First, I will tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Erica and I grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago, IL. I went to college at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO and graduated this past December. I have a degree in Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology with a concentration in Conservation. After graduating, I worked for the USGS FORT Science Center in a lab processing macro invertebrates for a Jams project. I was thrilled to be offered an internship through the CLM. My internship is with the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Klamath Falls, OR. I had never been to Oregon before moving here. Oregon is so beautiful!!! I am working with two other interns, Nicki and Alia. We are currently assisting with three projects.

Josh, our mentor, has us rearing and monitoring Lost River (Deltistes luxatus) and shortnose suckers (Chasmistes brevirostris). Both are currently listed as endangered. A major contributing factor to their decline was crucial habitat loss and/or degradation. Due to high mortality rates of larvae and juveniles, their recovery is limited. My first week, we went out into the field at night to collect sucker larvae. We collected the larvae with a sweep net dropped off of two bridge sites. Kircher’s bridge is absolutely gorgeous.

Kircher’s Bridge.

Before we started collecting, we saw a Bald Eagle eating a fish near the water. It was awesome! We collected at these sites for two nights until we had a significant amount of larvae (estimated over 2,000). We placed them into water pens at the office. We will monitor and feed them until we transfer them into our net pen docks that are within natural waters. We will continue to study and monitor the suckers until we release them near the end of the internship. This week we built the docks at Rocky Point. Today we installed the nets. We will transfer the larvae into the net pens next week.

Alia at the water pens!

Floating Docks.

Julie, a Fish Biologist, has us assisting with a rearing program for the Lost River and shortnose suckers. We will monitor three different sized fishponds. These ponds are not stocked yet. Last Friday was my first time at the ponds. We monitored for predators and fish. We collected water levels and sonde data.

One of the three ponds.

Darrick, a Senior Fish Biologists, has us assisting with Applegate’s Milk-vetch (Astragalus applegatei) surveys. The Applegate’s Milk-vetch is currently listed as endangered. We will be surveying for this milk-vetch at the Crater Lake Klamath Regional Airport. The airport has planned to expand and develop another runway. We will be in the field all next week conducting surveys.

I started my internship May 11th. My first week I went into the field two times (stated above) but most of the time I was at the MOCC (Motorboat Operation Certification Course). I learned a lot of useful information during this course. I had never driven a boat before and did not know how to tie boating knots. Now I feel 100xs more confident about boating. I will definitely use everything I learned at MOCC throughout this internship.

Completed Net Pen Docks!

My second week consisted of various required training. I went out into the field one day to collect zooplankton for our larvae. It is so neat to see how much life is in the water! This is my third week and it has been a busy one. We built the floating docks, prepared the nets, and installed the net pens. Brock and James from BOR helped us. It is so beautiful here. It looks like we will be out in the field most of the summer. AWESOME! Everyone at the office has been so welcoming and nice. I am beyond grateful for this opportunity. I am excited to see how the rest of the summer goes.

Till next time,

~Erica

After my third week I can say I’ve successfully explored a large swathe of my Cedar City field office. My work so far has encompassed a plethora of activities from Mexican Spotted Owl surveys in Kanarraville to point-counts in Hamlin Valley. As a wildlife technician for the Cedar City BLM, it is my duty to survey large areas of land for wildlife so that the BLM can properly assess and treat locations with species of concern.

Once such species is the sage grouse, which is a member of the pheasant family and is roughly the size of a chicken. It is dependent on an environment composed entirely of sage brush. This makes managing for sagebrush habitat an instrumental part in prevent their listing as an endangered species. My work thus far has put me on the forefront of monitoring for both sage grouse and any other wildlife exploiting the sagebrush habitat.

Relaxing in front of the sagebrush sea.

Outside of sage grouse monitoring, my team and I have surveyed for raptors and raptor nests along unauthorized trails. These unauthorized trails pose a danger to both the public and wildlife. It is the hope of our BLM to help create new trails that allow outdoor enthusiasts a fun and safe environment, while protecting native/migratory birds, mammals, and reptiles. My surveys are the first step in improving the path of these trails to help avoid clashes with wildlife hotspots.

Surveying for raptor nests.

Finally, we were able to participate in Migratory Bird Day. There we, and a number of other government programs, set up activities and educational booths to help teach the community the importance of migratory birds. Programs like these help ensure a healthy relationship between the public and our government agencies.  All of this combined has made for a tremendous experience so far. I look forward to finding out what else my CLM internship has in store for me.

Hello all. I have been in Lander, Wyoming for about two weeks now. I moved here from Minnesota, which is a very different place than Wyoming. One of my first thoughts after moving here was that I had never seen so much open space in my life. There are very few trees, making it easy to see for miles in every direction.  The habitat here is considered sagebrush steppe, a landscape dominated by sagebrush (Artemisia) species and short bunchgrasses. This area of the country has a semi-arid climate and there is much less water here than I am accustomed to.  Lander is located at the base of the Wind River Mountains. From many places in the field office you can see snow capped mountains in the distance.

The sagebrush steppe habitat in the Lander Feild Office.

My first couple weeks at work has consisted mainly of introductions and training. Various employees have been taking my fellow intern and I out for tours of the field office. The Lander Field Office manages 2.2 million acres, so there is a lot to see. We are just starting to get oriented so we can eventually head out to the field by ourselves. Much of the land is only accessible on two-track dirt roads, so we have been doing quite a bit of off road driving. We have also started talking about some of the projects we will be working on over the course of our internship. We will be doing quite a bit of rangeland monitoring, which involves monitoring key species to measure both the intensity and the impact of grazing in different grazing allotments. We will also be doing some experimental repair of wetlands in areas where livestock have caused “hummocking” of the wetland. We will also be doing some seed collection of native species with the Seeds Of Success program.

One of the prettier areas in the field office

I have started learning some of the native species in the field office. One of the rangeland specialists helped us with some identification tips in the field and we have also been studying from the herbarium. Many of the plants are species I have never seen before, which I find exciting. Out in the field last week I got to see Indian Paintbrush (Castilleja linariaefolia) for the first time.

Wyoming Indian Paintbrush (Castilleja linariaefolia)

We have also seen a lot of wildlife in the field. I’ve seen hundreds of Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana), they seem to be everywhere. Also many mule deer (Odocoileus heminous), rabbits, horned toads (Phrynosoma douglasi brevirostre), and a few elk (Cervus canadensis).

Pronghorn are generally very skittish. However, we got pretty close to this one in the truck.

It looks like it will be a great season, I can’t wait to see what it will bring. Until next time!

Erin, Lander Field Office, Bureau of Land Management- Wyoming

Taking Root is the title of a documentary telling the compelling story of Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai. A seemingly innocuous idea, Maathai discovered that tree planting had a ripple effect of empowering change. Planting trees for fuel, shade, and food is not exactly something that anyone would envision as the first step toward winning such a prestigious award, but as the trees grew, a spirit of hope and confidence also grew in ordinary citizens. Now over twenty years and thirty-five million trees later, the physical and social landscape of Kenya has completely changed.
Many children have few opportunities to break away from their screen oriented lives and get outside to participate in positive outdoor activities and experience nature in a fun way. Over the past school year I have had the chance to provide such opportunities once a month for a local class of third graders through a program known as Taking Root. With the objective of garnishing meaningful interactions between children and the open spaces around them; I was able to share and model my enthusiasm about nature and caring for the environment with 26 youngsters. Unlike so many school activities, lessons in this program were not standard driven; the idea was never to get children to understand the big ecologic picture, but to teach attitudes of curiosity, responsibility, and care for the environment. This was done through the intimate study of individual landscape features: plants, bugs, birds, water, etc. All within a preserved open space just beyond the back fence of the playground. Rather than focusing on proper identification, activities were based on observation and formation of meaningful memories; cattails became known as hotdog plants and mountain chickadee are “cheese-bur-ger” birds.
School and life in general, for a third grader is exceptionally riddled with rules. Just as it is for adults, nature provides the chance for escape and undistracted enjoyment of the moment. It’s okay to run, yell, and throw rocks, if you’re not hoping to see wildlife that is. Environmental education is an opportunity to show kids that school is not a form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world. Similarly to the way Wangari Maathai helped progress a nation using the environment as a tool toward empowerment; our interactions with Mother Nature and her children are the beginnings of potential preservation and conservation. Can we teach children to look at a flower and see all the things it represents: beauty, the health of an ecosystem, and beyond? Can we test for that? Or should we simply appreciate a child’s infatuation with something beautiful and leave the rest up to them?

A multitude of projects are keeping us Carson City interns quite busy.  The last couple of weeks have been centered around seed collections.  The early season bloomers Lomatium austinae and Amsinckia tessellata were our top priorities and multiple collections were made across our range.  While on these trips, we were kept on our toes by rain, thunderstorms and muddy BLM roads.  Of course, we always welcome the rain in the desert.  We were also able to collect several vouchers of plants for future collections.  The team is also busy preparing for a number of education and outreach events planned throughout the summer.   Collection of native plant materials and research are things we have done thus far in preparation.  A number of different monitoring projects are also being undertaken by our crew.  These include rare species monitoring, drought monitoring and fire rehab monitoring.  While everyone is loving all the time spent in the field, we are all very excited to travel to Yosemite to attend a workshop put on by the California Native Plant Society in two weeks!

Hardscrabble allotment overlooking Pyramid Lake

Cirsium occidentale (native)

Cleome lutea

A chilly morning in the Pine Nuts…

….but very beautiful!

Calochortus nuttallii

 

Spring in Nevada has brought exceptionally cool and rainy weather. However, we need all the rain and snow that we can get before the hot, sunny days of summer begin. According to NRCS, the Sierra Nevada Mountains have less than 25% of the average snowpack (based on a median between 1981 and 2010)! I’m very thankful for the rainy days. It has been wonderful to see fresh snow blanketing the mountain summits and ridges. Hopefully, it will prolong the accumulation of dust on the trails.

Well, I haven’t written a blog for a while now, and I apologize for the delay. So much has happened since the last time I wrote about our adventures. I don’t even know where to begin. I’ll just focus on the highlights of the past month.

We are out in the field nearly every day now. Most of our field work has been the collection of herbarium vouchers and seeds from early flowering species. We have now collected seeds from Lomatium austiniae and Amsinckia tessellata. I have found the collection of seeds very peaceful. During my wandering around in the seed collection sites, I often stir small lizards and birds from their shelter within the sagebrush and greasewood. Last week, during the collection of A. tessellata, I saw two horny toads! These were the first horny toads I have ever seen in Nevada. I’m surprised it took me so long to find them.

Antelope Bitterbrush (Purshia tridentata) in bloom.

There is a lot of work to do in the herbarium at the University of Nevada in Reno. Maggie, Olivia, and I went to the herbarium on a rainy Friday several weeks ago. We identified species and used herbarium specimens to verify current and past SOS collections. The days out in the field are splendid; but, every once in a while, you need to spend some quality time with a dichotomous key, plant identification books, and a microscope.

A day at the herbarium, University of Nevada-Reno.

A couple weeks ago, we ventured into the Pine Nut Mountains for an overnight camping trip. We were planning on monitoring Ivesia pityocharis and collecting more herbarium vouchers and seeds. The first day of our trip began with beautiful weather – cool, but sunny. Yet, as the sun fell behind the Sierra Nevadas, a storm began its own descent upon us. In the vanishing evening light, we quickly pitched our tents, cooked and ate our dinners as fast as we could, zipped up tent doors, and slept through a silent night of falling snow. The next morning, I opened up my tent door to an inch of snow, low visibility, and cold temperatures. As we made tea next to the fire, we realized that monitoring and collecting herbarium vouchers was not possible that day. But I guess that is field work. You just never know what might happen and, at least, we gave it our best shot!

A snowy morning in the Pine Nut Mountains.

I’ve been going into the wilderness as much as I can. About three weeks ago, some of the other interns and I went to Bridgeport, CA for a weekend. We backpacked a little into the Hoover Wilderness, where we hiked around and went fishing. I didn’t catch any fish on my fly-rod. I’m hoping to go out again in the next couple weekends. I would love to catch a Golden Trout! I have never before explored the Great Basin Desert and Sierras, and I’m glad this job opportunity has allowed me to wander through these areas.

Hoover Wilderness, CA.

The Flume Trail, Lake Tahoe.

The San Juan Islands National Monument includes a variety of public lands.  Each have their own value and allure.  There are historic light house locations, where you can view orcas from the porch of light keeper’s quarters.  There are small rocks and islands, some of which disappear completely at high tide.  Others consist of forest, cliffs, and coastal grassland, with amazing views and more amazing plant and lichen communities.  Among these locations, few are more scenic than Iceberg Point on Lopez Island.

Ranunculus californicus at Iceberg Point

Zygadenus venosusus

Eriophyllum lanatum

Iceberg Point is an 88 acre parcel of land on the south west portion of the island.  It’s a mix of forest, small pockets of prairie, and intertidal rocks.  As with other sites in the San Juan Islands, it was tended for hundreds of years by Salish tribes, who would live in the area in the summer seasons.  These areas were burned regularly and probably weeded to an extent to promote the growth of Camas (Camassia leichtinii and quamash) and other food crops.  Though these burns ended almost a century ago, we still see their legacy in the vibrant wildflower community here.  Each spring is an eruption of blue and yellow, purple and pink.  The common flowers include great camas (Camassia leichtinii), meadow death camas (Zygadenus venosusus), taper tip onion (Allium acuminatum), chocolate lily (Fritillaria affinis), Oregon sunshine (Eriophyllum lanatum), Coastal gumweed (Grindelia integrifolia), western and Californian buttercups (Ranunculus occidentalis and californicus), lance leaf sedum (Sedum spathulifolium), early spring violet (Viola adunca), blue eyed grass (Sisirynchium angustifolium), spring gold (Lomatium utriculatum), and prickly pear (Opuntia fragilis).  It also includes three listed imperiled species: California buttercup (Ranunculus californicus), showy Jacob’s ladder (Polemonium pulcherrimum), and white topped aster (Sericocarpus rigidus).

Viola adunca

Camassia leichlinii

With its robust plant community the sound, Iceberg Point has long been a favorite spot of botanists and the Lopez Island community.  People nearby think of Iceberg as their backyard, and walking its trails every day is a form of meditation for many residents. However, Iceberg Point faces several challenges.  Since fire and grazing (Iceberg Point was grazed for a short period) have been removed from the landscape, there has been considerable encroachment from shrubs and trees.  In many spots, what used to be dense camas gardens have turned into thickets of rose and snowberry (Rosa nutkana and Symphoricarpos albus).  In other areas, young stands of Doug Fir (Psuedostuga menzezii) and Grand Fir (Abies grandis) have shaded out shrubs as the land slowly returns to its natural state.  Iceberg Point has also seen an increase in use in recent years.  New user- created trails pop up each year, creating a mosaic of footpaths cutting through sensitive lichen heaths and plant communities.  Trails cut through populations of all three listed species on Iceberg Point.  It bums me out.

Delphinium menzesii

Iceberg Point was included in the San Juan Islands National Monument in 2013.  This proclamation has brought more attention and likely more people to visit places like Iceberg Point, a fact that many residents bemoan.   However, Monument status also means permanent protection of some clearly defined natural values.  As people enter into monument planning, deciding what is important to the landscape, I have great hope that they will make it a goal to protect the integrity of Iceberg Point.  I acknowledge (sometimes begrudgingly) that we all have the right to visit these beautiful and historic public lands.  As public land managers and citizens, we also have the responsibility to conserve, protect, and restore those lands for the benefit of both visitors and community, both plant and people.