This is beef country.

In addition to the grazing, there is also a fair bit of oil and gas drilling and some bentonite mining in this corner of Wyoming. Cody is located in NW Wyoming at the base of the Rocky Mountains at the Eastern entrance of Yellowstone on the North Fork of the Shoshone River. While the town itself is full of trees and now tourists, the surrounding range is sparsely populated other than by sagebrush and grass.

In the Cody BLM Field Office, I am interning under the direction of the biologist. Major projects for this summer include sage grouse monitoring, fence inventory as part of a pronghorn migration analysis, installing fence reflectors to reduce sage grouse collisions, rare plant inventory, and sage grouse.

My internship began in April while it was still fairly wintery. We began with sage grouse monitoring. In April my day started well before dawn. We drove in the early morning darkness to sage grouse leks so that we were there just as dawn broke and the grouse began strutting. Watching dawn break on the range is really stunning. Everything wakes up slowly with the increasing light and warmth. The grouse begin to stir, erect their tails, fluff up their breasts, and begin to use their air sacs to produce their otherworldly mating calls. The sagebrush landscape is stunning drenched in the reds and yellows of dawn. As the day becomes light pronghorn, rabbits, and wild horses begin to stir and can be seen across the landscape.

May was divided among different projects. When the weather was good (when it wasn’t snowing) I worked on completing a fence inventory in a pronghorn migration corridor. Unlike deer and elk, pronghorn tend not to jump over fences, but rather kneel and squeeze under the fence. Unfortunate for pronghorn, the Big Horn Basin has a long history of sheep grazing and a quite a bit of sheep fence constructed of impenetrable net wire or several barb wire strands close to the ground. Over the years most of the grazing has shifted to cattle, but the sheep fences remain in some areas. The fence inventory was an excellent opportunity for me to really get to know the field office and the range. Most of the vegetation was still dormant in May(or under snow), but I was still able to begin to familiarize myself with the local flora and fauna. I also got real good at using the GPS, to collect fence corners for the GIS database, and using topographic maps to locate fence lines, some long since removed.

Jason Clark
Cody, WY
BLM

Blog 1

Selected log excerpts:

Day 1

May 27th

This is Amazing.  Leaving Anchorage, from sea level, fields of mountains rise .  Out and expansive.  Going north, an eastern sun checkerboards the slopes white and black.  Sharps ridges and steep slopes provide the contrast.  The sun is just rising.  From 30,000 ft they are nothing but sheep.  Mnt. Mickinley shepards the flock from far above.  May still looks like winter.

The sheep disperse.  Pebbled lakes star the flats, rivers add stripes.  The hand that made these was not concerned with order.  This feels like the frontier.

I am changing my unknown to my discovered.

There are 17 people on my flight to Nome through Kotzebue, 1/10 full.  It’s weighted down with the necessities, food, goods, mail, someone’s new bike.  There’s no other way.

We fly up, over the Yukon River, through the interior, just past Nome and into the arctic circle.  Am I supposed to feel anything other than the novelty of so-far-north?  Above the Seward Peninsula, the Kotzebue sound is still iced and cold.  This is the Arctic Ocean.  The land stretches out brown with frostbite.  Kotzebue lies at the end of the longest coldest finger-no roads to the mainland.  Few depart at the Alaska Airlines hangar, their breaths tell the temperature.  US mail and cargo is unloaded.  Only 11 continue to Nome.This is still winter.

Leaving Kotzebue I see the town’s length, shorter than the runway and only three blocks deep.  I’m told Nome, just 30 minutes south and west, is a fraction larger.  Before we get high above the clouds that have formed in the ‘warming’ of the day, we’re south of the circle and above the Seward Peninsula.  A snow-blanket full of spring holes covers tundra, hills, mountains, and blurs the coastline.  There are no trees, little life.  I will get a second spring.

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Day 2

May 28th

I’ve been here in Nome for 36 hours.  Like any experience that comes with a place it is hard to put to words.  A first description I would give would only be a first impression unto you and thus temper the rest.  Each detail is only part of the whole, and the order they come is no particular indication of importance or significance.  That being said, I like Nome.  The people I have met have been nice.  They smile and say hello, wave from their trucks, shake your hand well.  As a point of reference there are only 3,500 of them, most are native Alaskans.  Children are everywhere, on bikes, playing basketball, walking unaccompanied.  As for the adults, most are busy, walking here or driving there.  Few sit and watch.  There are tourists, not many of them but they come for the birds.  I don’t know much about the birds but I’ve heard there are a lot of them, and there must be because this is a very long way to come.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks has a satellite campus here in Nome, known as the Northwest Campus.  In some regard or another I will be working with their Reindeer Research Program and the BLM, but how is not yet clear.  I’m living in the University Bunkhouse, 208A East Kings Plaza, for the moment alone.  There are three bunk rooms and master bed room with, what I would suspect are, Greg Finstadt’s belongings (more on him after I meet him).  There are maps on the wall, guns in the closet, couches, pots and pans and a fridge with, until today, little more than reindeer medicine in it.  It has been well lived in and as long as there’s kitchen and a bed its good enough for me.I’m excited here.  Now that I’m here there is nothing to lose by being fully here.  Exploring town, discovering all of the new, living everything is fun.  Nothing new is ever dull.  I’m enthusiastic about being here.  This is not just a work experience, it is an Alaksa experience, a too-far-north experience, a new-place-and-people experience, a learning experience, a living experience.  The work I will do will constitute a significant part of my time here, but it is just a fraction.  While I’m tentative to predict anything, I’m certain of this.

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Day 8

June 3rd

And just now, finally, I’m starting to get an idea of what I’m going to be doing.  From what Greg says it’s a terribly daunting task.  Greg’s been here for ages;  there’s no one better to introduce you to the herders, make you understand the place and teach you everything you need to know about the ecosystem than Greg.  He lives this and loves sharing it.  The BLM is responsible for assisting the reindeer herders in generating range management plans and it sounds like they’re having me start it because no one was qualified and felt up to the task.  No one has made one before for this area so I’m walking on new ground, and no one wanted to make one which tells me I need to watch my step and look for all the help I can get.  Laurie (BLM) has asked me to generate three plans for different herds but Greg says he would be more than happy with just one.    With the amount of material that’s accumulated on my desk today alone, piles of pressed plants, Federal handbooks, textbooks, and other reading material that I have to get through and know and understand by the end of the month, I’d say my job is daunting and finishing just one plan would make me very proud.  So, in short, I’ve got a hell of a lot of work cut out for me.

As for Photographs, I know family and friends would like visuals to put their imaginations to rest but they will be posted in some time.

I’m standing on a wind-blown bluff overlooking a mountainous ocean coastline, hip-high grasses brushing against me in the light afternoon breeze.  Backpack on my back, a similarly-clad office-mate is standing on my left, likewise looking off into the impressive landscape.  “Two hikers lost amid nature’s wonders”— it’s the type of scene you’d see on wilderness maps or on landscape posters.

Actually, it is one of those scenes.  A hundred yards behind us and up on a higher hill is a BLM photographer, capturing the moment for use in future King Range promotional materials.  It’s the second day of this unexpected tangent in my CLM internship—Zach Marine, landscape model.  “I move to California and just fell into a modeling gig,” I’d jokingly explained to my parents.  Still, it’s hard for me not to be awestruck by the fortune I had to not only hike a beautiful trail (the Lost Coast Trail) and camp overnight while being photographed doing it, but to do all this while getting paid.  This is part of my job!  Maybe I should look into this modeling thing more seriously….

Hiking, not modeling

Cut to three weeks later.  I’m in the office working on my computer and our NEPA planner comes up and hands me the draft version of the King Range Wilderness Plan.  On the cover is a familiar coastline vista with the backs of two every-man hikers in the foreground.  “That’s me!” I say.  Then the even cooler part sinks in—as I look through the document I see all the maps I made, 13 in all.  As amazing as the opportunity was to model for the BLM (I never thought I’d be writing *that* clause), the real serendipity happened a month earlier when there was a significant need for someone to produce the maps for this wilderness plan which was running desperately close to its deadline… and the GIS specialist was out of the office for the next three weeks.

For me, who had wanted to learn more about GIS and gain applied experience with it, it was the perfect opportunity.  Now seeing those maps in the draft plan brought home how cool the whole experience had been.  I had learned something I had wanted to, I had helped the office fill a need they had, and I had produced something that will be of benefit to the public as they evaluate the wilderness plan or put it into effect.  I couldn’t be more delighted.

Plus I was on the front cover (or at least my back was), and that was pretty cool, too.

Statue of Botany

I’m starting my second year as a CLM intern in New Mexico.  Last year I worked in the Chihuahuan desert.  This year I’ll be working in the Colorado Plateau portion of the state.  We are working out of the NRCS Plant Materials Center in Los Lunas, NM.  I am very optimistic this year, as we are having a significantly wetter year.  Although I gained wonderful experience last year while working out of the Las Cruces, NM  BLM, we had to accept the whims of Mother Nature and had rather poor seed production due to the drought.  We have spent the first weeks scoping out potential collection areas and learning the species of the region.  This is the first year that SOS interns have worked in this area, so in some ways we are treading new ground.  The opportunity to work in a different part of the state has certainly broadened my botanical knowledge.  The large geographic range that I have been lucky to explore here in New Mexico has helped to get a very visceral idea of species ranges, assemblages and ecologies.  We are getting off to a good start and I look forward to blogging more on our adventures and insights as the summer progresses.

I’m going on my fourth week in Rawlins, Wyoming working as an amphibian survey intern. I have to admit my first week here was a little different than what I expected. There was lots of paper work of course and office preparation. There was also the constant rain and foot of snow we received just last week. However, each week has brought new adventures and excitement. Southern Wyoming has lots of hidden beauty, and its appeal has become increasingly visible to me over the past few weeks.

As a recent graduate of the University of New Hampshire, both the Wyoming landscape and weather were a bit of a shock to me. Both the lack of trees and consistent rain/snow made me weary of the new area. However, every week here the weather has improved, and the shrubs and grasslands have really started to grow on me. I’ve also been able to travel to many incredible areas located within the Rawlins BLM district.

The second week here we took part in a drive up to Seminoe State Park located less than an hour north of Rawlins. The combination of mountains, aspen and pine trees, and sparkling water made for an incredible sight. This trip really made me realize the unique beauty of the Wyoming Landscape.

As the weather began to warm, we were able to go out into the field and see some amphibians. My first trip out was to a series of wetlands southwest of Rawlins. This seemingly plain landscape contained an array of wildlife. As we drove into the wetland area, we were met by several ground squirrels, antelope, and a large variety of wetland birds. A closer investigation allowed us to hear several boreal chorus frogs and a few northern leopard frogs within the wetlands. This was truly an amazing area and really made me appreciate both Wyoming and the internship work itself. I am excited to be participating in something that will allow me to see such an array of wildlife and that will help bring more attention and protection of our declining amphibian populations.

Sorry no pictures yet.

Hi All! Well where do I start? After years of watching Jurassic Park and learning about Paleontology, I get to spend my internship actually doing it! I am working with Ryan O’Dell out of the Hollister field office and get to work on excavation and prep of one of the specimens found on BLM land in the Panoche Hills. I had a lot of fun at the beginning of my internship working with Ryan and Kelly to excavate the specimen and transport it to the lab. Now I spend my days slowly removing the sediments from the plaster jacket that we encased the specimen in to reveal what is inside! Some days the work is very slow but it is also rewarding as I uncover new portions of the fossils. As I continue through my internship I will work on identifying each fossil that I remove from the jacket after I clean them up and possibly even write a research paper on the findings! Stay tuned for more information 🙂 I have been having a really good time on my internship and am so grateful that I could be part of this program!

Talk to you soon,

Susan Bowman
Paleontology intern
BLM, Hollister

Here is the jacket in the lab

This is the opened jacket, you can see some fossils on top of the sediments.

This is a really cool perfectly preserved Ammonite that I found in the sediment.

Hi! Well, this is my first out-of-state internship and I was really nervous to embark on such an adventure. Leaving all of my family and friends in Michigan and deciding to live 1,800 miles away was one of the hardest things I have ever done. However, once I caught sight of the breath-taking mountains and the lands teeming with wildlife, I finally felt okay. I’ve only been working for about three weeks here in Cedar City, Utah, but I already absolutely love it! Being able to explore mountains and valleys and venture through habitats I have never been exposed to have allowed me to change on a rather personal level. It’s almost as if the world’s natural beauty has opened my eyes to experience the beauty in my everyday life. I now tend to notice the little pleasures around me.
I’ve also acquired many new skills here as well. I now know how to navigate using a GPS and quad maps. This has proven to be extremely vital when we’re out in the field and the nearest city could be a hundred miles away. I also know how to use radio telemetry to locate the collared Greater Sage Grouse at known leks [breeding ground for a particular animal species]. Probably one of the more exciting moments here on the job was when I heard the very first beep of the first bird we found. We ended up flushing the male, along with four other males and one female, and seeing them all take flight at once was very thrilling.
I would have to say that my favorite moment here so far was when I was able to visit a lek early one morning and actually watch the Greater Sage Grouse courtship displays. My fellow co-workers and I saw around seven males all puffing out their white-crested chests and sticking out their pointed tail feathers. They were also emitting a deep thumping sound that to me sounded like a low heart beat. We only saw one female present and she disappeared down a small decline so we weren’t sure who she chose to mate with. I remember learning about leks in several biology classes during college, so actually seeing one was incredible.
This past week I also learned how to perform a habitat assessment. In this first photo you can see me measuring nearby plants along with my co-workers, Michelle and Adam. Doing projects like this really helps me become better in tune with the Utah environment. I come from a very urban area so this is a whole new world for me! I’m definitely excited about exploring this state and involving myself in the various activities that this internship has to offer!

An exciting habitat assessment in Minersville!

That's me holding the sign for our 100ft intersection of habitat!

I am typing to you all from the Pinedale BLM Field Office in Wyoming. Pinedale is nestled between Omernik Level III ecoregion’s 18 and 17. It oversees the management of 912,000 acres of federal surface/federal minerals and almost 300,000 acres of private surface/federal minerals. Of those acres that are disturbed from oil and petroleum use   reclamation and restoration plans exist to prevent invasive and noxious weeds from out-competing and dominating the native vegetation. I have learned a lot about the procedures for restoration in Pindale. While learning I came to see how vital Seeds of Success (SOS) is for this area.
The month of May is coming to a close and almost all of the native forbs are still dormant. Aside, from a few like the perennial Phlox hoodi. The climate is so harsh in this northwestern part of the United States of America they only have a total of 19 frost-free days. So if you all thought you were having a hard time growing your tomatoes… Here the word for a functioning garden is considered a greenhouse. Stepping back from that tangent, however; a lot of the  seeds available  for restoration have genes that predispose them for the South or Central Western areas of the United States. Alas, when they are planted here they tend to be a cause for unsuccessful restoration or a bottleneck population with low genetic abundance.
SOS can open a lot of doorways for more successful restoration here in Pinedale. Bend Seed Extractory, our national seed bank, will be able to hold these seeds and supply them to operators within the Wyoming Basin. Securing these seeds is vital to maintaining a genetically diverse community of plants in the field. The time period we have to collect these seeds here in at the Pinedale BLM is roughly two months so preparation along with training is what I have been up to so far. When I am not working, however; there are thousands of things to do here in Pinedale. Most of the land out here is owned by the government, which means there is public access to most of the lands. You can go boating, biking, hiking, hunting, ATVing, fishing, camping, climbing and running. Not to mention, that Jackson, the Tetons and Yellowstone are about 1-2 hours away.
I know that I probably did not do my current geographical location justice. However, I am loving it here and cannot wait for SPRING SEEDS!

While doing field work in Florida over the winter months, I came to the realization that I missed Utah. I missed the red rock, the deep smell of sage, the fact that I can see for miles, the calves prancing about and the people at the BLM office. This will be my second season as a CBG wildlife intern for the BLM in Cedar City, UT.

My journey back to South West Utah began in April, in a bright teal Subaru stuffed full of my belongings with a black dog riding shotty. The 2,988 mile road trip out here taught me a lot about “flying by the seat of my pants” and adapting to new situations. My stops included country dancing in Nashville, TN, green chili in Santa Fe, NM, hiking in Vail, CO, and skiing at Brighton Resort in Utah. I had some minor setbacks along the way. For example, I had not planned on repairing both my front axles. Nor had I anticipated how sore my buttock would be after driving for 10 hours. All in all, I made it to Cedar City, UT with a more rounded view of the United States of America.

My fellow intern, Brittany Stanglewicz, and I have started our field season by tracking collared Greater Sage Grouse using radio telemetry. Each collared grouse is wearing a necklace like transmitter, which emits a signal at a certain frequency. By dialing the receiver to the given frequencies, we can hear the signal and determine the direction the grouse is located in.

Our mornings begin by packing our Chevy Tahoe full of equipment. The essentials include: 2 receivers, 2 antennas, 2 co axle cords, 1 GPS, 1 camera, several maps, a hand held radio, a list of the frequencies and lots of food and water. After navigating from the office to one of the lek sites (an area where certain male animals perform their courtship displays) we attach the co axle cord to the antenna and to the receiver. Next, we dial to one of the frequencies listed for one of the collared Sage Grouse and listen for a beeping noise while we slowly move in a circle holding the antenna pointing away from us. On a good day, we hear a signal and then track the grouse down and flush it out of the sage brush, take pictures, and record data using a GPS.

<—- 5 Greater Sage Grouse took off into flight after we tracked them using radio telemetry

On a not-so-good day, we won’t hear any signals and then we drive or hike to higher spots in hopes of hearing a signal. If the collar is in a stationary spot for over 8 hours then it will turn to a “mortality signal”, which means the beep occur at a faster rate. We have found one dead collared grouse. Once we arrived at the scene of the crime, we found a severed grouse head with a collar close by. There was also many grouse feathers scattered about. Based on the evidence, such as broken feathers, we were able to determine the cause of death to be a mammal (chances are pretty high it was a coyote).

Besides tracking the Greater Sage Grouse around Southern Utah, our season will include bird banding, Utah prairie dog capture, Greater Sage Grouse habitat assessment, riparian exclosure maintenance, wildlife clearances and much more.

A Greater Sage Grouse that was a victim of mammalian predation —->

Over and Out,

Michelle Downey
BLM
Cedar City, UT

The view as we botanized along the San Pasquel Valley Trail

Showy Penstemon (Penstemon spectabilis) a native perennial.

Hillside flowering yellow with Deer Weed (Lotus scoparius).

Wildflowers along the Sunrise Highway, Anza Borrego Desert State Park, CA.

View of our desert collection area in McCain Valley.

Testing the boundaries of my comfort zone has become the theme for my internship experience in Southern California.  The coastal sage scrub, chaparral, and desert ecosystems are about as different as can be from the northern hardwood and boreal forests of the upper Midwest where I have the vast majority of my ecological experience.  To start the ‘next step’ in life after graduating I was looking for a new environment to challenge not only my ecological abilities but also give me the experience of living somewhere very different, this CLM internship has proven to do just that.

Learning all new plants and systems can be an intimidating yet exciting prospective.  My fellow intern and I are very lucky to be working with a number of very talented, knowledgeable, and enthusiastic botanists and ecologists.  Our first field trip was filled with gasps of excited exclamations of “Oh the Pickeringia montana is flowering!   And the Malacothamnus densiflorus is blooming so nicely.  The Dendromecon rigida and Romneya coulteri are having a good year so far.  Was that a Lathyrus vestitus among the Adenostoma fasciculatum back there? Oh!  What a beautiful swath of Lupinus bicolor!” while botanizing out the truck window as we bumped along the dirt road heading up and down the hills.  To me all the vegetation was a conglomeration of patches of bright colors interspersed with greens and browns.  As a landscape it was beautiful, but my brain could not distinguish all the parts that made up the whole. Gradually, through the weeks, the patchwork of colors has separated into different plants that my mind is starting to define as unique species with accompanying common and scientific names.  I learn (and relearn) new ones every day.

Just learning the plants is only half the battle in becoming acquainted with doing field work in a new environment.  Physical challenges such as becoming acclimated to a hot and dry climate and developing the stamina to climb up and down the hills that are mountains to a girl from a glaciated land are overcome with time and the vigilance to remain hydrated.  There are also new environmental hazards that I need to be consciously thinking about, such as remembering that certain plants are not friendly and will poke, scratch, or bite.  And of course, there is the danger of being bit by a snake, something I’m not naturally cautious of since I’ve never lived where snakes are a safety issue.  I survived my first close encounter with a rattle snake; I walked away with a pounding heart and the reminder to watch where I step.  There are some cultural differences to get used to as well, including the presence Border Patrol as they make their rounds through our collection sites, and the generally faster paced California lifestyle.  Some things are easier to get used to like the abundance of avocados and oranges that grow on trees in the front yard.  Working out of the San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park provides not only the chance to be involved in different research projects, but also the opportunity to work in the hills above various grazing exotic ungulates and to hear the gibbons calling for breakfast in the early morning.

All in all there are a lot of new things, but when it comes down to it, the field methods are familiar; it’s just a different location.   Many of the same field work related stories will be created; everybody needs to have the ‘day we got the work vehicle stuck’ story.  A month and a half into my internship, I’m amazed at how much I’ve already learned and have had the opportunity to experience.  Looking back makes me even more excited for the adventures and opportunities that are in store for the remainder of the internship.