Today marks the last day of my CLM internship in Vale, Oregon.  It’s pretty amazing how time as flown by.  It seems like it was July just yesterday.  However, it’s obvious that the seasons are starting to change.  September has brought rain and thunderstorms.  I never thought I would see torrential downpour in this part of the country but it still happened last week.  We had been scheduled to do a camping overnight trip in Leslie Gulch, surveying for Senecio ertterae.  It’s a good thing that we didn’t go because when we arrived for a day trip the next day, the evidence of flash floods were everywhere and we were blocked by washed out roads. Living in eastern Oregon has been almost like living in a different country for me.  Ranching is the predominant way of life.  Lightening-caused fires are a constant summer time threat.  Smoke from the fires leads to days of poor air quality.  Water erosion is not a gradual process: the landscape is so barren that one large water event can move huge amounts of dirt.  Birds are everywhere: quail, chuckars, kestrals, ring-necked pheasants, and killdeer.  I also find myself with an acute awareness that if I were stranded out on these landscapes, I would not survive for very long.  It’s humbling to be reminded that despite all of our constructs of modern civilization, nature is still in charge.

The sagebrush has been interesting to experience but it won’t be a moment too soon for me to go back to living among trees.  The people who grew up here say that they get clastrophobic in forests; they don’t feel comfortable if they can’t see the landscape for tens of miles around.  I think I’m the opposite; I almost feel uncomfortable without the cover.

One of the things I think about a lot is how much potential there is for renewable energy on public land out here.  While it doesn’t look like we have much, there is a huge wealth of wind, sun, and geothermal.  There are relatively few people who would be bothered by having renewable energy projects nearby.  There are large amounts of land that have already been overrun by cheat grass and/or other invasives and can really not get that much worse in terms of disturbance.  Despite all this, according to my mentor, there is one single wind farm of about five windmills on all of BLM land in Oregon.  We went to see the project and look at the relatively small level of disturbance it posed on the flora in the area where it was placed.  The BLM is already heavily involved with mining and ranching.  I really hope that in the future, there is a push for renewables on public land because they are already there, just waiting to be tapped.

My next adventure will be a 10 1/2 month Americorp position with the Center for Natural Lands Management in Olympia, Washington.  I will be doing prairie restoration science.  I think that the botany skills I’ve gained during this summer helped me to get this position.  I’m excited about this opportunity and happy to get back to a wetter environment (though, check back with me in a couple months…. I might be complaining about rain).  If any current or future CLM interns happen to be in that area, look me up!  I’ll always have a couch for crashing.  Anyway, cheers!  It’s been great seeing how things have progressed this summer.  I wish everyone luck with whatever their future endeavors are.

All dressed up in fire gear (rather unnecessarily) to look at the after effects of a fire and whether reseeding would be necessary.

Hi!

The field season is barely winding down here at the Eagle Lake Field Office (which I am perfectly content with). Carrie and I have been collecting more Mountain Mahogany and Great Basin Wildrye seeds to plant in the areas damaged by the massive Rush Fire (Aug. ’12), and we’ve managed to monitor another handful of Special Status Plant populations, too. After collecting Mountain Mahogany on a mountain called Fredonyer, we drove up to the top (7789 ft) and climbed into the fire Lookout. We met the lookouts, Bob and his wife, who stay up there in the single-roomed cabin-on-stilts 4 days each week in the summer months–which they’ve been doing for 31 years! It was awesome being able to see our field office from a bird’s eye view, and I was able to point out areas where Carrie and I have done field work, such as the Horse Lake area. Best of all, Bob helped to point out more Mountain Mahogany stands all over the mountain for seed collection.

Horse Lake, a dry lake, or playa, surrounded by mountains.

One of my favorite features of the basalt mountains out here is the myriad of lichens that grow on the ancient rocks:

It almost looks like the rocks have been spray-painted!

We also did some surveying of areas that were burned during the fire last summer. Some areas that had been drill-seeded and planted with seedlings aren’t doing as well as hoped, but then there spots like this aerial seeding site in the Skeddadle Mountains where sagebrush and grasses are sprouting beautifully. We visited an aspen stand high up in the Skeddadles, and were amazed to see the aspens not only re-sprouting from the charred ground, but spreading, leading us to believe the stand may be larger than it was before the fire!

You can see a sagebrush seedling popping out from behind the rock among the burnt antelope-brush trunks and ashy soil.

As the internship reaches its middle point, I’m anxious to spend as much time in the field as possible, gaining more familiarity with the beautiful landscape in which I’ve been placed and more experience with monitoring, plant ID, and understanding the BLM’s unique task of managing public lands.

Until next time,

Deb

For a moment there I thought the monsoon season was over. August here in southwest Utah was defined by bright, hot days and evening thunderstorms that produced more lightening than rain. Now it is September, the beginning of fall, but it certainly does not feel like fall. It feels like spring. Every day there are steady rainstorms, occasionally heavy rain that will fill normally dry washes. Being from the east coast, I am enjoying this refreshing rain. It has cooled off the hot desert and revived the dry, fire-prone sagebrush habitats.

We have started to do some browse assessments, examining key species along a transect to determine how much vegetation is available for animals like mule deer, elk, wild horses and cattle. This involves measuring the leaders on the key species, which is often Wyoming sagebrush. With all this recent rain, all the vegetation has experienced a lot of new growth, like the sagebrush below.

Grasses that were brown and desiccated a few weeks ago are now bright green and alive. Valleys are full of yellow and purple flowers. Lupine, globemallow, sunflowers and thistles are reappearing. The entire region looks more vibrant and alive than it did in May, when I first began work with the Cedar City, BLM office.

September is going to be a month full of work and wrapping up reports as my internship is coming to a close in a few weeks. For those experiencing a lot of rain, be safe out there. Flash floods are a real threat you got to be aware of. I know a lot of interns are also preparing to finish up in different offices, so be sure to enjoy your final weeks!

Office Space

The field season has ended for ES&R monitoring. Our next mission would be to input data and write ES&R reports! Dan and I were on top of data entry from Day 1 and we almost completed the task except for a couple of sites. In order to complete the data entry, we had to separate ourselves from the rest of the office, because we did not want them to go insane with our Latin speak and number crunching. They were fine with our activity, but we wanted to be polite, because we sounded like two robots. (Plus, we did this at the library in a private room and a dude yelled at us for being annoying…<_<)

For example:
Myself: Dan! What did you get for Site 5531-008 in terms of Phlox longifolia.
Dan: Site 5531-008…PHLO2……Density Plot 1: 5, DP 2: 8, DP 3: 7…you got the jest…. 4: 8, 5: 9, 6:2…
Myself: Thank you, Dan. Could you tell me the Ground Cover Percentage?                     Dan: Bare ground 94%, Litter 5%, and Rock is 1%.

We performed our data entry in the BLM Hall of Legends (aka the conference room) located in the central section of the BLM building. The data entry for each site would take us between 20-40 minutes determining on the diversity and condition of the site we have monitored. This was very tedious, but very fun! We had the pictures of the site and compared them with the results. You would be amazed how many different kinds of plants would grow back after a fire. We did notice cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), but many other native plants recovered in the seeding areas. We were finally done with the data entry….now it is time for the ES&R Reports!!

+8 Points Experience for Speaking Latin                                                                            +10 Points Experience for Basic Mathematics

——————————————————————————————————————–The ES&R reports were interesting to type. We included precipitation graphs, plant diversity graphs for each site, a large amount of maps, methodology, results, pictures for each of the sites, and recommendations / conclusions. The reports ranged from 15-50 pages. Each of the range cons we wrote the report with added their observations, funding reports, seed mixes, and previous experiences with each of the sites. We submitted our rough drafts and received good feedback. We are now at the very end and gained an enormous amount of experience with report development and data entry.

+15 points Experience for Data Entry                                                                                 +20 Points Experience for ES&R Report Writing

———————————————————————————————————–

New Opportunities Abound

Our awesome mentor, Casey, visited us during our report writing and gave us an update for future projects! He wanted us to get as much experience from the internship as possible and developed interesting projects for us to work on. One of the projects was to work on the JUNO/ Trimble system. Since we had plenty of GIS experience, he wanted us to create layers, geodatabases, and maps for the whole office to use in the future. Casey wanted us to get plenty of experience using ArcPad, so we could develop a presentation for the office on how to use many of the features. Our mission was to test the tools, list the pros and cons of the system, and develop shortcuts to make the system easy to manage in the field.

Casey encouraged us to develop our own projects as well using ArcGIS and remote system applications. One of the main projects we could work on was the aroga moth project. By using remote sensing tools and algorithms on ArcGIS, we could use four banded satellite imagery and NDVI to detect plant health and find where the aroga moth populations were in the Burns District.

I talked with my mentor and other BLM biologists in the office about future field excursions and opportunities. I really wanted to get SOS training experience just to see what it is like (….since everyone else seems to be doing that. 😉 ). For a small period of time, I would be collecting sagebrush and forb seeds! I am pretty excited about that field opportunity! Another major opportunity that was offered was Mule Deer monitoring. This mission would be to identify what the mule deer forage on. This would expose myself to new plant communities and new field monitoring techniques. I am super ultra excited for the next part of my internship!! \(^_^\)

Misadventures
Vale and Lakeview: Follow the Treasure Map

If you have been following my blog (which I am sure a couple of people have…Hi Family!!!), you would know that I love to rock hound for rare and unusual rocks. My mentor dropped by our cubicle and gave me two treasure maps…no joke! The map had an X written with a sharpie, topography, and township and range. One site was located in the depths of the Vale District and the other was in the Lakeview District where I got a flat tire.

The Vale District was located to the east of the Burns District. The landscape was filled with hills and sagebrush for miles around. The roads were not the best, unamused rattlesnakes were everywhere, and it took me over three hours to get into the site. The site was located in a canyon on BLM land, which contained agates and thundereggs galore. I parked my car and traveled a mile or two into the canyon. I was shocked to see the whole stream bed was filled with agates and thundereggs! They were everywhere! I carried a large thunderegg and many small agates back to the car. I did clean off the medusahead (Taeniatherum caput-medusae) seeds…man, that grass was everywhere! I carried this fifty pound thunderegg around two miles back to the car. I was exhausted! Luckily, I brought an enormous amount of water and a Subway Club™. When I was hiking back I noticed an airplane in the air flying by….then a helicopter…..and two more planes. I quickly made it back to the Ford Escape and packed everything, because there was a fire nearby. When I exited the allotment, I saw the smoke coming from the Warm Springs area. I got to the highway to see all of the aircrafts fly around the fire. Even though the fire was probably ten miles away, the experience was pretty crazy. I managed to collect a large thunderegg and many agates.

Success!

————————————————————————————————————–
I returned to the Lakeview District to look for Mountain Blue Picture Jasper on Hart Mountain. Previously, I went into the area to search for sunstones and ended up getting a flat tire. This time I was prepared! I drove to the X on the map to another canyon. I managed to find clear feldspar, some small agates, and a nice chunk of Mountain Blue Picture Jasper. The area was picked over, but I managed to grab a couple of nice specimens. At the end of the rock trail there was a very nice waterfall. I was nervous about unamused rattlesnakes being in the area, but I did not encounter any.

This was where you can find Blue Mountain Picture Jasper!

White Headed Woodpeckers, Goshawks, and Sage Grouse!

I love bird watching in the Burns District. One of the birds that eluded me for a long time was the white headed woodpecker. I was given directions to one of my boss’s properties which contained an abundant population. He managed the open woodland, which made the landscape ideal for white headed woodpecker populations. I drove deep into the Malheur Forest to a cattleguard where two horses were waiting for me. They did not move when I drove up to them. I honked at them, but they stood there looking at me. One even sneezed on my car, so I drove around them to my destination. (I found out later  that the horses hear a car and think it is their owner. When the owner honks his horn, that means it is time for treats…no wondering they did not want to move..they wanted a treat….<_<)

They wanted toll money…

I finally got to see the white headed woodpecker. They were everywhere!!! I was very excited to see a large number of them, despite the reports of their threatened status. They were not afraid of me and I managed to get close and take many pictures! To attract them, I had to pour water into the dog bowl. Many of the males were flying around and pecked at the metal roof, displaying their territory.

White Headed Woodpecker!!

On my way back home, I managed to see three juvenile northern goshawks waiting in the trees. They were probably hunting the white headed woodpecker. I slowly made my way through the loamy soil to the cattleguard and saw those two darn horses run up the hill trying to head me off. I quickly floored it and made it to the cattleguard before the horses got to me. Near the border of the sagebrush and forest ecotone, I saw many sage grouse walking across the road. Since it was dark, it was hard to see all of them. They were foraging on cheatgrass before moving onto the Wyoming big sagebrush nearby. This bird watching trip was amazing and I managed to see a new bird species! All I have to see now was 135 bird species before I have seen every bird species in North America. (Not including accidentals. Mostly I have to see the pelagic and Mexican border species.)

Exploring the Wild Blue Yonder

Since my fellow intern will be leaving for the Peace Corp very soon, I decided to take a small break and use my work comp time. For the next week I will be on vacation traveling along the California and Oregon coastline. The temperate rainforests, bogs, shorelines, and redwood forests would expose me to a variety of different new plant communities and birds species, which I am very excited about. For my next post, I will include some pictures under the misadventure section.

See you in a couple of weeks!!!

(/O_O)/……..To Be Continued…….\(O_O\)

Justin Chappelle                                                                                                                 CLM Intern working for the Burns/Hines BLM
P.S. This CLM Post has been sponsored by Tote the Note “Get Your Totes Today!”

And now…..your Moment of Zen…

The month of August has proven to be a slow one. With evasive monsoons, we haven’t had enough water to sustain life. But, we have done our best to chase down rain in search for signs of life and seeds! In the meantime, my partner and I have had the opportunity to assist on different projects: rangeland health assessments; help well-known botanist collect plant samples for his herbarium (and some for the BLM office of course); explore the wetlands and dry lands of the Carson National Forest with former Forest Service employees.
The sporadic rains of August were enough to aid in seed production and the end of August/beginning of September looked more promising in terms of collecting. We have made a couple of good collections with even more on the horizon. Of course the last few weeks weren’t all about work. We made time to play!
Last month I turned one year older and one year wiser. Even though my friends and family are on lands far away, the people here helped make the day very special. I gifted myself a road trip to Oregon to visit a group of friends. We spent Labor Day weekend in the Three Sisters Wilderness surrounded my wild blueberries and huckleberries and a panoramic view of the mountains and a serene Alpine lake. The hike in was tough (funniest and worse part was being ambushed by ground nesting bees because I accidentally stepped near their nest…whoops) but as usual the journey was worth the reward. Last Friday was United Way sponsored Day of Caring. A few of us from the office spent the morning painting the ceiling of a children’s learning center. It was such a wonderful day to service the community! Then again, what day isn’t? Last but not least I finally got to experience a real thunderstorm. It has been consistently raining for hours; it started yesterday afternoon and has continued through to this morning. Hopefully the water will bring new life and didn’t wash away the seeds!

I had the opportunity to assist in a few rangeland health assessments with our range peoples in the office lately.  This was a great new experience and another weapon in the arsenal of experience this internship has given me.  These rangeland health assessments are done as part of the permit renewal on pasture allotments every ten years.  The assessment consists of evaluating seventeen attributes of an area such as hydrology, erosion, and biotic integrity.  The process starts by running a point step transect with one hundred points and marking what was hit on a form.  Next hooping and clipping is done to measure productivity and then the seventeen attributes can be assessed.  The process is a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data used to give an idea of the pastures quality at that point in time.  The assessment is not used to measure what management practices should be taken on the land, it is simply a picture in time of the condition of the pasture.  The assessments are done multiple times throughout the pasture allotment the areas are selected randomly in order to get a representative idea of the pasture allotment.  Until next time people of the internet! 

     Here is another month of action in Arcata, CA. This month brought some new topics and activities, mostly relating to public outreach. The Humboldt county fair happened through the middle of August and as the BLM is a chief member of the Humboldt county Weed Management Area (HWMA), we set up and manned the HWMA’s booth at the fair. The booth featured lots of information on many of the common and most invasive weeds in Humboldt County. It also included vases full of examples of these plants, so the public could see them up close and personally. My mentor and I set up and maintained the booth, which involved keeping our selection of cut invasive plants looking fresh and beautiful (ironically enough). I also had the pleasure of manning the booth, which turned out to be quite fun. Many visitors were interested in the booth and asked loads of questions regarding various weeds they have in their yards. Some of the weeds we had put on display people did not realize were invasive, so it was good to educate them on the various negative effects these plants have on the landscape.

We also led a public hike to Red Mountain, which is part of the South Fork Eel Wilderness, which is home to numerous rare, endangered and endemic plants due to its serpentine soils. There were a variety of people on the hike with a range of botanical knowledge. Some of them just wanted to go for a hike in a beautiful place, while others wanted to know the name of every plant they saw. And as usual, when you go on a walk with a bunch of plant folks, things move very slowly. Given Red Mountain’s geographical situation and that it is surrounded by private land, it is not accessible to the public and we need the neighbor’s permission to enter. There is only one neighbor that will actually allow us to cross their land to Red Mountain.

Thunderheads forming over the mountains

I have also been swamped with seeds this month. Everything is ripening right now, so I’ve been collecting rather frantically. I think I made seven collections of 10,000+ seeds each this month bringing my total number of collections for the year up to twelve. Since I am a one-man collecting team, and some of the species can be quite tedious to collect, I have spent many days collecting seeds recently. I did get some help from one of our law enforcement officers, who came out with me as part of his homework to work with the resource staff and learn about the resources and land he is protecting. It was certainly an educational experience for both of us, as spending the day with a cop is something I’ve never done. He has to be in a completely different mindset than the rest of us “normal-folk” – always looking for the “bad-guys”.

I collected seeds from the Oregon gumweed (Grindelia stricta) along Seven Mile Beach. Not a bad spot to make a collection.

There has also been lots of fires up here in Northern California, so much of our office’s resource staff has been called into these fires as resource advisors. This has also caused lots of smoke to blow in and out of the areas where we work. Fire certainly is a hot topic around these parts right now…

The time is flying by here in Arcata, I took a vacation at the end of the month to do some backpacking in the mountains NE an SE of here, which were epic trips. I ‘m happy to have ended up in such a great location that has so much to offer.

Spotted this awesome buckeye tree while scouting for weeds in the King Range

Fields of gold in the golden state

Beautiful lichens on a fence post with a non-native bull thistle lurking behind….

Views from Strawberry Rock, where I’ve made several seed collections, looking down on the mouth of the Mattole River

Native lilies grace the hanging fen of Red Mountain

It’s still raining. Monsoon clouds still build from the southeast. But the first winds of autumn can already be felt in the air. Even though it feels as though it just began, the summer is on its way out.

It was only two months ago that the soil was desiccated and powdered. Vegetation was a crispy and golden. The sun shone all day, drying the land and parching the lips.

A little over a week ago I woke up early to work with the community to help salvage some native Giant Sacaton grass. Our pants were soaked with morning dew as we moved through the grass. Views of cloudscapes clutching mountain peaks dramatically surrounded us as we trimmed a summer’s worth of growth off of the clumps of grass. As we dug up the bunch grass, children scanned the vegetation for caterpillars. Each caught caterpillar earned 5 cents to the captor. And these creatures were mowing down the swelling vegetation at a tremendous pace.

I have witnessed water beget vegetation and vegetation beget caterpillars and grasshoppers (which are now so abundant that I have to dodge them as I drive to work.) Migrating birds have just entered Patagonia to devour the cornucopia of insects. And it all begins with water.

While summer begins to dwindle, migration begins to take off. I am fortunate to be able to witness this changing of the seasons through annual ecological succession. What a fun job to be able to witness this shifting.

Greetings from Wyoming!

It finally happened—not Fall per se, but that first day when you realize the summer will have to come to an end. From a botanical perspective, focus has swiveled around to scoping out sages and shrubs. It took me a while, but I am starting to appreciate the late season action, so different from the early excitement of blooms. The fruiting time can be beautiful, too.

There can be some unexpected encounters in the field. A few weeks ago, we were out chasing plants along a little-used road and ran smack into the historical Fort Laramie. It was a good lunch spot and a beautiful day, and we took a little time to wander around the buildings and exhibits. That was also the day we ran across some wild plums!

My team has gone back to school, so it looks like much of my fieldwork will be solo from now on. I really appreciated them, their company and extra pairs of seed collecting hands!

Cheers,
Abby D.

Leaf loss in the California floristic province is often dictated more by drought than temperature. This has been noticeable the past few months in the Sierra foothills, especially since the past two years have been exceptionally dry. The buckeyes were the first to shed their wide, almost tropical looking leaves. They prefer to wait out the Mediterranean summer without a fight, while other species keep their small waxy leaves in protest to the heat and drought. Next the abundant poison oak began to turn shades of yellow and red, and is now on its way to being completely leafless, with only its inconspicuous stems promising a rash. The California redbuds also turned various shades of autumn color as early as August. Twice a year redbuds exhibit a showiness that other chaparral shrubs shun in favor of toughness and practicability. In early spring the hills are alighted with thousands of bright pink blossoms on leafless stems, and in fall the leaves turn deep colors reminiscent of Eastern forests. Today I was able to collect redbud seed pods for the Seeds of Success program.

Redbud foliage

This pay period would have been the last for my internship, but I have been extended into early November. I now have a much more intimate understanding of the Pine Hill Preserve since I started working here five months ago. I have started calling the plants by their USDA plants code, which have been drilled into my head through repeated monitoring activities. For example, Salvia sonomensis, a ubiquitous sage that creeps underneath chaparral shrubs on long stolons, is known fondly as “SASO”. All eight of the Pine Hill Preserve rare plant species pop out at me, even late in the season when many of them have lost their above ground portions to the relentless heat. I have even been able to predict their presence a few times, when the gabbro soil turns a particularly otherworldly shade of red-brown and the chaparral becomes stunted due to the concoction of growth inhibiting chemicals in which the rare plants have undergone speciation. While seed collecting and monitoring I have army crawled through the silent, dusky under story of manzanita, and crashed through nearly impenetrable stands of unforgiving chamise. I often find that my pockets are full of chamise leaves at the end of the day. I can see why the Native Americans burned this ecosystem, if for nothing else just to be able to walk through it!

The rare Red Hills soaproot and gabbro soil

Last week I was given a respite from this difficult to navigate ecosystem. A cadre of field work hungry biologists and I were able to assist some guys from a lab at Utah State University who are working on a project to collect data on watersheds throughout BLM lands. It was extremely refreshing to be able to help collect data while half immersed in the clear, cold water of the North fork of the American river. We also ran into some interesting folks who were camping and gold mining along the river, proving there are remnants of the old West in California, once you get off the main highways.

Perhaps a bit too much sun

As the heat and drought persist, I find myself waiting, perhaps less patiently than the chaparral, for the earth to tilt away from the sun and for the Alaskan low pressure system to reassert its dominance over the Hawaiian high. Hopefully this will bring a cool, wet winter, and the Pine Hill Preserve plants can uncurl their crispy foliage, green up, and produce sprigs of fresh growth.

Joe Broberg

BLM Mother Lode field office