Two weeks ago Nathan, my co-intern, and I departed Denver in a mid-May snow storm which had socked in over the southern Rockies and turned mid- May into what seemed more like mid-winter. Such is the weather on the crest of the continent. We were headed to the western slope to run the Gunnison to complete cactus surveys. The Gunnison is one of the Colorado’s principle upper tributaries which drains the western aspects of the Continual divide as it runs through the Sawatch and San Juan mountains. Despite the snow rapidly accumulating outside my house in Denver the previous evening, I shoved board shorts, sandals, and the typical warm weather river gear into my dry bag feeling like I was packing more for a tropical get-away than for the wintery wet conditions outside.
The storm wore on the next day as we passed through South Park, down into the Arkansas River valley, and over the continental divide at Monarch Pass. Tomichi Creek and the town of Gunnison were encased in a wintery blanket of white. We continued westward into the evening passed Blue Mesa finally pausing at the rim of the Black Canyon to rest for the night. It was late and we needed to be up early, I hesitated before setting up my tent but finally conceded considering the conditions. It snowed late into the night accumulating lightly on the rain fly of my tent every so often cascading off in miniature avalanches. The temperature dipped low but I stayed warm insulated inside my goose down bag.

The following morning the snow had stopped but a heavy fog still shrouded the Black Canyon. As we drove off the rim toward Montrose the red rock country lay in the distance basking in the early morning sun; leaving us hopeful that the weather had finally taken a turn for the better. We met Brandee and Ken at the Uncompahgre Field Office in Montrose to assemble the gear and meet with river rangers Blaire, Ryan, and Rooster the head honcho. We were going on a cactus hunt.

The BLM on the western slope has been caught up in a debate over a small barrel cactus. Sclerocactus glaucus has consumed most of my time at the state office for the past several months. Earlier this year I conducted a literature review and compiled a status report for the species with the ultimate goal of getting a delisting package and petition drafted this coming winter. While the cactus most certainly has a limited range of distribution; being that it is endemic to several counties on Colorado’s western slope, it is certainly more abundant than USFWS believes it to be. I recently received an update to the Element Global Rank documented by the Colorado Natural Heritage Program estimating a total global metapopulation size of 25,000 individuals. Having been working with the cactus for the past three months it was clear that this was likely a low-ball estimate.

Unlike many other rare and endemic species S. glaucus doesn’t appear to be a specialist. In fact, within its confined range we’ve found it occupying a wide variety of habitat some of which is very intact and other areas which would be considered marginal by the most generous assessment. We’ve found it occupying sites with highly developed cryptogrammic soils, on selenium shale badlands, areas of hardscrabble as hard packed and scabby as concrete, and in areas nuked by grazing where you literally have to peel back the cheat grass to find the plants. In general though, S. glaucus doesn’t venture very far from the alluvial river terraces of the Colorado and Gunnison Rivers in the upper reaches of their basins. A broad swath of potential habitat exists in a rather remote region which spans the Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area and the Dominguez Canyon Wilderness and is only reasonably accessible by floating the river.

As we drove to the put-in north of Delta, low clouds and a fresh layer of snow clung to the broad flanks of the Grand Mesa, but by the time we shove off mid-morning the temperature had climbed into the mid-sixties with cobalt blue skies and a slight breeze and only promised to improve. The weather in the high desert canyons of the western slope is capricious by nature. During the short spring season you could experience a variety of weather ranging from rain and snow to temperatures in the upper eighties. The river was cappuccino muddy and running reasonably high at 3,500cfs. Rooster informed me that with the monumental snowpack still clinging to the divide and the coming warm temperatures that in a few week’s time the river would be ripping at at least twice its current volume. The stretch we were running though was fairly tame and lazy so it wasn’t difficult to sit back, relax, and watch the canyons unfold around each meander.
We were targeting areas on the rivers west bank which is encompassed by the wilderness area; the goal being if we can locate significant populations which are already within a protected area that our pitch for delisting will be strengthened. Despite having nine people and the better part of three days the amount of potential habitat flanking river left was remarkable, stretching nearly the entire 26 miles between Escalante Canyon and our take out a Whitewater just before Grand Junction. We focus on areas surrounding establish river-rat campsites fanning out along alluvial slopes and ledges. It isn’t long before were into the cactus. We assess areas quickly, pin flagging individuals to keep a running count, mapping polygons, and moving on downriver – a process we keep up for three days. The river rangers aren’t the only ones astounded by the amount of cactus we were finding. You could barely walk a few feet in any direction without bumping into it clustered cactus bunches crouching squat in the grass and shrubbery. On one afternoon we effectively counted close to 2,000 individuals in a five acre area.

By the time we reached the take-out at Whitewater we were nearly cactus’d out and feeling pretty good about ourselves. After three days of surveys in only a portion of the potential habitat which flanks the river through the canyons, we successfully located 6,000 previously undocumented individual cacti, or nearly 20% of the previously believed global population. With another few tours in the boats it is very conceivable we could locate an additional 25,000 individuals. It remains to be seen what the fate of the cactus will be. But for now it feels good to know that hard work and persistence pays off.
Until next time from the Front Range,

Phil Krening
Colorado State Office – BLM
Lakewood, CO

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison

Dominguez – Escalante National Conservation Area

Entrada sandstone and the muddy Gunni

Pyramid Rock ACEC

S. glaucus

The last few weeks have been busy.  To recap, we’re building floating u-shaped docks from which we are going to suspend nets that form a sort of cage.  We’re then going to catch some larval shortnose suckers and place them in the cages where they’ll live (hopefully) all season, then at the end of the season we’ll tag and release them.

Weir used by USGS to monitor sucker populations.

We’re still in the planning stages at this point, and are working hard to avoid missing our window to collect fish.  Despite a lot of delayed orders at the hardware stores, we have our docks and cages mostly ready to be stocked with fish.  We’re going to start setting plankton tow nets during the nights in order to collect larvae to put in the cages, and then the, “official” propagation work can begin.

Nature Conservancy site.

We still have some work to do with the docks, but it’s good to have them in the water and basically set up after dealing with them for the past few weeks.  We’re using JetDocks floating dock systems and they are just not nearly as easy to assemble and work with as their YouTube videos would have you believe!  Anyways, at this point we’re just working on setting up some aerators (for when the dissolved oxygen gets too low in the cages), and DataSondes (to tell us when the DO is too low, as well as to monitor ammonium levels,  pH, conductivity, and water temperature).  We also need to put some bird netting across the pens to keep our feathered friends (of which there are many) from helping themselves to our fish.

Planting day with the restoration team.

I’ve also been able to help out on a planting day with some restoration folks from our office.  The fish morphometrics project is also progressing.  We’ve also been getting a lot of help, both in terms of people-power and equipment, from the other agencies in the area, especially USGS and BOR.  It’s really cool to see how everyone helps each other out and works together on these projects.  So with some help and hard work, hopefully I’ll have some fish to talk about next time!

I can’t believe it’s almost June! The past month has gone by so quickly. It’s like they say, time flies when you’re having fun. And I’ve been having a lot of fun in the field!

I’ve been going out into the field every day, which is awesome. I don’t mind doing office work and helping the range specialists with their Rangeland Health Assessments, but being in the office for ten hours straight is torture for this nature lover.

The biggest change in the past month is that I have a work partner, Kyle. He isn’t a CLM intern, just a range tech, but we’ll be doing the same work.  After being on my own for so long it was weird to go into the field with someone, but it’s been fun to train Kyle. Once he feels more comfortable doing utilization studies we’ll go into the field on our own, but team up when we have long-term trend plots to monitor.

I’ve been working on learning to identify the many forbes we have in southeastern Oregon. It helps that one of my house-mates, a fellow CLM intern, is working with the botanist here. So whenever I have trouble with a plant I can go to her for help. My list of plants that I can identify is steadily increasing. It’s so fun to go for a hike and be able to identify most of the plants that I come across!

Highlights from the past month: being given more responsibilities at work, learning to identify lots of wildflowers, spending the day with a range specialist and learning more from her in that one day than I have since I started working here.

Allyson Schaeffer

BLM, Lakeview, Oregon

Tufted evening primrose.

I just love purple flowers!

The last month has been busy for the Arcata BLM forestry department (comprised mainly of the resident forester and his minion, me). After my mentor paved the way for months (by obtaining funding, getting the right forms to the right people, entertaining bids from contractors, and gaining public support), we have been bouncing around to evaluate the progress of 3 projects unfolding at the same time.

Common to all projects is the need for humans to (within the project boundaries) temporarily triumph over nature’s momentum, nudging ecosystems back onto the track from which human settlement derailed them. I have been awed by the range of methods humans have devised to make their mark on the landscape. I’ll focus on 2 of the projects here: thinning 140 acres of an overgrown Tanoak stand in the path of the spreading Sudden Oak Death pathogen, and restoring 18 acres of historic prairie that is well on the way to becoming a stand of towering Douglas Firs.

On the 140-acre thinning, the method employed was a 29-person hand crew. Steep slopes and specific contract conditions (20 foot leave tree spacing) precluded the use of machinery. These 29 guys (half with chainsaws, half piling the cut trees into burn piles) descended upon the forest with such fervor as I have never seen. Practically running from tree to tree, pile to pile, they worked with the utmost speed as safety would permit. Trees were falling in all directions and the piling crew was throwing wood everywhere, leaving thousands of tidy piles that will ideally be burned. They made me feel lazy in comparison to all the manual labor I’ve ever done in my life.

Before thinning.

See the difference?

On the 18-acre prairie restoration, nearly all of the trees are going. While some delicacy is needed around the majestic Black and White Oaks that were nearly shaded out by Douglas Fir, cutting and extracting this forest requires heavy machinery. Let me introduce you to the danglehead processor, a 7,000 pound attachment for an excavator that: 1) grabs a tree, 2) cuts the tree, 3) lowers the tree to the ground, 4) slides up and down the span of the tree to knock off branches, 5) measures diameter, and 6) cuts the tree into perfect lengths for the sawmill and biomass electric plant. The danglehead can process 3 trees per minute.

This thing eats trees.

During free time, last night I sat in the tops of skeleton Sitka Spruce and Lodgepole Pine. How was it possible? I was walking on the BLM-managed Ma-le’l Dunes along the Pacific Ocean. The active dunes swallow this unique duo of conifers, leaving 2-foot-diameter trunks rooted in groundwater 20 feet below with only a handful of desperate knee-height needles that still manage to produce cones.

Let your mind be like a braided river’s channels, flowing from bank to bank. But when you focus, be like the Sun’s brilliant point of light as it’s about to melt into the horizon. And never be afraid to use metaphors that have certainly been used before!

Hi –

For the past two weeks the other interns and I have been working long hours in the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument. We’re monitoring six large plots in an area of the Hidden Valley that have been burned repeatedly. I learned early in the internship that desert landscapes, once degraded, take a long time to regenerate the diversity and habitat structure once present. In an area that has been repeatedly burned, with a particularly harsh wildfire sweeping through the area in 2011, the native species on the landscape have had little luck regenerating. And in the meantime, of course, invasive species like Bromis grass have taken over the landscape, making it doubly difficult for natives to regenerate.

Needless to say, this area of the Arizona Strip could use a hand in recovering. Two years ago people at the USGS, partnered with the BLM, seeded the area with native species in an attempt to enrich the soil seed bank and test several methods of deploying the seeds. Some study plots were hand seeded, others received seed cookies–a way to hold the native seed together with a cement-like mix in hopes of better germination rates, and still others were sprayed with herbicide, then seeded. In all there are 28 combinations of treatment and seeding methods out there on the landscape. Our job in year two was to identify and count the perennial seedlings coming up in each plot.

After two weeks of working sun up to sun down we finished surveying the plots and are left with a mountain of data. Us interns are eager to get into the analysis to reveal if, at this early point in the project, there are differences between treatments. Based on observations in the field those plots treated with herbicide first seemed to have a greater number of seedlings popping up. Still, many plots remained relatively barren. Some plots had the seed cookies still intact with (viable?) native seeds visible. It will be interesting to see what the data says so far and how the project will progress over its 10-year lifetime.

Sam Somerville

USGS Las Vegas Field Station, Henderson, NV

A long drive from Detroit, Michigan to Needles, California was made short with stops visiting friends in some beautiful places in Colorado. I camped out the first night in my truck outside town with a friend who happened to be near while travelling through. The morning revealed an amazing contrast of the blue waters of the Colorado river splitting the tan and brown desert mountains of the surrounding Mohave. With the thermometer reaching 100 degrees by 10:30 a.m., we immediately headed down to the river and lounged out in the shade of a cottonwood tree.

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The first week of work consisted of meeting everyone in the office, learning about the field office area, learning the plant vegetation, and getting trained in off-road driving. The first day out in the field with our supervisor we saw what we believed to have been a Mohave green rattlesnake, potentially one of the most venomous snakes in North America. As we continued the walk up into the wash, getting acquainted with identifying the local vegetation, a white barn owl flew right over us. An exciting first day.

We spent the past few days driving out to different spring sites to monitor the water levels, check for invasives, document the surrounding flora and fauna, and begin looking for potential candidates to collect for the Seeds of Success Program.  A quick glance at what looks like a desolate wasteland void of life has been drastically changing in our perspective, as we learn more and begin to see the diversity and life that is hidden to most passing by in cars along the famous route 66. While beautiful and intriguing, the extreme heat and lack of people in the Mojave desert will make for a challenging time, but one that is sure to build character.

Hello from Needles, California!

My name is Steve, and for the rest of this year I will be bringing you tales, facts, and pictures from the Mojave Desert while I work as a Conservation and Land Management (CLM) Intern. I will be working for the Needles Office of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Needles sits right on the Colorado River, along the California-Arizona border, so I’ll be working in the eastern portion of southern California. That means desert country, and my field area includes portions of both the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts.

You want a typical picture of the area around Needles? This is it.

Now, I’m a Midwesterner from Illinois, so the southwestern desert is a dramatically different and unknown place to me. I’m looking forward to learning about this part of the country, and discovering how the ecology of the place functions. I have already begun to encounter lots of new things. New landscape. New vegetation and wildlife. New culture. New climate. (Ah yes, the desert climate. Get ready for some fun temperature updates. Here’s a teaser: the highest temperature so far, on May 27^th, was 109 degrees Farenheit. Don’t worry, I’ll keep the complaining to a minimum.)

My co-intern and I have been working in our new office for a week, so we are starting to figure out exactly what kind of work we’ll be performing this year. We will likely spend the most time making native seed collections for the Seeds of Success (SOS) program, but we’ve been told to expect a variety of other projects to come our way as the season moves along. Variety sounds great to me, so I’ll keep you posted about the different and interesting projects that we get to work on this year.

If you decide to read any of my blog posts this year, hopefully I’ll reward you by giving you an idea of what the ecology and plant life of this place are like (as I figure it out myself). That’s my plan anyway. And I’m sure that I’ll have good stories to tell along the way. And on that note, I’ll leave you with a classic desert plant that I’ve seen plenty of during my first week:

This is the desert after all, so I might as well show you a cactus. This is a barrel cactus (Ferocactus sp). This particular plant reached up to my hip, and this week we’ve seen some that were up over 4 feet tall.

I’ve seen lots of them around, and I continue to be impressed by how striking their red spines are.

Also, in case you didn’t know, cactus flowers can be absolutely beautiful. And they are much loved by the local pollinators. We usually find them being visited by bees.

They happen to be flowering at the moment, so we have been treated to plenty of color from these plants. Notice the ring of flowers they produce at the top of the plant. Very cool.

That’s all for now! Until next time!

– Steve

Needles Field Office, BLM

Oh how quickly the first month has gone by, and already how many engaging field hours I have got to spend. Yes of course, my first week was filled with training videos, but lucky for me I was able to space them out just enough to persevere. Now I can safely drive the 4×4 the trucks wherever the seed collection takes me.

Unlike my last monotonous field season (not with the CLM program) of vegetation transects, all day every day, this season is already filled with variety. However, I have realized the importance of the progression from that job to this one. Thus far, I have used radio telemetry to find sage grouse, educated seventh graders in the basics of water quality testing, and collected seed from grass, forbs, and shrubs.

The Bishop field office is wide spread; I have worked in locations over 150 miles apart and many in between, all with the convenience of riding my bike from home to the office in under 20 minutes. Along the way my wildlife sightings have been just as diverse: male and female grouse, pygmy rabbits, horny toads, prong horn, chuckwallas, bull frogs, dragonfly larvae, and many more, all with the stunning Sierra Nevada as a backdrop. I am so fortunate to love what I do in this amazing place!

Tyler

Bishop Feild Office, BLM

Problem solving continues at the Fish and Wildlife offices here in Klamath Falls, Oregon. After describing my work to a friend at home she summed it up perfectly by saying “Your job sounds so adventurous and MacGyver-like”. She was one-hundred percent right. As of yet, we still don’t have any shortnose suckers to put in our dock-suspended propagation cages. Nor do we have any propagation cages completely set up to put our fish in, but we sure have been working our hardest, adventuring, and MacGyvering our way to that end.

It may seem like we haven’t progressed very far since my last blog post detailing our lack of fish and complete cages, but this project requires a lot of groundwork to get moving and in the last three weeks, we have come a very long way. For example, we completely abandoned our original plan to collect eggs from adult suckers. The prime spawning window has come and gone with disappointing and worrisome results. Smaller numbers of spawning fish than previous years were caught migrating upriver, and the fish that were caught didn’t have good eggs. Several factors may have caused this year’s unusual spawning including lingering cold weather (something neither the fish nor I seem to be happy about) and a drought year resulting in lower than usual water levels. In any case, the hunt for adult fish has come to an end.

The new plan is to suspend drift nets in the river this coming week. The newly hatched sucker larvae swim up from the safety of the rocky bottom during the night and are swept downstream toward the marshland and lake where they will spend most of their lives. It is going to be a long week, involving several late nights and will yield a grab-bag of indistinguishable larvae species. However, a grab bag of fish is better than no fish at all! If all goes according to plan, we should have plenty of juvenile fish by the end of the week.

I should also mention that part of the hunt for adult suckers involved a day of snorkeling down the Williamson River to see if we could find any large groups of them spawning. And by snorkeling, I mean drifting face first down the snow-fed, shallow river in a waterproof, bulky suit while holding my hands in front of my face to stop it from colliding with rocks. All while trying to spot skittish fish in water I couldn’t see further than three feet in. Needless to say it wasn’t very useful and we didn’t find any shortnose suckers. But it was a heck of a lot of fun.

So, that was the adventure part, now for the MacGyver part.

The best news of the last three weeks is that we got all of our docks out on the water! We have yet to attach the cages but getting the five docks assembled, out of the yard, and anchored in the two lakes is a huge step. The Jetdocks come in three by four individual floating blocks. Each block weighs fourteen pounds so you can imagine how difficult it was to move them when they were all attached together. We spent the last several weeks reorganizing them into giant “U” shapes from which we plan to suspend our fish nets. The instructional video on YouTube shows a teenage boy and an older man easily attaching and rearranging these dock with no trouble at all. What a lie. In the final stages on the water, we needed the help of an intricate system of ratchet straps, liberal use of a mallet, and two burly men from the Bureau of Reclamation. It took a total of five people about an hour per dock, but they are done! The best part of this week has been waving goodbye to the docks as we drove the boat back to shore.

So where are we now? We may have no fish but we have a plan and have made all the arrangements to collect larvae this coming week. We may not have complete cages, but all of our supplies have come in and we are ready to attach the nets. Hopefully by the end of next week, and with minimal MacGyvering and maybe a little adventure, the groundwork will be completed and the project will be officially underway.