Once there were interns who drove far for seed collection

It was there some bad ones escaped loupe detection

Upon their return

This they did learn

And then painstakingly recounted to avoid seed rejection

Sometimes you can only see bad seeds back at the lab, under a microscope.

Ivesia lycopodioides. Sadly, despite our over collecting, there were not enough viable seeds to send in.

Lepidospartum latisquamum. Bottom seed looks good, top seed never developed.

Atriplex polycarpa. This was such a hardy collection that even at 60% viability we still had more than enough.

Pictures for nearly every White Mountains collection were taken through a microscope (good vs bad seed). These will hopefully assist future teams in better assessing what a good seed truly looks like.

-orps

Carson City BLM

This week is the last in an amazing ten month internship with the BLM in Carson City, NV.   When I arrived here fresh out of grad school, I had plenty of education, but very little real world working experience in natural resources.  My time here has provided me with a wide variety of experiences and skills that I look forward to building upon in the future.  Here is a laundry list of all the activities us six interns have done here at Carson City this year: SOS seed collection, Emergency Stabilization and Rehabilitation monitoring and reporting, rare plant monitoring and surveys, plant identification, GIS map production and analysis, planted plugs of native species in restoration efforts, seven education and outreach events, herbarium production and management, mechanical control of weeds, and assisting range staff in rangeland assessment.  Of all of these activities, a few memorable things stand out.

The two seed collecting trips our crew made to Inyo National Forest were among my favorite trips of the internship.  These 450+ mile trips turned into week long adventures with brilliant views (see “A Penstemon heterodoxus Haiku” below).  On these trips we spent half of our time in the Sierra Nevada’s and half in the White Mountains, just to the east of the Sierras.  These trips were very fruitful (ha-ha), both in seed collections and in familiarizing ourselves with flora outside of our field office’s range.  The end of the first trip was highlighted by an opportunity to tag along on a field trip with botanist and White Mountains flora expert, Jim Morfield, who works with the Nevada Natural Heritage Program.

Another highlight from this internship was attending the Vegetation Rapid Assessment Releve workshop put on by the California Native Plant Society in Yosemite National Park.  This workshop was highly beneficial in that it taught me a vegetation assessment method that I was unfamiliar with.  But of course, the real highlights of the trip came after working hours when my fellow interns and I were able to explore the park.  This was my first visit to Yosemite, and I was quite awestruck by its beauty.  Of course, the valley was beautiful, but I also very much enjoyed walking through the many Sequoiadendron giganteum trees of the Mariposa grove at sunset.

The skill that I enjoyed building upon the most during my time here in Carson City, and will likely be among the most useful going forward, was plant identification.  I learned plant ID in a completely backwards way.  Assisting with research projects during my master’s program, I learned to recognize individual species within the project area.  From there I slowly worked up the hierarchy, recognizing some genera and families.  From my many hours here with my nose in a microscope and eyes glued to the pages of Intermountain Flora, I have gained a strong understand of plant taxonomy and classification.  I can now pick out differences between families, genera and species for a wide range of Great Basin plants.  Further, I am now comfortable with using a dichotomous key and the language associated with it, so I will be able to apply my ID skills to whatever ecosystem I end up in next.

One thing I heard over and over again during my master’s program was, “always try to add to and strengthen the tools in your professional tool belt.”  In a nutshell, this internship did exactly that.  A big thanks to CBG and especially my mentor, Dean Tonenna, for providing the opportunity for this awesome experience.

Sunset at Indian Creek Campground, where we hosted two educational summer camps for 7th and 8th graders

A smoky haze from the fire in Kings Canyon National Park envelops us while seed collecting adjacent to the John Muir Wilderness

Couds while ESR monitoring

Heterotheca villosa, key ID characteristic is it’s “double pappus”. Look closely and you will see two distinct lengths

Asclepias mexicana with Bombus

A salt flat in Dixie Valley, at the eastern edge of our district

Sunset Rainbow

Myself (left) and fellow intern, John, philosophizing

Greetings once again from the North Carolina Botanical Garden!  As autumn has progressed, we have been hard at work collecting more seeds of native Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain species.  In mid-October, my coworker and I far surpassed our personal record by making 37 seed collections during an 8-day trip!  With November marching on, the frosty early mornings are making me grateful that our SOS work is winding down.

Six months have come and nearly gone, and the SOS crew here at the North Carolina Botanical Garden find ourselves at the end of our internship season.  I could say that I can’t believe so much time has passed, but that’s not totally true.  After so many months of pretty much constant travel, I am feeling the need to settle down and be in one place for a while.  That’s not to say that I regret the work, though!  At this point, the crew has surpassed our goal of 200 collections for the year.  I feel a solid sense of accomplishment  about all these collections being banked by the Seeds of Success program.  This means that I have personally contributed to building a national seed bank to protect the genetic legacy of many native North-American plants.  According to the BLM website (BLM.gov),  “[t]he long-term conservation outcome of the SOS program is to support BLM’s Native Plant Materials Development Program, whose mission is to increase the quality and quantity of native plant materials available for restoring and supporting resilient ecosystems.”  I know that not everyone in this line of work really thinks about the bigger picture of why we are doing what we do.  I also know that I may be in the nerd-tastic minority, but I spend a lot of time thinking not only about issues of genetics and statistics that drive our technical protocol, but about how our project connects to the wider scene of conservation biology/ecology and land management in today’s society.  Suffice it to say that having the opportunity to do my own small part in building a big old germplasm library makes me feel that I’m working toward something very positive!   That same seed bank, and the ideas that helped form it, may help our culture move into the uncertain future of climate change, shifting land-use patterns, and ever-changing human population with more grace and adaptability than would otherwise have been possible.  Ok that’s enough of me waxing philosophical.  Here are some cool photos from our last few weeks of work:

I commute weekly to Chapel Hill from Asheville, NC. My westward trek at the end of the week means I get to enjoy beautiful sunsets while unwinding from work.

The clouds were particularly beautiful on this day of collecting Panicum amarum and Uniola paniculata on the dunes of Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia.

This field season presented me with many opportunities to appreciate the beauty of the coastal salt marshes in this region!  This one can be found at the Frank M. Ewing Robinson Neck Preserve on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Another scene I have come to appreciate better during my internship: the eerie elegance of the baldcypress swamp. This photo was taken at First Landing State Park in Virginia.

For the last two weeks of our internship, my coworkers and I will tie up loose ends, such as re-naming photo files, double checking data sheets, and packaging and shipping our last collections and voucher specimens.  Most of us look forward to beginning the second year of this project next spring.   I hope everyone else had an enlightening and fulfilling field season.  Until next year, happy hibernation!

Hello all,

The Native Plant Society of Texas Symposium (NPSOT) was a fantastic experience!(minus the Austin traffic) The atmosphere of the symposium was both professional and friendly, as were the many representatives of the agencies present.  I was able to attend a botany field trip at the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Preserve and  nearby conservation easements. The tour leader, a retired Fish and Wildlife employee, was very knowledgeable about the local flora of the area and enthusiastic about sharing his wisdom with us. Unfortunately, a few of the field trips near Bastrop State Park and the Lost Pines area had to be canceled due to a wildfire.  Topics presented at the symposium included: prairie restoration of parks, observations of the local flora, and the recovery of the Lost Pines from 2011 Bastrop fire. The presentation over the 2011 Bastrop Fire was quite ironic, considering some of the area included in that study was currently ablaze again. I would highly recommend to anyone, who is even slightly interested about Texas plants, to go to the next NPSOT meeting.

Helianthus maximiliani at Clymer Meadow.

The week after NPSOT, I had the privilege to be a guest on the Texas Nature Conservancy’s Clymer Meadow Preserve at Celeste, TX to survey for monarch butterflies and Ascelpias spp. I had previously learned about the preserve from one of my former professors, who happens to be the former preserve manager. It was an awesome feeling to be working at a place that I had previously studied in the classroom.

The migration of the monarch butterflies along the I-35 corridor ended with the coming of a major storm system that brought North Texas a tremendous amount of rain and cold weather. It has been three weeks since I have seen a monarch butterfly. The storm system not only ended the migration, it brought major flooding to Corsicana, TX, the town where my wife and I both live.

Monarch butterfly on Symphyotrichum ericoides at Clymer Meadow.

Stay warm my friends. Winter is coming.

-Keagan

Leaf litter from the aptly named red maple (Acer rubrum).

Falls has come and the maples trees have been turning brilliant colors.

Pickle weed (Salicornia depressa) turning a beautiful scarlet in the salt marshes of Massachusetts.

The beautiful flowers of the Witch Hazel come out as the other woodland species are dropping their leaves. Depending on the timing, these flowers can be hidden by the fall foliage or be wonderfully conspicuous as one of the bright spots in an otherwise bare forest.

One of the great joys of working outside is connecting with natural areas and seeing dramatic shifts occur throughout the seasons. Collecting seeds from a wide range of habitats, from mountain peaks to coast lines, has allowed the New England team for the Seeds of Success program to experience each season.

Early summer felt like spring would never leave us (after a particularly long and harsh winter) with cold rainy day and mud everywhere. This was a great time to familiarize ourselves with the team and the protocols that we would be using throughout the field season. As Summer came into full swing the days grew hotter and flowers bloomed all around us. Extremely hot days ensued, with us taking refuge in the shade in between collections.

Fall has come and the temperature has been dropping as the number of collections are picking up the pace. The cool, dry air works well with a lot of the wind dispersed species, which in this area can range from Milk Weeds (Asclepias sp.), Golden rods (Solidago sp.) and grasses (Littile blue stem, Schizachyrium scoparium in particular).

These days have been a delight to behold and with the sun low in the sky the autumn leaves are beautifully colored. Many of the places that we have been visiting all season have changed yet again, as a last hurrah before the inevitable winter. Soon enough the colors will fade and we will have a lot of white snow.

Things have been quite busy here in the Mojave. I recently went on a week-long field stint where we camped Saline Valley in Death Valley National Park. We used the campground at the hot springs as our home base, which was quite nice at the end of a day in the field! We were working with a group of Sierra Club volunteers and spent our days travelling to the BLM wilderness units across the valley to survey for tamarisk in the riparian areas. It was a great week!

Most of my time lately has been spent assisting with Rangeland Health Assessments and Proper Functioning Condition surveys. I’m learning to recognize more of our plant species as well as signs of land health. We’ve been travelling to new areas (well, new to me) of the field office which is always neat. At the higher elevation areas, we’ve even been getting snowed on. I really like snow but I have definitely become a cold baby, it didn’t take long for the desert to spoil me.

Last week I attended a two-day desert tortoise handling workshop. In the classroom we learned about the genetics, natural history, physiology, scat/sign, survey techniques, and laws/regulations for desert tortoises. During the field portions of the class we learned about differentiating scat from other vertebrates, fencing techniques, creating artificial burrows, the basic processing of an animal and screening for clinical signs of disease, and walking transects. We got to learn from and interact with some prominent desert tortoise folks, and it was a really interesting class.

Picking Penstemon

high atop the White Mountians

hands cold, view brilliant

The weather thus far in New England has been unseasonably mild as of late, with only one day below freezing through the end of Halloween.  The leaves on the oaks and aspens were turning beautiful shades of ochre and vermilion as October came to a close; most of these have since fallen.  With the weather on our side, the New England team has already exceeded our collection quota (239 of 200) for the season.  Consequently, not much is left for us to collect, save for certain late-season asters (e.g., Baccharis halimifolia) and species with persistent fruit (Ilex verticillata, for example).

Milkweed field and forest edge, Callahan State Park, MA

Sea myrtle (Baccharis halimifolia), Avalonia Land Conservancy, Stonington, CT

Winterberry (Ilex verticillata), Round Marsh, Jamestown, RI

It is hard to believe that this is my final month of the CLM internship; though the time flew by, I have learned an immense amount, not simply about plant identification and phenology but also the habits and function of these plants in their respective habitats.  It has given me an incredibly comprehensive understanding of the ecology of New England biomes, and I hope to apply this knowledge in future field internships, graduate school, and careers.

The time has flown by so quickly during my internship here in Alturas and, just like that, it’s already over! This internship has been a really amazing and valuable experience and I really could not have asked to be part of a better program. I started my internship with very little experience outside of undergraduate research and have gained so many valuable skills, including general monitoring and surveying protocols that can be useful in countless different field positions and specialized knowledge on the plant and bird diversity in northeastern California. Everyone that I met and got to know during the internship, at the BLM office and elsewhere, were more than friendly and were always helpful. Our mentor was incredibly knowledgeable and was able to ID essentially any plant species in our resource areas, regardless of reproductive stage. Just about everyday of work was enjoyable for me. Whether I was conducting raptor surveys and bird inventories, monitoring raptor nesting habitat, collecting seed, conducting rangeland health assessments, monitoring plant populations and so forth, I was being payed to hike through scenic wilderness areas and work with plants and animals. In addition to assisting our mentor (a botanist and rangeland manager) in fieldwork, we also worked with wildlife biologists and archeologists during the internship.

Alturas may not have been the best place to live as someone single and in their 20s, given the sparse human population in and around the area. Nevertheless, Alturas was a beautiful place to live. The South Warner Wilderness Area is about a 25-minute drive from Alturas, so I was able to frequently make trips there on the weekends. The Warner Mountains seem to be a hidden gem – aside from on Saturdays, I rarely encountered other hikers in spite of how spectacular the trails are. I did, however, frequently encounter bald eagles, golden eagles, great horned owls, and even a black bear on one occasion. My adventures through the Warners were incredible and, in my opinion, on par with hikes I’ve done through Yosemite, Lassen, and other areas in California.

one seeded pussy paws

Cows and calves

Sunrise over Alturas

Burney Falls

Baker’s globe mallow

Desmocerus aureipennis

raptor observation point

South Warner W.A.

The last two days of my internship I got to assist with the Bureau of Reclamation’s efforts in salvaging fish from the A canal on the Link River that occurs annually. Fish were herded with a seine net to one end of the fish screen, netted and placed in a large bin. The bin was then hoisted up and sent to a make shift table in which we sorted through the fish. Through the mayhem of fish we had to locate and remove all suckers. The majority of fish being Blue or Tui chubs. Once you got a search image down, locating them became much easier. Overall I estimate we sorted through over 500,00 fish. Suckers were placed into a holding tank to then be processed. They were measured, some clipped for DNA and PIT tagged. They were then released in a spring fed stream that connects back to Upper Klamath Lake. More suckers were found than was expected, last year only 123 fish were caught, this year was over 300.

Fish being hoisted up out of the pit.

So many fish!

Julie Day (USFWS, Fish Biologist) and Bureau of Reclamation Staff sorting through fish.

It has been a great experience working at the US Fish and Wildlife Office in Klamath Falls, Oregon. I’m leaving with a more robust knowledge of fish biology and ecology plus a slew of new skills. With MOCC (Motor operator certification course) training standing out the most. Being able to use that knowledge and apply it to the rearing of an endangered species was extremely rewarding. But I’ve also learned a great deal more about the endangered species act (ESA), in its implementation and impact. And being a part of data collection for a biological opinion, which is a major component of the ESA. I’ve also learned the importance first hand of cooperation with other government agencies and NGO’ s in conservation.

Me, Erica and Nic, looking awesome in waders.

I will definitely miss working here in Klamath; I was able to work with some really great and inspiring people who I hope to keep in touch with. I am gearing up for a bunch of traveling. I’m headed to Seattle first, then Maryland, Vermont, New York and perhaps a trip to Ethiopia (fingers crossed). And after all that traveling I hope to continue a career in wildlife biology and conservation.