Its been a little over a week back from the CLM internship conference in Chicago.  It’s also been a little over two months into my internship in the San Juan Islands National Monument.  I’ve spent the bulk of my first two months planning my project and creating databases for my information.  Now I’m finally at a point where I get to the field nearly every day.  Let me tell you, I don’t miss the computer time.

Last week, I completed several forestry surveys, line point intercept surveys, and recorded several listed rare species in the archipelago.  I worked primarily on Lopez Island, the homebase of the monument, but got to spend a day on the beautiful Patos Island.  Patos is a two hundred acre island and is the very northwest point of the continental United States.  On it is a lighthouse, 8 campsites, and plants not seen anywhere else in the archipelago (namely Columbia Lily and While Fawn Lily).  It’s also a great spot to view marine life, with frequent seal, oystercatcher, peregrine falcon, eagle, and porpoise sitings, and less frequently ocra sitings.  I came to Patos with Keepers of the Patos Lighthouse, a group that works to maintain the island with monthly work parties and stays on the island during the summer months to educate its thousands of visitors about the lighthouse and its history.  Though I wasn’t helping them with work party I saw them remove loads of blackberry and maintain the trail.  It’s always impressive to see how much work they can accomplish in a day.  Also around on Patos that day was the American Hiking Association; they had been volunteering with various public lands that week and were on Patos to help maintain the trail.

My time on Patos and on Lopez last week was largely spent in the forest.  The salal, roses, Himalayan and trailing blackberries don’t make it easy to reach a sample point, but I’ve found the forest systems of these islands fascinating.  The topography, soil type, bedrock, and water availability are hugely variable within any given parcel of land on the islands, and these abrupt changes can be seen looking at the forest canopy.  The Douglas Fir is the dominant tree in the San Juan Islands as well as most of the western coast.  However, I often come across pockets where grand fir, red cedar, rarely sitka spruce or bigleaf maple dominate where conditions are favorable.  While west coast tree diversity often pales in comparison to the east, I was impressed to find a stand on Patos island dominated by Grand Fir and Douglas Fir, with Red Cedar, Douglas Maple, Western Yew making the understory tree community.

Typical Douglas Fir forest in San Juan Islands, WA

This week I spent surveying land on coastal bluffs.  This means lots of grass identification and not a lot of plant diversity.  Still, I can’t complain about the view.

View from line point intercept sample point at Point Colville, Lopez Island, WA

Here are a few pictures captured within the last few weeks of field work.  I hope everyone is having a great field season with lots of collections and tons of new plants.

Jen McNew

Spotted Coralroot (Corallohiza malculata) in early July on Lopez Island

Nodding onion (Allium cernuum)

Hooker’s Onion (Allium acuminatum)

Harvest brodiaea (Brodiaea elegans)

Orange trumpet Honeysuckle (Lonicera ciliosa)

We have fish! We spent a week setting drift nets between 8 pm and 1 am (when the larval suckers are higher in the water column), off a bridge over a river where the adult fish are known to spawn. The first night we filled two coolers with tiny fish. We left them in the coolers over night, with a bubbler to keep the water oxygenated, and then transferred them to the pens the next morning. Each night we got fewer fish, but in a week we managed to collect enough to fill three of our five pens. The remaining two pens we filled with larval suckers brought up from a hatchery in California. The fish from the hatchery are Lost River suckers, the fish we caught are either Lost River or short nose suckers, they’re still too small to tell which. With any luck they’ll be short nose suckers, but either way, they’ll be valuable in testing and developing methods of rearing larval suckers.

Dock in progress at Tule Lake site.

Pens at Upper Klamath Late site.

Nets set at night to collect larvae.

Algae at one of the pens.

Since getting the larvae into the pens, we’ve been working on deploying Data Sondes to monitor water quality. We’re particularly interested in, among other things, dissolved oxygen because at some point in the season the algae is going to start blooming rapidly. Not too long after that, it will all die and the dissolved oxygen is going to plummet. At that point, we’ll be setting up an aeration system with a generator powering a bubbler that will aerate the pens 24/7 until conditions improve. So the focus over the next few weeks will be to get a good system down for reading and re-calibrating the Sondes and monitoring the fish and the water quality, and preparing for the crash.

A cooler full of larvae.

Up close and personal with a larva.

Larvae from the hatchery.

A lamprey that got caught in our net.

The heat is creeping up on us at the Safford BLM office. While the days are merely warm now, in a few short weeks southeastern Arizona will be as hot and dry as ever.

Our crew has been spending time mapping invasive Tamarisk as of late. We have been hiking remote drainages and using a Trimble Juno 3 series to map the locations and details about populations of invasive Tamarisk. These populations will be removed as soon as possible by work crews. The mapping project has allowd our crew to see some beautiful areas. One drainage was located in the Dos Cabezas. Only small pools of water existed, but a plethora of flowers were in bloom around these areas. Several small populations of tamarisk were mapped along ~5 miles of the draingage. Another large mapping project took place in Deer Creek, a drainage that runs into Aravaipa Creek in the Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness. Access to this area was very remote, but once we arrived we area able to map ~15 miles. The first day we hiked the upper 6.5 miles up stream from our camp. This portion was fairly rugged with a lot of exposed bedrock. We met 4 rattlesnakes on our journey: 2 western diamondback, and 2 arizona black. The 4th snake we came upon was hidden in a pile of flood debris, and we didn’t notice it until I had reached to grab a walking stick out of the debris and received a vigorous rattle in response. Quite a fright! Only a few small tarmarisk were mapped in this stretch, and it should be fairly easy to remove these populations once the area is reached. The second day we hiked the lower 8 miles from our camp. This portion quickly turned from an open wash to a magnificent slot canyon. The canyon walls were absolutely beautiful. A couple of small springs along the way provided enough moisture for incredible plant diversity. We located several populations of the rare Arizona woodfern, and saw diverse flowers in bloom, including Golden Columbine, one of my favorites. In the cool, shaded canyon the snakes weren’t even around; another plus! With such beautiful scenery, it was a challenge to focus on finding our foe the tamarisk, but we did map at least 15 individuals. Over two days our crew hiked 29 miles. It was a feat, but well worth it to determine the efforts needed to remove tamarisk from Deer Creek, and enjoy such a beautiful area.

It is also the season for us to complete fish monitoring at Bonita Creek, Aravaipa Creek, and the Gila River. The annual Bonita Creek monitoring was a week-long task that required many hours of UTV travel to reach some of our sites. The upper portions of Bonita creek are remote and much more pristine when compared to the lower portion, where our non-native removal takes place. The Reservation Boundary, Midnight Canyon, Red Knolls, and Lee Trail are the Upper Bonita Creek sites where non-natives have not invaded, and intact populations of native fish are doing well. Gallery, Upper Site 1, and Serna Cabin are the three monitoring sites in Lower Bonita Creek where non-natives are prevalent, but native fish are still present as well. Our monitoring consists of setting promar, red promar, and metal minnow nets in the large pools and electrofishing the riffles and glides. This was my first time to electrofish! We also performed a pebble count with the gravelometer to measure the substrate in each habitat. Each fish that is caught is identified and measured to obtain age data. The Bonita Creek monitoring was started in 2003, and data from all 11 years is kept at the BLM office. Lee trail was my favorite site. Along a rock wall there is a deep pool where the natives could be easily seen. Sonora Suckers could be observed mating. Several males were following females around in the shallow sandy area. The females lay eggs in sandy areas for incubation. Males follow the females waiting for her to deposit eggs for fertilization. A large number of Gila Chub were also visible enjoying the great pool habitat. I had not traveled to any of the sites in Upper Bonita Creek, so getting to explore this area and see so many native fish was a treat. Observing natives flourishing in proper habitat without the presence of non-natives highlights the importance of the work I do here. Without non-native removal efforts and habitat monitoring and improvement, these native fish would be in even more danger then they already are.

The spring fish monitoring in of Aravaipa Creek was just completed as well. Aravaipa is home to 7 native species of fish, 2 of which are federally endangered, the loach minnow and spikedace. It is always a great pleasure to monitor in Aravaipa. The canyon scenery and intact native fish assemblage makes for a wonderful couple of work days. Our monitoring protocol in Aravaipa was established in 1963 by Dr. Minckley. The collection of data from the fish populations in Aravaipa for so many years is extremely valuable information for the species that live there. Each 200 meter site is seined throughout, by either seining downstream, or kick seining. In the upper sites, a healthy number of both endangered species were collected. In lower sites, some non-natives are present, including red shiner and yellow bullhead, and native populations are not doing quite as well. The Gila River monitoring is scheduled for June.

My work with ArcMap has continued and my skills are becoming more defined. Updating the Gila River Guide maps was a good task for me to work on, and I am much more proficient with creating maps in ArcMap. I have also been working on extracting data from SEInet to get precipitation information on the pollinator plants we are growing at the greenhouse. I am realizing what an amazing resource ArcMap is and the diverse projects that can be completed using this technology.

After a week at work in Alaska and a wonderful week back home in Chicago at the CLM intern training I am back in Fairbanks, AK and officially settled in to my new home for the next 8 months.  The first few weeks of my job have consisted of mostly office work and trainings, and so I was quite excited when I finally got the opportunity to go out into the field the other week.  I shall recount that story here.

Twenty minutes before some fellow interns were to go out in the field to fix a water catchment system at a cabin and survey trails, I found out that I would be able to go with them.  Even though the weather was less than ideal, I jumped at the opportunity to get out to the field for a few days.  Despite the rush I was ecstatic to finally be getting out to the field—might have even leaped for joy at one point…

We ended up leaving Fairbanks around 5 for the foggy and damp 1 hour drive to the White Mountains. Upon arrival, however, we discovered that one of the interns had forgotten some essential items—namely water for himself and the garbage can lid that we were to use to replace the water catchment system.  So we ended up driving back to Fairbanks, buying a garbage can lid, then driving back to the White Mountains, arriving back at the trailhead and beginning a ~8 mile, ~4 hour hike at 8:30 PM.  Good thing about Alaska in the summer is you don’t have to worry about the sun setting on you.

At this point the rain had picked up and the weather was generally pretty miserable.  The trail was in poor shape—the majority of it was flooded and areas that had boardwalks or wooden planks were mostly rotted away or broken.  We began the hike, often sloshing through standing water, climbing up and down mountain ridges, over fields, through spruce forest, never able to see much more than 30 feet from us due to the fog and rain.  We forged onward and ended up at the cabin at around midnight, cold and drenched to the bone.  We used the dregs of a few small propane bottles to heat up the cabin a bit, changed out of our wet clothes, read by the Alaska midnight sun for a bit, then fell asleep.

In the morning that beautiful wizard Mother Nature sent bright rays of sunshine through the tiny window of our cabin.  We awoke to an absolutely gorgeous day and even more gorgeous view of the surrounding mountain side and foothills that had previously been entirely shrouded in clouds and fog.  Our spirits much higher, we fixed the water catchment system and enjoyed the views. I took a trip around the cabin area to check for invasive species (none found, yay!) and we started the long walk back.

No invasives, just lots of spruce.

The morning/early afternoon was absolutely gorgeous and afforded us some beautiful views that overcast conditions had hidden from sight the day before.

What previously looked like Mordor is now a pleasant hike.

Shortly, however, that evil sorceress Mother Nature sent from the other side of the ridge an ominous dark cloud that promptly settled above our head, let loose an enormous thunderclap and began to quite violently spit hail at us.  We plodded on. On our way back along the trail, we stopped to take GPS points and denote the condition of the trail, boardwalks, and wooden planks. One of these stops occurred when the rain had briefly subsided.  I counted 57 mosquitoes on just my fellow intern’s legs at one point in time during this stop.

In time we finished the hike, again sopping wet and chilled to the bone once we arrived at our destination, but content on having accomplished something.

Since this adventure I have been back in the office.  Currently I am working on getting up to speed on NISIMS (National Invasive Species Information Management System), and loading data onto Trimbles for an upcoming trip to Chicken, AK to inventory for invasives.  In addition, I am using GIS and some good ol’ fashioned maps to locate rare plant populations that are accessible by trail and/or river float for future monitoring trips.

It has been quite a time of excitement for us lately here in Oregon. The past several weeks have been chock full of seed collection opportunities and other adventures. To start off, last Thursday my partner, Mason, and I found ourselves being evacuated from the top of Upper Table Rock due to a fire that started at the base of the mountain and was creeping toward us. We quickly gathered as much Fool’s Onion (Tritileia hyacinthina) seed as we could before hiking down the two mile trail with a sheriff’s department officer and three other hikers that unfortunately had just reached the top before finding out they had to turn around and immediately hike back down. By the time we reached the bottom, the fire had nearly spread to the top of Upper Table Rock, not far from where I had been standing looking down on the fire just 45 minutes prior.

This week my mentor, Doug Kendig, my partner, Mason London, and I embarked on a week-long tour of nurseries, seed farms, and seed processing facilities. We departed Medford, Oregon on Monday and headed toward Bend ready to deliver nine collections to the Bend Seed Extractory. Sarah and Kayla gave us an in depth tour of their operation, including demonstrations of some of the seed cleaning equipment, seed viability tests, and more. It was a great experience to actually see where our seed goes, what happens to it when it leaves our hands, and who spends their time and energy managing our seed. We left with a great appreciation for everything Sarah and Kayla do at the Bend Seed Extractory.

From there we headed north toward the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. After a short stop to examine the impressive exposed rock revealing millions of years of natural history, we continued our journey north. We later stopped at a quaint little town called Fossil, Oregon. While there, of course, we searched for fossils. There is a public fossil digging area behind Fossil High School. If anyone is ever passing through the area, I recommend the stop. Fossils that are anywhere between a million to thirty million years old can be found in the area.

We stopped for the night along the Columbia River before pressing on the next morning toward Moses Lake, WA, our northern most destination. Our first stop of the day Tuesday was at BFI Native Seed near Warden, Washington. BFI is a native seed increase farm that grows out source-verified grass and forb seed. It was an incredibly impressive and professional operation. Plants from all sorts of different biotypes were represented on this ~1700 acre farm. It was an opportunity to see how individuals of the same species that have become adapted to very different environments share different phenotypes. Seeing these very different expressions of the same species highlighted some of the difficulties of identifying forbs and grasses that we had encountered in the field.

After leaving BFI Native Seed we made a stop at Rainier Seed LLC, another seed growing operation that grows various sourced seed including natives. This farm consists of ~5000 acres in total, including all contracted farming operations tied to the company. We were lead through a variety of fields of different flowering and seeding plants that would soon be harvested and cleaned.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, June 25) we will be attending a restoration tour led by the owner of BFI Native Seed to see how these native plant seeds are used in restoration projects and what the final result can look like. We are quite excited to complete this ever expanding perspective of the native seed network by seeing examples of the seed actually in use for conservation or restoration purposes.

There is still a lot of touring and driving left before we make it back home to Medford on Friday. After leaving the Moses Lake area in Washington, we will be making our way to the Willamette Valley area in Oregon to stop by the Plant Materials Center in Corvallis, as well as possibly other seed farms or native plant nurseries along the way.

All in all it has been a very informative, interesting, and exciting couple of weeks for the Rogue Valley crew! If any of you have a chance to stop by the Bend Seed Extractory, I highly suggest it, as it really helped me to understand the greater system that we are apart of and how I can help make their jobs easier by making simple adjustments to my seed collecting techniques.

I hope everyone out there is doing well.

The stages from collection to cleaned seed

Seed cleaning demo

Searching for fossils in Fossil

Plant plugs and greenhouse at BFI Native Seed

Fields of Oregon Sunshine at BFI Native Seed

Finished clean seed

Seed processing equipment at Bend Seed Extractory

Sunday June 22nd, 2014- I turn 24 years old.

My life has changed more in these last two weeks of my 23rd year than they have in the past 200 before them. All the familiar comforts of home have been stripped away and replaced with a new bed, a new job, and a part of the country unlike any I have ever experienced. After leaving the Internship Workshop in Chicago, my mind was filled with questions and expectations about my new situation. After a week here, some of those questions have been answered, but most of them still remain. I have found my co-workers to be kind and helpful and my living situation comfortable, but exactly what it is I’m going to be doing here still seems to be up in the air. I have met with a number of my neighbors, but between moving in and starting work I haven’t had much time to really get to know anybody here in town. There is so much going on, it’s hard to keep up with it all.

But all these new experiences seem to pale beside the backdrop against which they take place. I am surrounded, at all times, by such… volume. To my immediate east looms Cedar Mountain and the Hurricane Cliffs, so close they make you crane your neck upward in search of the sky. North, south and west roll on for mile after mile after mile. When talking about the American West, my dad is fond of saying, “There’s a lot of there out there.”  I think I understand what he was talking about now. I can see Cedar Valley- the entire Cedar Valley- unfolding before me for forty miles or more, reaching to the horizon where it explodes upwards into the Wah Wah Mountains. Locals tell me that I’ll get used to the view before long, but for now I have learned to live with the sense of astonishment I feel every time I lift my eyes. Every other place I have lived suddenly seems so much smaller, and I wonder if I will find myself feeling cramped when I return to these places. I have been profoundly touched by this landscape, and the more I learn about it and its inhabitants, the more enchanted I become.

Nothing remains now but to learn as much as I can.

Last week the Carson City botany crew had the opportunity to work at the Pyramid Lake Youth Camp, an environmental education summer camp sponsored by the Piaute tribe. Dean lead lessons on vegetation mapping, traditional games, and native stars. Our role was to lead small groups on an exploration of the Hardscrabble Creek area they had just mapped in the classroom. I worked with two motivated young women with big plans for their futures. After a bit of wandering and plant talk, one asked what the colorful stuff all over the rocks was and I had the joy of explaining to a rapt audience the magic of lichen. “I’ve always wondered what that was, and now I know!” The chance to give someone an Ah Ha moment such as that is a rare and beautiful thing.

Carson City BLM

Camping near Sand Mountain during an SOS collection trip.

These past few weeks have been a learning experience! I’ve picked up a bunch of new tricks in GIS and can even navigate the maze of office cubicles! I also got to make some fire maps for dispatch. The workshop was a refreshing change of pace and it was great meeting so many of you! I look forward to continuing on my learning journey!

The mountains are a special place when the beauty of the sagebrush plains has somewhat faded and the warm summer days begin to move in. Retreating to the higher elevations of the mountains is a wonderful way to relive the recent memories of spring in the foothills. Some species of plants are similar to those of the foothills, like Purshia tridentata, however they are shorter in stature and just beginning to bloom in the end of June. The twisted and contorted forms of the Sierra Lodgepole PIne (Pinus contorta var. murrayana) stand like sentinels on the mountain top weathering the harsh winds and storms of all the High Country’s seasons. The harsh conditions and short growing season makes the pondering soul wander how the plants and animals of these habitats and environments endure the rigors of the year.

This past weekend I was able to hike one of the higher peaks on the eastern front of the Sierra Nevada Mtns: Mt. Rose. The snow at the top has just recently come off within the past few weeks and allowed many excited and outdoorsy folks to hike the beautiful 9.8 mile trail and summit Mt. Rose. Mt. Rose is around 10, 600′ tall and the last several hundred feet is alpine environment; one of my absolute favorites when considering plants! At the beginning of the trail and most of the way to the top of the mountain, you are hiking through Sierra Lodgepole PIne forest type. This is a beautiful tree and its forest provides habitat for many interesting and wonderful species of plants. There are many wildflowers that call the higher elevations of the mountains home and each one has a special beauty unique to itself. One attractive specimen was Ipomopsis aggregata and it has long, red tubular flowers that are quite showy. Another wonderful and densely hairy species growing in the forest was Packera cana. Ribes montigenum was also blooming and is a very nice gooseberry species of the higher mountains. Carex sp. were everywhere, especially in the Mt. Rose meadows area where Carex scopulorum var. bracteosa was growing. This is a truly beautiful sedge species and to be able to find it in such a floriferous meadow in the High Sierra was a rewarding experience for sure.

Once into the alpine habitat near Mt. Rose summit the eyes were pleasantly rewarded with small gifts of wonderful species of alpine plants growing in the crags of the rocks. So many different ones are able to call this harsh environment home and cope with the difficult weather in interesting ways. A majority of the plants have very hairy or pubescent leaves, helping to decrease transpiration and build up a thick humidity layer around the leaf surface. Other plants have strongly reduced leave surface area or their leaves are shiny and very thick. Several different plant species seen while traipsing in the alpine included: Ipomopsis congesta, Hulsea algida, Polemonium pulcherrimum, Eriogonum rosense (Mt. Rose Buckwheat!!), Penstemon davidsonii, Streptanthus cordatus, Phlox condensata, Draba densifolia and Ranunculus eschscholtzii. 

These plants seemed to shout for joy as they raised their flowers towards the heavens in hues of color that could only cause one to stop and consider their intricacies in solemn amazement! They seem to live a life remote from most all people; even those who climb the mountain will easily overlook them unless they are aware of the tiny gifts that are beneath their wandering eyes. I am thankful to have seen these plants who dwell in the high country  and ponder the special place they have in the environment. Two friends I was able to see after leaving the summit were very interesting indeed: Draba asterophora and Salix petrophila!!

Carex scopulorum var. bracteosa

Ribes montigenum

Penstemon davidsonii

Streptanthus cordatus

Polemonium pulcherrimum

Draba asterophora – Lake Tahoe Draba!

“It is for all of us to remember that the earth does not belong to us. We belong to it. At best, we are entrusted with a few brief years of life to relish the splendours about us. We are but an infinitesimal fragment of a staggering universe. It behooves us to cherish well those natural liberties entrusted to our care. The humble knowledge that we have no claim upon them other than the honor of passing them on in at least as fine a form as we found them should lend honesty dignity to our efforts on their behalf.” – W. Phillip Keller

Farewell my friends,

Ethan

BLM CCDO

Hello Interns,

Not much is new with me.  I recently took some time off to pursue other interests (wildland fire related), but now I am back at it at the Cosumnes River Preserve.  I am still working on a NEPA/CEQA combination document for a restoration project I am responsible for.  We are creating habitat for the endangered (federally and state listed) California Central Valley-endemic giant garter snake.  These permits are incredibly tedious and time consuming documents to write.  Did I mention how massive they are?  Use your imagination.  You might think that projects designed to benefit native plant and animal species (restorations) would require less federal and state permits than say, (evil) development projects.  This is not the case.  Both types of projects require permits galore, and from a permit standpoint, both are fairly similar.  Every permit requires its own unique vocabulary.  Tomato, tomato- right? WRONG! Good times.

I enjoy when one of the other CLM interns at our field office invites me for a glorious field day of seed collection.

Cheers folks-