Three and a half months down, one and a half months to go. We’ve finished collecting most of our species and things are starting to wind down a little. Luckily more opportunities have started to open up. In fact, this morning I’m leaving for a week long camping trip down in the Escalante River for some invasive species removal and plant population monitoring. We’ve done a good deal of population monitoring recently and we’re planning on doing some range land monitoring when we get back. I’m looking forward to learning about that. Another potential opportunity we’ll have is cougar monitoring with one of the office’s wildlife biologists, he’s been tracking one with a collar for a while and examining the kills. We also hope we can get out with the paleontology crew again, but we’re still working on that.
Last week was probably the last Hummingbird banding session we’ll have. It’s been a great season, we’ve caught Black-chinned, Rufous, Broad-tailed, Calliope, and one Anna’s Hummingbird! The Anna’s has never been caught in Escalante before and on top of that, we’ve caught more Calliope than they’ve caught in the past. It’s been a great year for banding.
I’ve been doing a good deal of camping this last month, Zion twice, Arches, and Canyonlands. It’s been great being out here and being able to take advantage of all the great places around me. I don’t know if I’ll be doing anymore major site seeing while I’m here, but there’s still a lot of great local places to check out. It’s also nice that the job puts us out in the field where we end up seeing so much in the first place.

A few days ago, autumn snuck up behind me and caught me by surprise. We were up in the Bodie Hills on a particularly blustery afternoon, reconstructing a previously-established aspen monitoring plot, and I smelled it. It was an electrifying moment—surrounded by rustling aspens just beginning turn and reveling in the unfamiliar urge to put on a jacket, I smelled that wonderful crisp, leafy smell that signifies fall in all of its glory to some deeper part of my brain. It was wonderful. This summer was busy and intensely alive, but I have never been one to dream of living in a place where the summer never ends. Give me gloriously colorful falls, deep and snowy winters, and those springs in which the first flowers to emerge feel like declarations of victory after a long fight with the cold over endless summers. Bishop was starting to worry me when it hit 93 degrees before noon last week, but it looks like changes are coming.

It is fitting that fall found me in the Bodie Hills. Autumn ambushes aside, the Bodie Hills are often filled with surprises: hills that appear to be nothing but gray-brown brush from a distance reveal pockets of wildflowers and fields of lupine when approached, and vistas of the Sierras and Mono Lake appear unexpectedly as you wind your way along the bumpy roads. Nestled between the northernmost peaks of the White Mountains to the east and the dramatic eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada to the west, they are best known as the site of the abandoned mining town of Bodie, the oldest unrestored ghost town in the country. For our purposes, it is a sage grouse haven and home to numerous aspen groves that reveal the damper soils in the region.

Ah, the aspen groves. Now that we have wrapped up our SOS collections for the summer and surveyed most of the sage grouse nests, fire monitoring and aspen surveys have begun to dominate our weeks. The aspen monitoring, a deceptively simple project involving re-surveying permanent plots to track aspen regeneration after different management strategies to encourage aspen growth (mowing, thinning of other tree species, and in some cases burning), has in fact resembled a giant scavenger hunt. Finding the plots themselves has proved the challenge; a few have GPS points associated with the permanent posts, but most are either identified by a grove or simply by a vague description in paper records. Needless to say it has been an adventure, with frustrating GIS sessions more than compensated for the satisfaction of finding T-posts in a grove with no previous GPS information whatsoever. Lesson learned: always create good metadata records as you go, your successor will thank you.

Fall has arrived, our tasks are shifting—did I say our? The biggest change around here, alas, is the departure of my fellow intern, Bridger, who has been a great coworker, a patient teacher when it comes to filling the gaps in my botany knowledge, and the best hiking buddy I could have asked for. I’ll miss having you around, especially on those long drives—audiobooks just don’t cut it. But so it goes. Time stops for no one, and the changes will continue through the rest of my stay here. Some will be welcome, others will require adjustments—but I hope that more of them will resemble my first formal encounter with autumn in the Eastern Sierra. Standing on that blustery hillside, staring out across the mountains and surrounded by the sounds and smells of fall, it was a moment of clarity and quiet exhilaration that I won’t soon forget.

Fall comes to the Bodie Hills

Cedar City is just starting to take on that homely feeling, as the internship winds down to the last few weeks.  5-6 months is about the amount of time it takes, I suppose, for one to really adjust to a new locale.

Our time the past few weeks has been consumed primarily by one project; Utah prairie dog wildlife clearances for cattle guard construction and trough maintenance. This undertaking posed a variety of challenges which required critical thinking, providing us valuable experience developing our field skills and technical report writing abilities.

I moved to Cedar City about 10 days prior to the start of my internship, and by the suggestion of my mentor, used some of that down to attend a Utah prairie dog survey certification course, instructed by a joint effort between the USFS and Utah DWR.  Despite attending this training course, the cattle guard/trough clearances was my first official UPD survey, requiring sharpening my understanding of protocol, of which the details had become hazy over the five months since training.

Our supervisor for the project is a senior biologist who has headed the UPD program within the field office for many years. As such, she made clear from the onset her high expectations for our field work and report. Though the guard construction and trough maintenance had been known about for quite a while within the FO, it fell under the radar and addressed only once the September seasonal deadline for UPD surveys drew near.  This unfortunately produced a narrow timetable for Maria and myself to conduct field work and report writing.

Aside from a minor mapping error, our survey went well, finding two active UPD holes in one of nineteen proposed project locations.  After collecting our data, it was time to write the report. Though we have completed a couple write-ups this summer, they did not come close to requiring the depth and preciseness under a crunched timeline, as needed of these clearances.  This being the case, Maria and I were slightly distressed to find our first draft returned with heavy track changes, despite the encouragement of our project supervisor who applauded our work thus far.  Because some of project areas overlapped with historically mapped UPD habitat, much of the difficulty in the report lied in referencing specific stipulations for required conservation measures.   Another aspect of the report we struggled with was creating maps to properly illustrate where we surveyed in the project action area. Part of the problem lied in a miss-communication between us and our supervisor in expectations regarding suitable habitat vs. area surveyed. In addition, Maria and I are both beginners of using GIS technology to create and alter maps, myself especially. We eventually managed to produce acceptable draft reports for the project within the deadline, and thus construction is slated to begin this week. Given our limited experience and high expectations, it feels good to produce a sufficient product.

Other duties completed the past couple weeks include assisting DWR with seine netting to assess fisheries populations in the Virgin River, and repairing fencing around sensitive riparian exclosures with the field office range technicians.  Both were rewarding, physically demanding, experiences. This coming week we are slated to assist a field office biologist with pygmy rabbit monitoring, a state sensitive species.

Through September, our team at the Colorado State Office has worked to wrap up our rare plant monitoring with a few last trips and has continued to collect seeds, with as many collections as possible on BLM lands. We traveled to Garfield County to monitor Penstemon debilis, a low-growing forb that only occurs on the steep shale slopes of the Roan Plateau. This was one of our trickier macroplot sites and we were working on what can best be described as “Satan’s ball pit” (in which the brightly colored plastic balls are replaced with loose rocks on a 45° angle). The view from the top of the ball pit, however, was really spectacular (for as long as you could stand still before sliding down the slope) and made the tough work worth it in the end.

We elected for some edaphic contrast and spent the following week on adobe clay, monitoring Eriogonum pelinophilum, or clay-loving buckwheat. We had the lottery-odds luck to be in Montrose the week is rained nearly every day, causing the clay to glue itself to our boots, making us all three inches taller and considerably slower than usual. We may also have lost a few friends at the hotel as we casually tracked in a few acres’ worth of muck.

After these trips (which I believe to be the last of our monitoring for the season), we’ve spent most of our time collecting lots of seed from BLM land near Fraser, Leadville, and Fairplay, CO. Snow has recently materialized at our alpine and subalpine sites, which the Okie in me finds completely mystifying. While collecting Pyrola asarifolia near Mosquito Pass, I bent over to poke a pile of snow hiding under some willows (definitely not a mirage) and giggled like the Pillsbury Doughboy.

Last Friday we attended the Colorado Rare Plant Symposium hosted by the Colorado Native Plant Society. This was a great opportunity to learn about more of Colorado’s rare plants, as well as to hear about the listed plants I’ve helped monitor in a larger context. Plus, we got cake and a free mug. So, yeah, things are going pretty well.

The view from our Penstemon debilis monitoring site on the Roan Plateau

Snow sighting at Mosquito Pass

Pyrola asarifolia

Pedicularis groenlandica, or Elephants Head

Katherine Wenzell

BLM Colorado State Office

Lakewood, CO

Thus far September has been a lovely month to be in the desert. Some intense monsoons have brought a lot of moisture to the area. The result has been magnificent: lush ocotillo, a variety of flowers in bloom, and beautiful skies. It has been a very pleasant time to be out in the field.

Barrel cactus in bloom

Green sunfish removal has been the focus over the last month. A contract crew from Phoenix has made two week long visits to Bonita creek. We are slowly catching less and less non-native fish! The native populations of Gila Chub and Sonora Sucker seem to be doing really well. A couple minor flood events have occurred in Bonita creek, one which blew out several of our nets. Several days of frantic searching for the lost nets ensued, but fortunately we were able to locate all of the missing units. The contract crews are done for the year, but our BLM crew will continue our non-native removal efforts throughout the winter.

We have also visited a couple new monitoring sites over the last month. One day we took a long bumpy road out to Spring Canyon. It is mostly a dry canyon, but a short portion has annual water and is home to a population of Longfin dace, a native endangered fish species. We were able to monitor adults and juveniles in the population and also spotted some Lowland leopard frogs. Success!

Lowland leopard frog

Longfin dace

When in the office I have been working on summary data for non-native removal and from monitoring data from different sites. We have also been preparing for the grand opening of the greenhouse at the Discovery Park Campus. I have prepared information cards for all of the plants we will be growing out for restoration projects. At the grand opening there will also be a native pollinator plant give-away. I made care-cards for all of these plants so people have information on how to take care of their new plants. This has been a nice way to refresh myself on all the different plants we will be growing.

I have also had the opportunity to volunteer with game and fish doing desert tortoise monitoring. I traveled to Phoenix and spent the day hiking around Sugarloaf mountain in search of hidden desert tortoises. Not only did the crew track the 15 juveniles in their juvenile movement study, but 3 additional tortoises were spotted, as well as a Western Diamondback rattlesnake and a Tiger rattlesnake. I also made it out to another Sky Island Alliance volunteer weekend working at the Cobra Ranch, a Nature Conservancy property. We planted native grass seedlings at their native grass hay farm. It was a wonderful cloudy day to be playing in the dirt.

New native grasses planted at the native grass hay farm

Tiger Rattlesnake

Desert Tortoise

On the search for tortoises

Another great month 🙂

-Rosalee

Monsoon season is nearing the end and it has left washed out BLM roads, massively eroded areas, torn up roads and sticky traps for our trucks, but most importantly desperately needed water! Although the torrential rains washed away some seeds it has brought new life to the wildflowers. We are keeping hope alive and patiently waiting for them to start seeding then we will be right there to catch them. With roughly 2 months left we have our work cut out for us but cooler temperatures will make collecting more pleasant.

We had a chance to explore the New Mexico badlands near Angel Peak this week. Standing and looking out towards the horizon, being able to see for hundreds of miles and blue skies, it was almost ethereal. I could have stayed out there for hours. I have learned the desert is not my favorite biome but what it lacks in lush vegetation and cool temperatures, it makes up for in expansive undeveloped territories, covert colorful wildflowers, and brilliant huge rainbows! I want to soak up as much of this area as I can while I still can.

We packed all our gear into USFWS’s largest truck – a Dodge Ram. We had two electrofishing backpacks, waders, nets, 16 gallons of water, and four girls’ worth of camping gear and food. Needless to say packing the truck was a bit of an art. So off we went, the project biologist leading the way in a sedan and the Ram following close behind. The trip was about 2.5 hours, only one hour of which was on paved roads. From there it was an hour and a half driving on dirt roads to a campsite and nearby survey areas. We were conducting presence/absence surveys for endangered suckers (Lost River, Klamath Large Scale, Shortnose) in along streams in the Clear Lake portion of the Modoc National Forest in California. Our supervisor showed us the survey sections on the map with a general idea of site priority, showed us where we should deploy our two sondes (named Curly and Moe), then turned around and drove back to Klamath Falls, Oregon. And so we camped the night amongst coyotes howling and owls hooting overhead and started surveying the next day.

The first section we managed to electroshock successfully and most of the fish were Dace and the beautiful and brightly colored Green Sunfish. We pretty quickly realized pretty much all of our patched and re-patched waders had holes in them. But we caught a few juvenile suckers. For each pool that contained suckers, we mapped and took depth measurements – which, in the absence of a meter stick, involved myself wading across the sometimes deep pools and yelling out where the water came up to (2” above knee! Crotch deep! Brr I’m wet now). Then we reached much larger, deeper pools which were much more difficult to shock effectively. The fish would feel the shock and swim away before we could stun and/or catch them. Many pools were too deep for our (leaky) waders and we gave up part-way. Then we reached a wide, waist deep pool and by shocking along the edges the girls caught a large fish which was – Eureka! A sucker! We hadn’t expected to catch such big guys out here and it was super exciting.

The next few days of surveys yielded many Scaulpin, bullfrogs, and more difficult survey conditions. Our last survey site contained large, deep pools with descent size fish that we suspected were suckers, so we employed as many tactics as we could think of to catch them – we tried herding them to one side of the pond and then shocking, we tried leaving the probe in the water and waiting till they were close and then shocking – but this tactic was not particularly successful; they swam as soon as you pushed the trigger. In the end we managed to catch a few through a combination of herding, sneak attacking, free netting and pure luck. We did catch some more big suckers and the biologists at USFWS were pretty thrilled – their presence was unknown as far up the streams as we caught them. We were not so excited about backpack electroshocking in leaky waders.

With 90+ collections, so far, we have surpassed our original goal by more than 50%. We are now able to slow the collections a bit and shift our focus to packing and shipping seed, and finalizing the supporting documentation for each collection.

1. Each collection requires photographs of plant, seed and habitat. From the many pictures taken, we must now choose the best. Thanks to Jonathan, who has been keeping up with this aspect of the project from the beginning.
2. From the multiple pressed vouchers that we have made all season, the very finest are being selected to be be sent to the Smithsonian. The remaining quality specimens will be reserved for local and regional herbaria. Labels for each voucher must also be created. It is interesting to look back on all the plants that we have known this year.
3. While vital habitat data was collected at the location of each plant population, field data forms now need to be fleshed-out and finalized. This includes updating information such as driving directions to each site. Thank goodness for Google Maps! Also, GIS layers are of great assistance, in filling the ecoregion and geology fields for each seed collection.
4. We are also using GIS to create detailed maps for each site.

Although the new seed collections seem to be slowing a bit, there are still several species that have yet to ripen, and 100 or more collections for the season still seems realistic. Here are a few of the later-season plants and scenes that we have encountered:

Ageratina occidentalis

Chamerion angustifolium

Our primary work vehicle gets us to the plants

These little ones didn’t seem so cute while they were jumping up on me as I attempted to collect seed

Helianthus bolanderi cooperating for the group photo

Helianthus bolanderi

Saussurea americana

Epilobium brachycarpum

Hyatt Lake

Frangula californica with pollinator

Lupinus luteolus

The myco-heterotrophic Pterospora andromedea

Trichostema lanceolatum

Betula glandulosa

Ericameria greenei

The appropriately named Rock Creek, Jackson Co., Ore.

I can hardly believe it is already half way through September! That means I am half done with my internship here in Lockeford. Its super sad to think about because I am really enjoying my time here. We have a very small staff at the PMC and so we work really closely together every day. I especially work with one other person, Shirley and so we have quickly become friends as well as coworkers. We share an office as well so we end up spending a lot of time together. So needless to say when my time here comes to an end I shall be very sad to leave this place. I also was super fortunate to find a great place to live while I’m here! I’m renting a room in a big house just 2 miles down the road from the PMC and it is super convenient! Plus I have a great landlord who loves me and said I should stay forever! LOL Its all good for me though and now I’m trying to stay in California for School or another job once I finish up my internship. I’m really happy here, and despite the long distance I am from home and my family I really have loved the experience and want to make a life out here.
As far as work goes we are trying to prep for the busy fall planting season. The fields need to be water and sprayed and plowed and prepped, while in the green house we are planting seeds to grow into plugs for spring planting, and we are working on several acquisitions we were able to make so I’m also doing some business dealings. I have really gained a great idea of how diverse a work place the Plant Materials Center can be, and appreciate the work NRCS and the USDA is doing. We also have several seed mixes that need to be made for our fall cover-crops. I am writing up a special Study Plan to propose and design an experimental study on a new technology for boosting the germination rate of some native seeds that currently are a big problem because they have such low germination rates. I’m really excited about it because I get to stretch my scientific legs as it were a little bit more then I have been lately. But I am now quite the expert at weed control (i.e. pulling, shoveling, and hoeing weeds). I enjoy all the sweaty work though. Its nice to work hard out in the California sunshine. I also did just finish a Plant Guide for the USDA PLANTS database, so if you want to know more about California Fuchsia (Epilobium canum) stay tuned and you will soon see my guide published by the USDA!! I also became a little bit more of an authority and was able to identify some of the herbarium specimens they had at UC Davis to subspecies when I went out there a couple weeks ago.

Otherwise right now its been mostly prepping fields, doing some tractor work, removing weeds and deciding what can be done before the main planting season goes into full swing.

Here my coworker Shirley was using one of our John Deer Tractors to roller crimp the Sudan Grass we used as a summer cover crop along with Cow Peas in our organic field. The grass was a lot of work to get established because of all the times we had to move the lateral lines to water it, but it was amazing to watch it reach 8 feet or more tall in about a month.

In about a month we have to put in the second year of our soil health plots as well, and before that there are a lot of soil health indicators we need to measure and get some initial 2nd year data prior to planting. Its gonna be a lot of work but should be interesting. We were doing a lot of soil coring the last week so we can see what fields are where for nutrient and moisture levels and decide if any soil amendments need to be added or any changes done otherwise.

Using this really large soil corer to pull out soil samples to get analyzed for nutrients. I know you all are especially amazed because of my awesome farmers tan there LOL rolled up the sleeves so we could even it out a bit.

We are also planning on recovering a few areas from Himalayan Blackberry that has taken over, which will be horrible painful work but needs to be done. Besides that there are a ton of other weed issues, but we are doing out best to get that under control and once all our fields have cover crops on them the weeds should be vastly diminished as they are outcompeted by the weeds. I also watched this amazing video by the NRCS called Under Cover Farmers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWXCLVCJWTU) which has some really interesting information on the benefits of keeping soil covered and treating it like a living organism rather then just as what you plant in. It inspired me to use some of the techniques in my own garden! And I think as we apply more and more of them here we will see some amazing improvements in out soil health across the soils there are on the property.

Thats all for now! Talk to you all again soon!

Jesse

These last few weeks I’ve been finishing up my field work with season wrap up work. I went to all the Ranger stations within Wrangell-St.Elias National Park and retrieved the moth traps we put up in the beginning of the season to trap invasive moths, collected our pollinator transects and phenology logs. Throughout the season I’ve gotten a chance to go out in the field with several different people in other divisions of the park and broaden my field experience. I went out with the archeologist and did plant and cultural compliance surveys and also with the park planner to do trail monitoring survey work. Many of the trails within the park are primarily used for subsistence hunting and are accessed by 4-wheelers. The ground cover on the trail we were monitoring consists of moss and mud. When 4-wheelers rip up the top layer, permafrost melts and creates huge mud holes and the land subsides. Along this 16 mile trail, 20 transects were set up to monitor the braided diversions off of the main trail people are taking their 4-wheelers. Once we approached a transect, we measured the length of how wide the trail had gotten from the braids and divided that length by 20 intervals. At each interval we recorded the depth of subsidence and weather the pin hits litter, bare ground or vegetation. Wrangell-St. Elias and Alaska Parks in general are different National Parks than those found in the lower 48 because there are several private property parcels within the parks. Legislation provides private property access to owners within the Park boundary and we found that the use of this trail from hunters and visitors staying with the private property owner is creating major damage of the trail. It has been an awesome summer learning from various divisions within the Park, it has given me a new perspective of how the park’s resources are managed. I am truly grateful to expand my resume to include these new field experiences!

Braided diversions off the Tanada Lake Trail