Changes.

Posted on 8 November, 2013 by cwaits

Only a few more weeks left at the Eagle Lake Field Office and many things have started to change. Many of the trees have dropped their leaves and the weather has started to get colder. Most recently the mountains have been coated with a white sheet of snow. What a beautiful sight to see. I don’t get to see that in Indiana. The fieldwork has started to slow down. We sent off our last bags of seed to Bend Seed Extractory this week. As we reviewed all our seed collection data from the last five months I couldn’t help but feel accomplished. We collected lots of seed which will go to seed the Rush Fire. That’s pretty awesome!

Since seed collecting is over Landon, the Hydrologist in our office, asked if we could help him with one of his projects. So we’ve been going out looking for potential springs in the northern section of our field office. He had looked at aerial photos for evidence of green vegetation and produced a map of dots to be surveyed. All these points and potential springs will be surveyed so they can be entered into the National Hydrography Dataset. Since springs in the desert at this time of year are mostly dry we haven’t had much to report back. But we have seen some beautiful places and when we do find water it’s an exciting event. While we drive around we’ve seen lots of wildlife; mule deer, deer, pronghorn, badger, jackrabbits, burros, and many types of birds. It’s always so awesome to see them in the wide open spaces.

As this internship comes to an end new experiences and projects are still to be had. We’ll see what the next few weeks will bring.

Until next time.

Going on a Grouse Hunt

Posted on 8 November, 2013 by Leah

Fall has firmly established itself here in Bishop—temperatures have plummeted at night, the White Mountains are finally living up to their name, and the aspens and cottonwoods down in the Valley seem to be in a competition for most dramatic display of fall color. The falling temperatures and snowfall have effectively ended our seed collecting season and have brought an end to most of the vegetation monitoring projects we had been running throughout the summer and early fall, and as a result much of my time lately has been split between GIS projects in the office and using radio telemetry to track greater sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus).

Sage grouse monitoring is a year-round project that can take many forms depending on the time of year. In the spring, sage grouse congregate in leks (where males perform elaborate courtship displays to attract females)—providing an important opportunity for the field office to count the gathered birds and estimate the size of the local population. Capturing individuals and fitting them with radio collars allows us to track the birds throughout the year and study their movement patterns and what types of habitat they use depending on their seasonal needs. Tracking collared females to their nests gives us a sense of not only the location of the nests but also provides us with an opportunity to survey the local vegetation and try to piece together what makes for an ideal nest site (e.g. lots of brush cover and no nearby trees or power lines). As the year goes on, the birds continue to move around as the needs of their chicks and eventually falling temperatures dictate where they need to go to find food. As we move farther into fall, more birds will be captured and collared to establish a new cohort to track throughout the coming year.

Tracking sage grouse has proven more challenging than I expected. The basics of radio telemetry aren’t particularly complicated, but out in the field things get more complicated: rough terrain can make the signal seem to appear or disappear depending on your position relative to the grouse’s, and even small changes in how deep into a bush the bird is can make the signal vary. There are some days where the phrase “wild goose grouse chase” seems particularly appropriate—but that only makes getting in close enough to actually see the grouse all the more satisfying.

Greater sage grouse are especially relevant right now, because as of this past Monday the US Fish and Wildlife Service officially declared the “Bi-State” population (found throughout southeastern California and over the border into Nevada) federally threatened under the Endangered Species Act. This is going to mean a lot of changes moving forward for our field office: the Bishop field office has played a large role in managing this population for a while, but with the federal designation there are other agencies and groups that will have a larger role in the future. It also means that there will be changes in land use regulations for areas throughout the region, which is always a difficult adjustment but will likely be especially complicated following so closely on the heels of the listing of three amphibian species in the region. Watching these listings unfold has been a really good lesson in the importance of communicating effectively with the public: if we as land managers and scientists cannot adequately explain why certain decisions have been made and what factors contributed to those decisions, let alone how those decisions will play out locally, conservation efforts on public lands will always be an uphill battle—which only hurts everyone in the long run.

Last Day at the Jarbidge

Posted on 4 November, 2013 by lori shafer

The last 7 months have been quit the learning experience for me. I have made life long friendships and gained a plethora of knowledge. I am joining the Idaho State Dept. of Ag team on Monday for a full time permanent position doing Livestock Investigations. I will also be evaluating environmental compliance with CAFO’s (Confined animal feeding operations) . I am looking forward to my new adventure. Thank you for the opportunity of the CLM internship!

Back to work

Posted on 4 November, 2013 by amoeller

I’m back from our federal furlough and everyone is frantically trying to catch up on missed work. Since I came back, I’ve been building willow exclosures, mapping water sources, and monitoring riparian areas post-grazing season. Last night we got about four inches of snow so more people are in the office than I’ve ever seen at one time.

The big news this month is that I am busy applying for graduate programs. This CLM internship has given me the perfect opportunity to narrow down my interests and finally settle on a field of study. Yay, wildlife biology! Although the government furlough was not ideal for anyone, the shutdown came at a relatively good time for me. I was able to use my time off to study for the GRE, research graduate programs, and contact prospective graduate professors. There is always much more to do on my applications, and the next part will be to just wait and see!

A New Beginning

Posted on 4 November, 2013 by eliward

October 29, 2013

Las Cruces, NM

I mentioned in an earlier blog post that BLM New Mexico only has two botanists stationed throughout the state—one in Farmington and one here in Las Cruces. This has implications for plant conservation. Our mentor and local botanist, for instance, is responsible for managing approximately 11 million acres of public land. However, in addition to managing an enormous area of land, botanists in the state have the added hardship of being responsible for two full-time jobs: seed collections for Seeds of Success and threatened and endangered (T&E) species monitoring. Because seed collections are more time sensitive in the short term, work on T&E species usually occurs later in the season, after SOS projects are nearly complete.

Until now, 95% of our efforts have been focused on seed collections. However, Kate and I are now beginning to plan several T&E related projects for the upcoming weeks. A few weeks ago, we helped Evelyn Williams, a researcher from the Chicago Botanic Garden, set up a preliminary pollination study for the rare plant Lepidospartum burgessii (LEBU), and in a few days, we will return to the LEBU site to check up on the progress of her experiment. We are also going to be involved in projects related to several other T&E species, including the Sand Prickly Pear Cactus (Opuntia arenaria) and the night-blooming cereus (Cereus greggii). While Kate and I really enjoyed our Seeds of Success work, we are excited to mix it up and experience a new aspect of plant conservation in the upcoming weeks.

Elisabeth Ward

Big Thicket wrap up

Posted on 4 November, 2013 by adye6

My CLM internship with Big Thicket is finished in a week, and I leave Texas better able to deal with all kinds of new extremes: extreme humidity, extreme thunderstorms, extreme heat, and extremely sharp palmetto leaves. I experienced so many things during my work and time off, both good and bad: I felt the pain of fire ant attacks, had my car invaded by crazy ants, was bitten by mosquitos the size of a quarter, chased black widows and centipedes out of my bed, stepped on a copperhead, watched a rattlesnake eat a frog, spent more days than I want to think about up to my waist in swamp muck, watched the sunrise over the Gulf of Mexico, lived in the hometown of George Jones, ate something called a Super Monster Burrito, hammocked in the Thicket, stood on the highest point in Texas, ate phenomenal barbeque, went to an Astros game, and worked in a national park. While not always comfortable, working at Big Thicket certainly gave me the adventure I was asking for and helped me improve my work skills. I leave Texas with no regrets and hope to take what I’ve learned to the next stage of my career!

The End Is Coming

Posted on 4 November, 2013 by sjfleck

It’s been a hectic month to say the least, I don’t mean in the sense that it’s been busy, but instead slow and full of anxiety. The shutdown isn’t a common issue with CLM employees and would not have been a problem if I still had a car. I mean this in a few ways; since I couldn’t travel anywhere further than my bike would take me, the 16 day shutdown went by pretty slowly. During the shutdown, I went on long walks or bikes through town everyday, studied a lot, got some geographically-limited birding in (front yard, in town, and at the reservoir), worked out, and watched a few movies. I do all of these things normally, but getting out in the field helps make life more interesting. I’m not much of an indoor person, so it started to wear down my spirits.

OK, now to talk about the good parts of the Shutdown! if Anyone spends time in the desert like I have, Desert Ecology by John Sowell is a great read. I’ve been reading it and making flashcards based on some of the topics he talks about. It was published in 2001 but the info seems up to date for the most part. I found out that the 2 most common passerines in town are the White-crowned Sparrows and Yellow-rumped Warblers. I’ve also been seeing Dark-eyed “Oregon” juncos a little further from town but I’ve never seen that variety before so it was exciting. Finally got a picture of a Black-billed Magpie, a super common bird but I’ve never been able to get a picture before now. There are tons of American Coots at the reservoir but I also happened upon a group of Double-crested Cormerants, a Great Blue Heron, and a mystery duck that I’m hoping to figure out (but if I can’t figure it out for sure, I’d rather say a mystery than guess at it’s ID). Walking through town I noticed a tiny bluish-purple mustard growing roadside and on some lawns, I still need to figure out what it is.This plant was not here during the heat of the summer but only came up recently; temporal partitioning makes the world a more beautiful place.

Finally I’d like to mention that our almost 3 week hiatus didn’t ruin seed collecting for us, the seeds are still there. Actually, for the species we’re interested in they’re even more abundant. Yesterday I made 3 hefty collections on my own, or rather, finished 3 collections we started before the shutdown. I think things should stay pretty busy until the end because of all the time we had off. Two and a half weeks of work left, and I’m excited to finish things up here.

Back in action

Posted on 30 October, 2013 by deborahrivers

Howdy,

Not much new happened before the government shutdown–the usual collecting of Mountain Mahogany and Great Basin Wildrye seeds for SOS. The most exciting development was that it snowed on us the last time we collected Mountain Mahogany (on Sept. 25th)! This gal from Florida/Texas has never seen the likes of a September snow…Ah, the mountains are full of surprises.

First snow of the field season for Carrie and I!

It made us a little giddy:

Best part about hugging a Jeffrey pine (Pinus jeffreyi): it smells like vanilla. Ahhhhhh.

The next week we were out of work and left to twiddle our thumbs in the high desert. There are worse places to do this in, really. Nonetheless, I was glad to hear we could work again.

Today was my first day back at work, and I accompanied Missi, our wildlife biologist, on a trip to survey part of the field office. We were checking to see that people hadn’t taken advantage of the shutdown and disobeyed public land rules (dumping garbage, creating roads through burn restoration sites, etc.). Luckily we didn’t find any evidence of such activity on our route.

Then we checked in on the Biscar Wildlife Area, composed of two reservoirs that are home to many nesting water foul, as well as some good fishing, rumor has it. We picked up a little garbage and checked on parts of the reservoirs where willows and invasive vegetation had been removed in order to keep the spillway clean and dam structurally sound. Some of the resilient willows have moved back in already, and a beaver has joined the ranks of the inconvenient vegetation, damming up the spillway itself.

The upper reservoir and a flock of Coots!

With only a few weeks left, I’m trying my best to savor my time at the Eagle Lake Field Office. Stay tuned for more epic tales of my conservation adventures out here.

Until then,

Deb

Season Finale! All’s Well That Ends Well in Burns, Oregon

Posted on 29 October, 2013 by Justin

Where Do I Begin?

Five months have passed since I first started my CLM internship in Burns, Oregon. I have traveled a long way both physically and mentally through the rough terrain of Harney County. From collecting sagebrush moisture samples to mule deer monitoring, this internship had given me a vast amount of knowledge and skills that I could apply to my future job. Over thousands of miles and many honey peanut butter sandwiches later, I have acquired a solid understanding of high desert ecosystems and the flora and fauna the populate the landscape. The heterogeneity of this area surprised me! I remember when I first came here, all I saw was sagebrush. I was wondering where all the forests were, since this was Oregon. The more I worked in the area the more I was shocked. Sagebrush steppe was a dominant community, but there were alpine tundras, deserts, riparian/ wetlands, hot springs, farm land, aspen forests, wet meadows, alkaline flats, outwashes, and talus slopes to name the main types of habitat I encountered. Even in the most harsh and remote places within Harney County I saw beauty everywhere. ^_^

Where do I begin? I know a few of you have followed my blog and saw all of the adventures. I tried to be as informative and entertaining as possible to help people understand all there was being a CLM intern. You work very hard and at the end of the day you feel proud that you actually contributed to making the world a better place. Even in the harshest conditions a sense of humor could go a long way. Dan and I always had a good sense of humor, which helped us work through every condition nature threw at us. We established, monitored, and drove to hundreds of sites, which was over thousands of miles of travel. At the end of our internships we could confidently say that we have grown from all of the experiences.

Our first line of work was moisture sampling sagebrush. We would go out to three specific areas and collect sagebrush samples twice a month. We would dry the samples and compare the wet and dry weights. This data would be digitalized and given to our mentor for his end of the year reports. Some days at the beginning of our internship we would look for rare plants and monitor them, which could always be a challenge. A huge bulk of our time was spent doing ES&R monitoring at the DSL, Miller Homestead, Lamb Ranch, and Holloway fires. We have identified hundreds of plants and used countless resources to help us identify all of the flora. Towards the end of our internship we typed our portion of the ES&R reports and created a huge amount of folders and databases to help our mentor. Once Dan had left, I worked on a couple of GIS and plant identification projects to help my coworkers and future interns when they go out in the field. At the end of my internship, I would be out in the field doing mule deer monitoring. During these five months I have acquired an enormous amount of skills that would help me accomplish many projects for my future job. Thanks to this internship.

Skills and Techniques

During my internship I learned how to properly identify a huge number of plants. Working in a variety of habitats, I was exposed to hundreds of flora. I used many taxonomic keys and guide books to the point where I knew the page numbers and where to look up a specific genus of a plant. I would gladly lecture my friends or coworkers about the specific plant communities that we monitored to help them with their plant identification skills. The knowledge I developed in my college experience easily transitioned over to help people understand how to identify plants. With the incorporation of remote sensing and GIS, I could go out in the field with vegetation maps and could segregate plant communities based on composition, soil type, elevation, sun exposure, and slope. After all of the field plant identification experience I was able to update the Burns District flora database and create specific local flora powerpoints for coworkers.

While working on plant identification, I gained experience with many different monitoring techniques. ES&R monitoring helped me transition the field experience I gained from college and apply it to the real world situations in research. Point-Line intercept and Pace 180 was our main vegetation monitoring techniques we used to survey a specific site. Random sampling, erosion, and vegetation density monitoring was used to collect the necessary information for the end of the year reports.

In the office, I built on my knowledge of GIS with new GIS hardware and software. I was exposed to a fantastic amount of new tools on ArcGIS, which helped create maps and geodatabases. I gained bonus experience with working with metadata and digitizing field collected data into the computer. Working with ArcPad, ArcCatalog, and ArcScene helped improve my understanding of remote sensing and GIS theory, which would definitely help me in the future. Working with the Trimble JUNO System in the field helped me bring GIS out into the field where I was able to create new maps and navigate around our study area.

Understanding the spatial distribution of animals in the landscape had always been a passion of mine. To be able to go out into the field to look for Aroga moth had been an exciting experience. Not much was known about this moth due to their mysterious life cycle and lack of research collected on it. I was able to go into the landscape, take pictures, record dates, and inform state entomologists of my findings, which would help contribute towards future research and control of the species. I was very fascinated by how such a small moth could do so much damage to a sagebrush community within a couple of years! o_O

With mule deer monitoring I was able to transition from monitoring small moths to large undulates. My research experience had always been with bird species and their environment and I was surprised by both how similar and different it was to monitor deer. I learned different field monitoring techniques and gained a valuable skill on how to track and identify animals and their scat.

I have improved on many skills I have acquired before. My plant identification skills have improved with the exposure to different plant families and genus. My landscape photography had greatly improved through much trial and error. Before I was very nervous about off-roading, but with this internship I could easily go off-roading with trucks, UTVs, and ATVs. Changing tires and fixing machinery had become second nature. My bird and rock identification skills had greatly improved due to the unique landscape of southeastern Oregon. I improved profoundly on my GIS skills involving working with maps, creating databases, digitizing field data, working with GPS naviagation, and working with different GPS hardware/software. Writing different end of the year reports helped me with developing PowerPoint presentations, creating word documents, and inputting data into spreadsheets. Most of the experience had been with Microsoft software.

This internship helped myself transition from a college/academic environment to a real world environment. Being able to apply my skills I learned from college to a government job built up my confidence and gave me a perspective of what to expect in future jobs. As an added bonus with this internship, our mentor Casey had enrolled us for a large amount of certifications. I have my CPR, off-roading, ATV, radio, and safety certifications. He gave us the opportunity to attend the Rangeland Firefighter seminar where we learned about all of the potential natural hazards, blood born pathogens, and fire safety. We even had diversity training!! Beyond Burns, Oregon, the Chicago Botanical Garden provided an awesome seminar, which helped with field methodology and plant identification. This helped many interns with transitioning to their present or future internship.

Medusahead was only found in a couple of locations, thankfully this grass was well managed.

Lost Adventures:

Hitting the Jackpot (End of July)

The day was very long and tedious. Dan and I were monitoring lower elevation sites that have been burned by the Holloway Fire. We had to go to one last site located on a drilled seeded slope with a southern exposure. By the looks of the site, not even cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) wanted to grow. Dan and I were recording mostly barren ground with no canopy of forbs. The nearest forb would be 10 meters in front of us. The wind was blowing and the temperature was slightly over 100°F. The mirages were dancing around us and all we heard were the rock wrens chirping in the canyons with the occasional spitting sound from our local guide, Randy. Both Dan and I established a plot and took our pictures. We headed out into the desert.

Justin: None, Soil, Bare…closest…AGCR…waaaaaaay over there…

Dan: Got it.

(Repeat)

Tumbleweeds would be rolling by us with the shadows of red tailed hawks and turkey vultures flying in the thermals overhead.

We were almost towards the end of the transect until….

Justin: None, Soil, (Cling!)…..Whoa….WHOA! DAN! Look!!! We hit something!

Dan was writing bare and quickly started to erase it. Dan ran over to my location to see what I hit. I smiled and pointed. “Dan we hit the jackpot…we hit a rock instead of bareground. Put THAT in the record books.” Dan’s face grew from a stoic look to a look of excitement. Dan was speechless and then said, “What are the chances!? I am definitely putting this in the record book.” Dan and I knelt down to observe the rock until we noticed a plant growing nearby the steel rod we were using. The plant was partially green and was about to die due to the harsh conditions of the surrounding environment. The plant did have a flower, so we decided to identify it. I shook my head with a large grin on my face. I said, “Dan, we just have found a PHLO2 or Phlox longifolia….we’ve found LIFE!!” We both stood up and dusted ourselves off. Randy was near us and walked over to our location to see what we were looking at. Randy looked down and then looked at us asking what we found. We smiled and Dan said, “We hit a rock instead of bareground and we found a phlox!!” Dan and I finished the transect and made a special note about the rock and phlox we found on this site. Today was a good day….

This was the location where we found a rock and Phlox longifolia!!

Shoo Cows, Don’t Bother Me (Early August)

Randy, Dan, and I were doing vegetation monitoring for the random sampling project on the border of Oregon and Nevada. We were supposed to take a landscape picture of the cardinal directions and perform one vegetation density survey. Each spot was randomly generated by ArcGIS and we were supposed to go to each location and record our information.

Long Canyon was one of the hardest terrains to drive in. The canyon was very steep, the roads would disappear and reappear, and this was considered some of the best country for mountain lions to live in. We followed the GPS the best we could, but the signal was bouncing all over the place. There was a small creek surround by a stand of quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) and we had to get out of our vehicle and walk uphill to our random location. When we were unpacking our measuring instruments and started to head up the hill until we noticed a single cow walk out of the aspen stand and stare at us. It mooed and stood there eating some delicious basin wild rye (Leymus cinereus). Dan and I laughed and continued up the hill. I named the cow Moona and took a picture of her. We almost got to the location when I noticed I forgot the GPS. I walked backed down and noticed Moona with two other cows that came out of nowhere. They were all staring at me with a serious expression on their face. Whenever I turned my back to them, they would moo. I quickly acknowledged their presences before running up the steep hill.

When we were monitoring the site I would look back to our vehicle and notice Moona getting dangerously close to our UTV… and our lunch. Each time I would look back I would see more cows coming out of the aspen stand and walk towards the vehicle. Moona would stare at us and then sniff through our items in the back of the UTV. Dan, Randy, and I completed our survey and cautiously headed back towards the vehicle. There was one bull in the herd and he was sleeping in the aspen stands. We approached our vehicle and the cows slowly walked away with a calf over exaggerating to our presences and running away kicking up dust near us to show the other calves how tough it was. Moona stared at us nearby for the longest time before moving on with her herd. We looked in the back to see if our food was gone, but nothing was damaged. We ate our food and moved onwards to the Fields Station.

This is Moona… The most devious cow I have ever encountered…

Onwards CLM Intern!!! The Future Is In The Past!

(October 23, 2013: Day Before the End of My Internship)

The fall colors of the Steens Mountains were especially pretty during my final day out in the field. The Indian Summer had lasted for a long period of time and the conditions for mule deer monitoring were excellent. I was traveling with three other BLM employees on ATVs to various locations within the Five Creeks area to do monitoring. The roads were very dusty and the dust clouds had actually created a dust mask around my face. You could even see the outline of my sunglasses! <_<

I was on the tail end of the group trying to catch up, while avoiding major rocks in the road. Most of the roads were very rocky and hard to drive through. I was traveling around this large hill and slowed down the vehicle to go around many of the rocks sticking out of the ground. My brakes were not as effective because of all the loose dirt and rocks. Suddenly, my ATV slide off the road to a rocky cliff! O_O,, The vehicle was caught on the cliff and my right side started to lean down slope. I tried to move a little forward but there were rocks that kept the ATV from moving forward or backwards. The more I moved around on the ATV, the looser the ground underneath became. The cliff was not too steep, but the steeper drop off seventy feet further downslope was my major worry. I tried to move the ATV until it started to lean further. Now I was very scared and I had to jump off the vehicle while trying to keep it from rolling. What was I going to do!? I held onto the ATV as it was slipping… I had to think fast…

(Flashback to Early June)

ATV Instructor Toby: Alright! Many of you are probably not going to have to do this, but just in case you were stuck on a steep hill, you would have to do a K-Turn.

(Instructor demonstrates)

ATV Instructor Toby: Very good. Now, I will show you a couple other ways to deal with steep terrain. If you stuck on this angle with your vehicle, you may have to do….

(Instructor continues to demonstrate different turns)

ATV Instructor Toby: Any questions?

Everyone: Nooooo.

Myself: O_O…….(I hope I don’t have to do this someday….)

(Flash to Present)

My mind screamed, “DO THE THING THE INSTRUCTOR SHOWED YOU THAT ONE TIME!” I held onto the steering, while standing to the side of the vehicle. I pushed on the lever to make the ATV reverse over one of the rocks to do a half a K-Turn. With a quick bump over the rock, the ATV almost left my grasp and started to head down hill towards the steep drop off. I tried to steer the vehicle and reach for the brakes. If I turned the vehicle too much, there was a chance it could roll again. I managed to face the ATV upslope. I quickly jumped on the vehicle and squeezed the brakes as it was sliding. I shifted to low gear and pressed the lever for the ATV to go forward. The ATV responded at the right time and I managed to drive up over the rocky cliff onto the road!! ^_^ That was a close call…even though it was not a true K-Turn or a turn the instructor showed me (It was more like a weird obtuse double parallel mirror U-Turn…it was a weird turn) I managed to follow the principles of navigating a vehicle on a steep slope and managed to make it to safety. I continued down the road to meet with the other BLM staff who were wondering where I was. The rest of the day we continued monitoring and we all made it safely back home.

Acknowledgements

There are a couple of people I would love to thank for this experience! Thank you Krissa and Wes for this amazing opportunity and for helping me find this internship out here in Burns, Oregon. I also want to thank both of you for all of the time and effort you spent calling, emailing or answering questions for the interns out here. I know it was your job, but both of you went above and beyond to help make sure that each intern had what they needed. I want to thank my mentor, Casey. You are the best in the biz! ^_^ Thank you for giving Dan and I many different opportunities for our internship. Your guidance and knowledge had really helped us out here. I want to thank all of the Burns BLM Legends for their guidance and help that they provided with our reports and monitoring efforts. Especially our local guide Randy, who was a life saver and helped us navigate through the Trout Creek Mountains. I am thankful for my family for their love, support, and care packages! Thank you so much Mom and Dad for visiting and encouraging me during this internship! You are both awesome and beyond totes! I finally want to thank the people who have been following my blog and giving me feedback. I hope you enjoyed the experiences, pictures, comics, emoticons, and the blog updates. ^_^;;

Justin Chappelle
CLM Intern for the Burns/ Hines BLM

….OH NO!!! I forgot!!! I did all of these blog entries and forgot to do an “Aha” moment… Let me think… My “aha” moment was when I learned when washing your windows,squeegee vertically outside horizontally inside. If you see streaks, you will know which side they are on. (The more you know! ^_^)

Windy Bugs — wrapping up

Posted on 28 October, 2013 by lunafox

As winter sets in in Wyoming, I’m finishing up my CLM internship with the Windy Bugs project. I have been spending the last month and a half in the lab since we wrapped up our field season. I have been identifying, sorting, and photographing the insects from our summer’s collections. We have collected quite a variety of insects! In the few thousand I’ve identified, there are representatives from 11 orders and 56 families. Of bees alone, we found over 20 genera.

Hymenoptera: Halictidae: Lasioglossum, subgenus Dialictus — one of our most common native bees

I love photographing insects because it allows us to see them from a different perspective and appreciate the subtle characteristics that often go unnoticed with the naked eye.

Diptera: Tachinidae — This fly’s face is Halloween-ready!

Our primary focus for this study is bees (Hymenoptera: ) We found some very common genera, like Anthophora, Bombus, Melissodes, Osmia, Agapostemon, and Lasioglossum, as well as some rare and beautiful specimens.

Hymenoptera: Apidae: Anthophora

Hymenoptera: Apidae: Melissodes

Hymenoptera: Halictidae: Agapostemon

Hymenoptera: Megachilidae: Osmia

Hymenoptera: Megachilidae: Ashmeadiella – a rarely collected native solitary bee

We did have some interesting beetles and moths representing two extremely diverse groups.

Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae

Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Trichiotinus

Lepidoptera

My personal favorite group are wasps. Wasps are a paraphyletic group of insects in the order Hymenoptera. There is a lot of research to be done in this area, and I hope to study wasp behavior as a part of my graduate research. There are many beautiful, interesting, and ecologically important wasps found in Wyoming.

Our collections included velvet ants, a type of wasp with pronounced sexual dimorphism. Males are usually winged and females are wingless. They can be so different in morphology that some males and females were initially described as different species. We had quite a number of males in our collections, but no females. We did observe “cow-killer” females (Dasymutilla) in the field. They’re easy to spot due to their bright red-orange coloration.

Hymenoptera: Mutillidae: Dasymutilla

Hymenoptera: Mutillidae — a velvet ant winged male

We had some predatory sphecid or thread-waisted wasps. The silvery hairs on the face of the wasp appears metallic in the sunshine.

Hymenoptera: Sphecidae

Some Vespid wasps are known as hornets and have a bad reputation. They are facinating social insects that include potter wasps.

Hymenoptera: Vespidae

Hymenoptera: Vespidae: Odynerus

Crabronids are one of my favorite wasp families. They are very diverse, always beautiful, and include cicada killers, beewolves, and sand wasps as well as many very small species that can resemble small bees.

Hymenoptera: Crabronidae

Hymenoptera: Crabronidae: Astata — males of this genus often have holotypic eyes (meeting at the vertex)

My favorite wasp family as well as the most beautiful of the wasps are the cuckoo wasps. They are also known as jewel wasps — it’s easy to see why! Their multifaceted texture accentuates their often bright and multi-hued coloration.

Hymenoptera: Chrysididae

As I complete my internship and move on, I am very grateful for the opportunities this CLM internship has provided me. I’ve learned a lot and enjoyed myself in many ways. Many thanks to my mentors, Drs. Lusha Tronstad and Michael Dillon, as well as to the Dillon lab, WYNDD staff, and the BLM. And of course none of this would be possible without Krissa and Wes of the CLM!! Thank you!!

Me at Sierra Madre

Sadie Luna Todd
CLM intern, UWyo WYNDD/BLM
Laramie, WY

CLM Internship Program Blog

adventures of the clm intern