Greetings,

The last couple of weeks, I have been supervising surveys for Pediomelum pentaphyllum and Peniocereus greggii var. greggii. In southern New Mexico, grassland was once extensive and dominated primarily by Bouteloua eriopoda, but overgrazing (especially in the 1890s) and perhaps other factors (climate change is a possible contributing factor) have resulted in most of our low-elevation grasslands being replaced by shrublands dominated by Larrea tridentata and Prosopis glandulosa. In an effort to reverse this trend, the BLM and others have been conducting herbicide treatments, primarily with pelleted tebuthiuron. Unfortunately, tebuthiuron is a fairly broad-spectrum herbicide, affecting most eudicots to some extent, and can therefore kill non-target plants… including rare ones! So, in areas where herbicide treatment has been proposed we go out and survey for rare plants to ensure that protected species are not being killed. Interestingly, there seems to be a spike in forb diversity in about the first decade after these herbicide treatments. The vegetation dynamics are not understood very well as yet, though, so when rare plants are involved we try to play it safe and exclude them from herbicide treatments.

In southwestern New Mexico, the rare species that might be adversely affected are usually Pediomelum pentaphyllum and Peniocereus greggii var. greggii. Most of the treatments that have been proposed for later this year and next year might affect Peniocereus greggii var. greggii but are unlikely to include plausible habitat for Pediomelum pentaphyllum, so Peniocereus greggii var. greggii has been our primary focus. We’ve been heading outside and walking lines at 100 meter intervals across these proposed treatments looking for it. We’ve found 16 plants on proposed treatments so far. Apart from helping us design these herbicide treatments to avoid rare plants, this lets us go outside and walk through pretty places! Here’s one of the areas we walked through last week, around Antelope Pass in Hidalgo County, New Mexico:

We have also encountered one of the hazards of botanizing in New Mexico: when the rains are good and plants are happy, the roads are bad. They get washed out. Arroyos that are dry 364 days a year are suddenly flooded. Low-lying areas that are usually hard clay become brown slime. So, this is a “road” (really, it is a road, we drove down it a couple weeks prior with no problem):

And this is a stuck truck, supervised by Michael Kolikant:

Finally, in an attempt to break the record for most pictures in a CLM blog post (if there is such a thing) here are a bunch of Peniocereus greggii var. greggii that we found. The basic problem with these critters is that they generally look an awful lot like dead sticks, and they usually live in the middle of shrubs (especially Larrea tridentata). This makes spotting them difficult. I think I’m getting the hang of it.

Yeah, that’s a lot of pictures of Peniocereus greggii var. greggii. However, my guess is that this is an average of 1 per 3 miles walked. They’re out there, but they are sparse and not easy to spot…

My second month at the Surprise Field Office has been busy. Fellow CLM intern Amy and I have been working hard to meet our goal of 16 collections. We’ve got 10 so far, and are currently working on 2 species of grasses. The main challenge has been finding riparian areas with sufficient populations to collect. It’s also been raining here on and off for the past 2 weeks, so a lot of our riparian areas are totally flooded. The rain is definitely a good thing, but we’re not able to collect anything when it’s so wet.

The rest of the time I’ve been working on an Environmental Assessment of a juniper reduction project we’re proposing. It’s still in its early stages, so writing it is a fairly dull task, but we’re grinding along. Learning how to write NEPA documents is something I’m really glad to be learning. I’m not sure where else I would be able to get this experience without any prior knowledge of the NEPA process. I’ve been taking some time to do online GIS courses through ESRI as well. I had almost no GIS experience coming into CLM but I now feel comfortable navigating the program and using its basic functions. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to integrate my new GIS knowledge into my NEPA report.

Here’s to another month of new experiences.

Matt Phillips
BLM Surprise Field Office

As things move to coasting speed in the world of the suckers, I have gotten a chance to branch out and help with other projects around the office. Namely bull trout research. The last five years of CLM interns have spent several weeks every summer electrofishing and tagging bull trout as well as red bands and browns. Fellow intern, Casey, and I joined in the tradition and raided the office’s communal supplies of camping gear for a great week of trout work. Electrofishing is like high speed treasure hunting for science. You walk up a stream and turn on the circular cathode of the electroshocker in areas that look like good trout habitat to create a current strong enough to temporarily knock out the fish. Ideally these are deeper sections with slower moving water. It took me a while to realize this. At first one area that the team leaders would say looked good, would look identical to another that they would pass by. But then it gets exciting. The stream can be totally clear and you won’t see any fish until you turn on the electroshocker. Instantly there will be trout everywhere and you will need to move fast to catch them before they get away or wake up from the stun. It doesn’t matter how many fish you catch, every one elicits cheering with bonus points for more than one fish at a time or stylistic grabs. It may be my new favorite thing.

Casey and I also got the opportunity to learn to tag the bull trout. Sticking a sharp needle with a tag into the back of a small fish is very intimidating for someone who has never even really handled fish before, but I got the hang of it. It helped that the other guys we were with caught and killed an invasive brown trout for us to practice on. It felt a little like a cat bringing home a dead mouse for their helpless kittens to learn how to hunt, but I appreciated the help.

Only a few days after electroshocking, we were given another chance to get out of Klamath Falls, Oregon for a few days. To check on our sucker rearing pens in the middle of the lake, we need to be able to drive the office’s two boats. The Department of the Interior requires that you have passed a Motorboat Operator Certification Course to do this, so off to Orofino, Idaho we went to spend three days playing with fast boats on a reservoir… I mean “working with”…yeah. Now Casey and I are free to go out in the field and deal with our ornery boats all by ourselves. This is a freeing feeling but also a little scary since our mud boat spontaneously decides to stop behaving sometimes. I’m sure we can handle it though. And if not, that’s why we pack extra oars.

Never a dull moment with Fish and Wildlife!

Until next time,
Alanna

On the hunt for trout!

Casey sizing up a trout

I’m tagging fish! And rocking a great outfit.

A bucket of trout ready to be tagged.

A bull trout

Hello from Missoula,

It has been another busy month here at the Missoula BLM office. While temperatures have been pretty consistently in the 90’s, fire season smoke has not seemed to hit us too badly yet. My fellow interns and I have continued to conduct forest inventory on an almost daily basis, but we have had some chances to search for Whitebark pine (an infrequently spotted species on our lands), and I was able to camp with several other seasonal employees to conduct integrated vegetation monitoring for a week. I continue to have a great time here in Missoula both at work and outside of work, and I am still learning new skills and techniques each week. I have taken many pictures over the course of the month, a few are below!

– Vince Fasanello

It’s just about the halfway point for me and I am starting to get a bit worried about making my seed collection target of 30 species (maybe we shouldn’t have been so ambitious, I am only one person after all and I’m only at about 10). Some days are much less fruitful than others; I just spent about an hour trying to ID a plant that turned out to be the noxious Russian Knapweed, Acroptilon repens (yuck! I wanted so badly for it to be a native!). I guess I still need to brush up on my weed ID skills. I haven’t had the chance to go out in the field with the weeds specialist yet, but I did get to go out on the river and that was spectacular.

So the river of which I speak is the Missouri River, which is about 2 hours north of Lewistown, where I am stationed. One of the largest rivers in the US, it flows for 2,341 miles from the mountains in western MT to the Mississippi River in Missouri. It is a sight for sore eyes seeing so much water after weeks of dry heat that has turned the ground into a solid brick. OK, I lied a bit; Lewistown has a beautiful spring running through town, which is actually the third largest freshwater spring in the world at 50,000 gallons per minute with some of the world’s purest water. I am pretty spoiled with excellent drinking water, but other than that it is pretty dry.

The 149 mile stretch of river on which I boated is part of the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, meaning it is land that will be protected from development forever. The proclamation of the monument was actually made by President Bill Clinton right before he left office and much of it looks the same today as it would have when Lewis and Clark navigated the river in the early 1800s. There are some cattle grazing allotments (grandfathered in) along the river today and that was one of the reasons I went on the river, to help with fence repair. The BLM manages the monument and is responsible for the up-keep of some of the fence lines, especially near the river where the water level fluctuates, which constantly changes the end point of the fences. Lewis and Clark had predicted that the land surrounding the river would be almost impossible for settlement, but yet it happened when homesteaders came in the early 1900s and the remnants can be seen today in the grazing cattle and remaining standing structures. The land surrounding the river is known as the “breaks”, the term for the dramatic draws and cliffs that the river has created in the sandstone over time. We boated for 30 miles upriver while I scanned the breaks for big horn sheep, bald eagles and other wildlife. The 30 miles seemed like an endless journey through almost pure wilderness and I would have missed the sheep completely had Aurora, who manages this area, not pointed them out to me.
Some days when I am out scouting for plants alone I often have no luck in finding a large enough population or only find species whose seed have passed. Lately, what has made up for the lack of plant luck is my luck in coming across bird nesting areas, especially the all-important species of concern. I have been dive-bombed by goshawks, which was very frightening. They would fly straight at my head and I couldn’t help but duck even though they’d veer off at the last minute. I also thought I was going to be carried off by a golden eagle when less than 20ft away, I startled it and watched the massive creature rise out of the grass ready for it to turn back toward me and finish me off. Thankfully that didn’t happen, I just watched him soar and discovered his mother and their nest in a cottonwood. Maybe my mentors are turning me toward wildlife…

Big horn sheep!

Lamb!

Fritillary on Gaillardia aristata

Goshawk eyeing me suspiciously.

Goshawk on the defense

July at the BLM Grand Junction Field Office provided more fun work experiences and opportunities than the ongoing search for the Colorado Hookless Cactus in the North Desert. I was able to join about 20 office employees on a field trip to Pine Ridge, an area near DeBeque where a 40,000 acre fire raged in 2012, the largest my office has dealt with. The purpose of the trip was for everyone to see how fire rehabilitation efforts were working, despite some initial complications, such as the fire happening at the end of a fiscal year so they were not able to chain and re-seed as soon as they hoped to. And then there was little rain for about a year for what they did seed, but things are looking okay for most areas with a few areas dominated by Bromus tectorum, of course. The first thing they seeded was a manufactured sterile grass to just stabilize the soil and prevent erosion (they had a big problem after the fire of ash and soil eroding into nearby water supplies) and even though it was supposed to be sterile it is still around a little bit… They did not re-seed any forbs so it was good to see some globemallow and others popping up on their own!

We have ventured beyond the desert to some creek beds and canyons to search for Sclerocactus glaucus and were rewarded one day with seeing wild horses! They were beautiful but I felt a little bad because as soon as they saw us they immediately froze and didn’t twitch an ear or flick a tail while we snacked nearby for 20 minutes. Eventually the mother and colt continued grazing but the others didn’t dare move at all until we left.

Wild Horses

We also got to help the office hydrologist do a stream health assessment in the Dominguez Escalante National Conservation Area. We did macroinvertebrate sampling and discharge and flow rate monitoring. The water was high from monsoonal rains and it felt soooo good!

Macroinvertebrate sampling

macroinvertebrate sampling

Flow rate and discharge monitoring

I took last week off to visit my fiance who is working in Jackson, Wyoming and my mom drove from NC to meet me there. We went to Yellowstone and Teton National Parks and saw these guys pretty close up (it was scary when one tourist started whistling at the grizzly bear….):

Elk

Grizzly bear

Elk

Baby bison

My mom and I then continued on a little road trip to visit Ouray, Telluride, Mount Evans (where I saw bristlecone pines over 1,000 years old!), Denver, Rocky Mountain National Park, Eagle, and Glenwood Springs. I especially loved RMNP because above the treeline was cloudy and misty and reminded me so much of Ireland and Scotland, and I also finally saw a moose!

Back to work this week!

Lindsey B,

BLM GJFO, Colorado

The past month has been both fantastic and exhausting! Most of my July was spent in the backcountry: I first spent two weeks on the remote Sitkinak Island (SE of Kodiak Island) where I served as a biotech/botanist for an NRCS Soil/Eco Site Survey, then cashed in all of my accrued comp hours to go backpacking in the Bitterroots with one of my best friends.

As is the case for southern Kodiak Island, spruce and alder have yet to reach Sitkinak. This makes ecological site descriptions a bit more complicated than usual: because most of the preexisting descriptions involve alder and spruce or their eventual succession, the communities on Sitkinak don’t quite “fit” the typical community delineations. Though that’s ultimately a task for the senior NRCS ecologist to tackle, I thoroughly enjoyed discussing what it means to be a Reference Plant Community in this context, and the pros and cons of our current methodology for site description.

In the absence of alder and spruce, then, the island is dominated by forbs, graminoids, and occasional Salix sp. which is quite alright with the 500 or so cattle whose ancestors have inhabited the island since 1937.  The Alaska Meat Company currently holds the grazing rights for both East and West Sitkinak, and for you omnivores out there interested in conscientious meat consumption, it’s difficult to beat the degree of “free range” achieved on Sitkinak.

It’s also hard to beat the views that Sitkinak affords. It would seem our NRCS crew somehow pleased the gods, because the skies remained blue for eleven of our fourteen days on usually-grey-and-misty Sitkinak.

Until next time, I’ll leave you folks with a few highlights of the island!

Looking out at Kodiak over an Eriophorum-Sphagnum dominated swale

Looking east toward the northern end of east Sitkinak

Looking east toward the southern end of east Sitkinak

Sitkinak’s primary river

The lagoon dividing the two islands

Solidago-graminoid plains

Diggin’ holes and findin’ plants!

I woke up this morning and went on the balcony to find a pleasant surprise…It was raining! It wasn’t the pouring Midwest rain with which I am acquainted, but it was lovely nontheless.  I looked to the Sierras, and there was a mist hovering above them. It was kind of mystic. I opted to ride my bike to work despite the rain. I mean, there hasn’t been a morning like this since the first week I arrived in Carson City back in February, so I had to savor this rainy morning. Plus I have rain pants, which made that decision easier.

On the business side of things, I would like to officialy welcome our two new interns to the CLM crew, Mary and Arie. Their first day was last Monday, and they’ve already settled in quite nicely. We took them to Sand Mountain (which we have dubbed Butter Mountain) to seed collect Distichlis spicata. We visited a few other places to collect seed, including the beautiful Pine Nuts, where we collected Carex Nebrascensis. We are to receive ATV training tomorrow. Needless to say, we are all super stoked about applying this training out in the field. Well, that’s all for now. Until next time!

Alex

Well fire season has certainly picked up around these parts. The whole valley is filled with smoke from local fires as well as fires from northern California. It makes for some interesting field work for sure. Extraordinarily dry fuels, drought, and lots of lightning don’t help either.

What it looks like outside right now

But other than the fire chaos happening, I’ve been picking up new GIS projects for the minerals department. Mineral deposits are kind of a big deal down here as southern Oregon has plenty of mining history and even some of the towns are basically old gold rush towns. I’ve been digitizing maps of known deposits that correlate to the geology maps we have. We’re doing this to see what valuable areas may be within areas of critical environmental concern. In addition to that, I’ve been writing a lot of reports of the geology of the mining districts down here to help the archaeologists in our Abandoned Mine Lands program. The geology down here is quite interesting and can vary greatly between districts even though the spatial distance between them is small. For instance, one area may be a granite intrusion type area known as a porphyry style deposit, and another may be a volcanic massive sulfide type deposit which is basically a black smoker vent from an ancient sea floor that are now on land.

Studying and learning about the mining history and all the different types of geology around here is becoming quite the interesting project. Hopefully the smoke-filled valleys will die down soon and field work will be a little easier, but that may not happen anytime soon. Anyway, I’m off to Portland to the state office to help out with some GIS projects in minerals this week.

Until next time,

Morgan

BLM Medford