, it will be even crazier not going back to school in the fall.  I just graduated in May, and with summer winding down I have that “back-to-school” feeling in my gut.  I have never had a full time job that lasted this long either, so it feels like I should be starting something new.  But no, I’m only half done with my internship!  And fall is the busiest time for a seed collector.  Late July was a lull, but things have been gradually picking up speed and September through November will be hectic, but fun! 

The summer has been hot and humid with very little rain. The temperatures have been well into the 90s and there was even a week were it was in the 100s for a few days.  I’m sure all of you out west have to deal with similar or even hotter temperatures, but I wasn’t expecting this on the east coast!  The high humidity has added to the discomfort.  The high heat and little rain have been hard on fruit production, mostly on fleshy fruits.  Ridge top habitats are the worst- everything is dried up and dead.  However, the Prunus serotina or black cherry is doing exceptionally well this year.  We have also made good collections of Sambucus canadensis, Gaylussacia frondosa, andVaccinium corymbosum, or dangle-berry and high-bush blueberry respectively.  Some other collections includePolygonatum pubescens, Morella pensylvanica, Deschampsia flexuosa, Gaylussacia baccata, and Carex comosa, to name a few.        

Since I am stationed at the Greenbelt Native Plant Center, an actual nursery, I get to experience the process of preparing seeds for storage in the seed bank.  The nursery cleans its own collections and has short-term seed storage facilities as well.  I have been cleaning a lot of fleshy fruit lately.  We collect fleshy fruit into plastic bags and then store the collections in a refrigerator for a couple weeks to “after-ripen” which softens the fruit and makes the cleaning process easier.  The tool of the trade for cleaning fleshy fruit is…a blender!  We tape the blades of the blender so the fruit is mashed, which inhibits the possibility of seeds getting cut.  We simply blend up the fruit with some water until the seeds are loosened from the flesh.  Then we pour the mush into a large bowl, and add more water.  After gently stirring the mixture, the good heavy seeds sink to the bottom, while everything else floats or is suspended in the water.  The bowl is tipped and the fruit particles are slowly poured off, leaving the good seeds settled at the bottom.  These seeds are then spread out in trays to dry in the “Seed Lab” and then stored until winter, when they are put through another cleaning. 

I am one of the few interns not headquartered at a BLM office.  Like I said, I am stationed at the Greenbelt Native Plant Center on Staten Island, but the US Botanic Gardens and Botanic Gardens Conservation International play the crucial role of funding which makes this internship possible.   

Martin Schoofs

Greenbelt Native Plant Center

Staten Island, New York

Hello all!

I am writing with some bitter sweet news.  I was recently offered an emergency hire biological tech. positionwith NPS at Carlsbad Caverns.  I have been volunteering in the park on the cave swallow mist netting/banding program and met some of the park staff, including the seasonal bee surveyor.  We share a love of all things insect, so when his co-worker unexpectedly left he brought my name up as a possible replacement.   After much debate I have decided that the NPS job is a better opportunity for me.  I will be collecting and identifying hymenoptera and the corresponding flowers they are visiting as part of a three part project with NPS, U.S. Department of  Agriculture,  and Utah State University.  It is hard to find entomology-only jobs and the chance to learn how to identify bees down to genera and even species is going to a valuable skill set.  Long story short I am leaving the Carlsbad BLM and CBG intern program early. 

In no way is my job transfer a bad reflection on my previous position.  The time I spend as wildlife intern has been jammed back with useful information and monitoring techniques.  My experience with the Chinuaiuan desert at the BLM was one of the reasons they decided to hire me here at the park service.   While sad to leave the BLM, I have always wanted the opportunity to work for the Park Service and catching bees all day is going to be a dream job!!

Thanks again CBG!

Rachel Krauss

Carlsbad, NM

Ben Copp

Nome, AK

July 28th

The helicopter we’re flying in is a Bell 206 Long Ranger.  It seats 7, in the same way a VW bug seats 5.  There have only been three of us so it’s perfectly comfortable.  As the day goes: we pick an area and a few sites to visit, somewhere between 8 and 10 and head out to the furthest one and work our way back.  Fuel and weight are our limiting factors.  We’ve only got about 3.5 hours of fuel and as frequently as we power up in might be less.  When we arrive at a site we look for a suitable place to set down and begin our survey.  The surveys are simple and painfully unscientific.  Laurie (my mentor) and I stand side by side and envision a semi circle.  Within that area we consider the amount of cover of preferred lichen and the percent use of that lichen.  We record these percents within classes, take two large steps and do it again.  What we’re looking for are signs that the lichen has been grazed on or steps in the lichen.  When it’s hot and dry the lichens crumble under foot and hold big prints, and when reindeer or caribou eat they pull out clumps of lichen but only eat the very tops and drop the rest.

I’ve been in a helicopter once before but here I am spending loads of time flying around rural Alaska, where there are no roads or people, only the occasional sign of human use, a cabin or a two-track, for a week.  It’s awesome.  I have a flight suit and a helmet and gloves, which make it bad-ass and get to see bears and reindeer and musk ox and hopefully some moose from the air.  It’s a seriously good adventure.

Yesterday we got into a bit of a mess.  We flew early, getting out to Tom Gray’s Range about 100 miles east of Nome.  There were clouds around, some of them low to the ground but easy to fly around and avoid.  We got to our sites, 10 of them.  Ate lunch on the top of a hill, picked blueberries after surveying, generally having a great time despite a constant mists and chilling wind.  It wasn’t comfortable working but always fun.  I found a big moose antler at one of our sites but it was last year’s and had been gnawed on by some critters and torn apart so I left it to the tundra.  Even in the rain it’s great to be out on the tundra, better in the sun of course but the rain seems to accentuate the colors of the white and green lichens, red and blue berries, green mosses and grasses.  The complexity is hidden in just a few centimeters above the ground – it demands a close look.  Every site is a little different.  Some and boggy and wet, with high tussocks and lots of lichens and blueberry bushes, while other are in saddles or on hilltops that have been cleaned of lichens and turned mostly to rock.  The blueberry bushes are in a fully ripened state.  I’ve found that the little ones that are close to the ground and in a harsher place have the most berries.  When it’s boggy and wet, when the bushes are big and green, you have to pick one by one.  It’s the hardy little bushes that carry the most berries.  But back to the mess.  We were at site 10-05, our 10th site of the day and destined to be our last.  We wanted to make it a shorter day because the previous two had been long and it had been raining all day but we had made good time and I had a softball game to make.  We were up in a saddle working with the wind and mist to our back and finished quickly because we were getting cold and wet.  It was only about 45 deg.  We finished our assessment, took some measurements, and got back in the helicopter.  There were no blueberry bushes to keep us there any longer.  As we power up a thick cloud came and knocked down our visibility so we can only see the ground below us and nothing ahead.  We set back down and wait a second before trying again only to have the same result.  This time we powered down and waited for a good opening.  We sat and watched the cloud move past, rain thickening and thinning, the peaks to either side coming and going.   We got glances of trees below, the valley, maybe the river, but none long enough to make a run for it.  Calls went out to dispatch, still on the ground weathered in, 50 miles straight line from Nome, middle of no where.  I napped, ate, got cold, peed, ate, thought I see an opening, no.  On and on. We started to make plans.  We only had enough fuel to make a straight line back to Nome, which with this weather was unlikely.  If we did get off we might be able to make it back or at least follow the Council road back.  That’s the best option.  The second option was to fly to Council, only a few miles away and have the mechanic drive out and meet us.  The pilot could only work so many hours in a day and as that time approached option three, which was spend the night in the helicopter seemed more and more likely.  We relayed our options to dispatch and sat tight for more hours.  There was no making the softball game now.  It was 9:00pm – just about of 5 hour mark.  As we made the second to last call into dispatch, giving them our options, setting a time to talk in the morning, and all but giving up we get a little clearing.  Nate, the pilot, powered up and Laurie and I put things away and prepped for take off.  The clouds cleared out of the valley and we lifted off and flew down below the soup that had stranded us.  We found the road to Council and began to follow it towards Nome.  The going was slow, still clouds everywhere and a low ceiling.  As the road climbed a hill and we followed it we reentered the mess of clouds and rain.  Now flying 20 feet above the road, going 20-30 miles an hour we couldn’t make it back to town.  I could read mile marker 56 as we passed by- 56 miles to Nome, no chance.  It was now 10:30, just 10 minutes from the pilots shut down time, so we set down at the side of the road powered down, put a call into the mechanic to drive out and pick us up, and sat tight.  The wind was up again and so was the rain.  I could see my breath inside the aircraft.  It took an hour and a half for the truck to get to us, and eventually we were home.  A warm shower, some proper dinner, and bed.  I didn’t get to bed until 2am, but that didn’t matter.  I wasn’t in a helicopter on a hillside or still on the road to Council.  I was back and able to sleep in.

Tomorrow we’ll do it all again.

Photos of it all are here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/bacoppvi/Alaska?authkey=Gv1sRgCLr_gPen9KiasgE&feat=directlink

During the last few weeks of seed collecting the quantities have begun to dwindle. However, there have been species that are just beginning to flower like the Cleome and Helianthus, or spiderflower and sunflower. I am still amazed about the beauty that the late summer has brought. A few weeks ago all of the plants were beginning to dry out and die off for the year, but a new flush of blooms have come to life. It is a beauty to behold. I hope that I will have enough time to enjoy them before the season ends.

Jason Stettler

Provo Shrub Science Lab

It’s pretty hard to believe that I’ve been in Buffalo for 11 weeks. In some respects, it seems as though it’s flying by. I still have lots to learn, there are some exciting wildlife projects on the horizon, and days almost never drag. In other respects, though, it feels like I’ve been here forever. I was out in Montana a few weekends ago, and a friendly cashier asked me where I was from. “Buffalo, Wyoming,” I said, with only a little hesitation. And that was that. Certainly weird, but exciting, too – this place is becoming my home.

My time as a range intern is wrapping up as the range plants are curing into a prickly and impossible-to-identify caramel/taupe/tan/gold mass. It looks more like a sea of fun-shaped pasta than the lush fields of June and July, so we’re beginning to focus more specifically on wildlife projects, such as prioritizing areas for fence marking, standardizing a sage-grouse pellet count methodology, and using the Anabat to identify local resident bat populations.

Our main transitional project was the development of a riparian monitoring procedure for a section of the Tongue River (read Anya’s post too: “Land Management and the Act of Monitoring”). It will be a useful tool for the range specialists because the area is leased to ranchers for cow grazing, and it’s important to the wildlife biologists because the land immediately bordering the Tongue is a thruway for migratory birds. I hope (and think) that we’ve been comprehensive enough that we’re leaving a Welch monitoring legacy for generations of CBG interns to come… Here’s what it looks like:

Taking pictures of cover boards is a useful way to monitor changes in vertical structure. Please note the board's most impressive feature: a built-in, data-holding arm.

Greenline monitoring includes determining streambank alteration, woody species regeneration, dominant and co-dominant species, and streambank stability.

Vegetation along permanent transects is monitored with a Daubenmire frame

A spider we found on one of the transects.

Over and out!

Miriam Johnston
Buffalo, Wyoming

Vernal has proven itself to be a unique place with the opportunity to work in both the sagebrush/oilfield habitat to the south where the work is primarily cactus monitoring (Sclerocactus wetlandicus/Sclereocactus brevispinus) to a whole different habitat working in the riparian areas of the upper Green River to the north.

The cactus monitoring provides a look into the life of the office botanists whose job is to make sure that well pads and right of ways are not constructed in areas that could potentially be harmful to the threatened species of the area. The work I have been able to do so far has provided the data for my co-workers to make informed decisions about permitting.

The work on the Green River provides a whole new life. The main work on the river is invasive removal which has been predominately common teasel thus far. The next stage of this work is just beginning this week with the surveying of some lower sections of the river for Russian Olive. The surveying that began earlier this week will provide the data to determine both the amount of work in store as well as the amount of seed that will be needed for the restoration effort that will go hand in hand with the removal.

I am enjoying being able to work in varying ecosystems in order to provide myself with a more diverse background. Thanks CLM!

Josh Merkel
BLM Vernal

Anya Tyson
Range and Wildlife Biology BLM Intern

August in Buffalo, Wyoming: the weather has heated up as my duties as a range intern are winding down. The once uncharacteristically green range has finally cured into shades of yellow and toast. I am now “on wildlife time” here at the office, and I will soon see what the biologists have in store for me.

As an appropriate transition between range and wildlife work, my fellow intern and I spent a fair amount of time designing and implementing a riparian vegetation monitoring effort on BLM land on the Tongue River. Currently, much of length of the river in the parcel is leased for grazing and calving in winter months, but the area is also a BLM recreation site and home to a decent density of breeding birds. In the future, grazing practices will likely change in hopes that riparian vegetation will respond favorably (reduction of non-natives, increased recruitment of woody species, increased vertical structure) and wildlife habitat will be improved. In the planning phases of our monitoring efforts, Miriam, my fellow intern, even had a phone conversation with John Willoughby from the Grand Canyon. Monitoring does seem to be somewhat of an experiment; it is difficult to know just how appropriate and representative the data you choose to collect will be. (John Willoughby recommended at least two years of pilot data, which unfortunately, in this case, is just not that useful for pertinent management objectives).

This project was trying at times (i.e. try driving ~50 t-posts into the ground as both sweat and mosquitoes saturate the air closest to your body!), but extremely worthwhile. In my office, a Scarlet Tanager and a Vermillion Flycatcher, both seriously pretty birds, are centered on a poster that proclaims “Riparian Areas: Nature’s Lifelines.” Though the backdrop of the poster is the San Pedro river in southeastern Arizona in this case, I know that the Tongue River, even states away to the north, must look remarkably similar from a bird’s eye view: a ribbon of green, a crucial highway to the mountains. Earlier this summer, before my internship began, I rafted Desolation and Gray canyons on the Green River in Utah. I had just taken Ornithology as my last course at college, and I was ecstatic to see Lazuli Buntings, Bullock’s Orioles, Western Tanagers and many other birds both nesting and cruising up the waterway. It turns out I desperately love rivers and birds; I truly hope that this monitoring program and its effects on management play even a small part in increasing the numbers of neotropical migrants and breeding birds that utilize habitat on the Tongue River.

The month of August is upon us here in Pinedale, and we are already three months into our Seeds of Success (SOS) internship. As SOS interns, we have amassed an expansive amount of seed from numerous species and populations within the Pinedale Field Office (PFO). We have observed a variety of different phenotypes from the species we have collected. A plant phenotype that our bodies have especially noticed, during our various collections, is the different heights of the plants. We have found, that each plant population requires several different body alignments for a most efficient harvest. Some of these positions can be quite physically challenging. However, if one prepares for the aerobic and anaerobic challenges in the field; the aches and pains of a full day’s work can be alleviated and avoided.

8 Recommended Practice Positions

The Jumping Frog                                             The Tired Harvester

Fabaceae Astragulus sericoleus                             Ranunculacae  Delphinium Bicolor

The Spread Raptor

          Polygonaceae Polygonum bistortides

The Bridge                                                      The Prayer

Asteraceae Achillea millefolium         Scrophulariaceae Penstemon humilis 

The Sleeper

ZZZZZZZZZZZZ

The Arrow

Polemoniacae Pholox Hoodii

The Proposal

Asteraceae Stenotus acaulis

WARNING: These positions should be done at your own risk. Failure to do them correctly could result in serious harm or death. The following exercises are not approved by the Bureau of Land Management, Chicago Botanical Gardens or Conservation Land Management Program. 

 We also suggest taking up yoga, in addition to practicing these positions to your own mantra every morning or evening. We have found that our rigorous collection exercises have significantly increased not only the amount of seed that we pick every day but also our mind, body and souls. We would love to hear any input on any other valuable hints to other techniques to enhance our seed collecting.

Thank You,

The Pinedale Team

Training in the Grand Canyon, one of the great wonders of the natural world, was one incredible experience; meeting our wonderful bosses Krissa and Marian as well as ~75 fellow interns, learning to key flora of the West, watching a triple rainbow spread from rim to rim as well as breathtakingly beautiful sunsets every night…the list goes on and on. It was very special to be introduced to this beautiful and sacred place, not as a tourist, but as a biologist. The trip back was a bit nostalgic, but was still gorgeous and aided by waking up on the 4^th of July in Canyonlands Ntl. Park. It was also a challenge transitioning back into the office workplace (no windows!), but we were kept busy with projects. I finished managing the Government Policy and Results Act on Invasive Animals spreadsheet, allowing data for FY10 to be entered. From there, I picked out all marine/brackish species in ocean and coastal parks from that list and combined them with the species that I had found in the Watershed Condition Assessment reports. Those lists were then combined with data Brittany had acquired from the Nature Conservancy. Our next hurdle is to tackle NP Species as well as data from the USGS. Once we have our comprehensive list, we will be turning it into a report and a website for our final project.

The week I got to spend doing field work in Rocky Mountain Ntl. Park was literally and figuratively, a breath of fresh air. Technically, I was a volunteer with the Rocky Mountain Inventory and Monitoring Network, spending my days outside (what a dream!) and my nights in the research dorms right outside of Estes Park. I got to assist with montane and alpine wetland sampling; locating existing well plots, as well as installing new ones. We assessed water quality, soil and site characteristics, and vegetation species cover and composition at each plot. Three days were spent in gorgeous Moraine Park and one day was spent at 12,000 in an alpine wet meadow, where I was able to marvel at the rugged beauty of life above the tree line. This consisted of a 20 degree temperature drop, a fabulous array of wildflowers, snow-capped peaks, a herd of over 60 elk, as well as the ever-so-consistent thunderstorms that come through the alpine every afternoon. After that fabulous introduction to the alpine, I cannot get enough, and even brought my mother there when she came to visit.  We got to see another large herd of elk, a small colony of yellow-bellied marmots, multiple pika, and many a songbird.

Now back from fieldwork, Brittany and I have had to strap in and make ourselves experts on our topics that we will be presenting at the International Conference on Aquatic Invasive Species at the end of the month in San Diego. My poster takes the macro approach, titled: “Managing Aquatic Invasive Species in Ocean, Coastal, and Great Lakes Parks”. It’s quite daunting knowing that we will be representing our agency – quite the responsibility and privilege! We will be attending the conference for 4 days of the 9 days that we are there, so we will have a few days to explore and play in the ocean. Brittany and I both have friends in the area, so it will be a real treat to see them and have backstage passes to the city!

Still loving life in Fort Collins! Until next time…