I cannot believe fall is already rapidly approaching the Modoc. Already the redbud has ripened and some leaves are beginning to turn colors. My field season experiences continue to be interesting and varied. My partner Joe and I scoped out a habitat corridor to post a game camera for Arlene, the wildlife biologist at our field office. The sight for the camera is under a bridge which is over the South Pit river across from the Modoc Wildlife Refuge. Arlene is hoping to capture any wildlife crossing under highway 395. Besides helping out other departments in our office, seed collection is still the main project we have been working on. Joe and I have made over 20 seed collections and have plans on making even more. We often drive out into the field looking for more plants populations to collect from while exploring new areas. Last week we collected coffee plant and elderberry.

When I first arrived here I was rather uncertain how I would like working here for the entire summer…but the truth is I have really grown to love this area. A few weeks ago I went to the county fair in nearby Cedarville. The fair was quite the adventure complete with demolition derby and line dancing. (: So something really exciting is the fact that Joe and I both got extended to work into the fall. I am looking forward to gaining more work and life experiences on the Modoc. One of the projects we will be working on is mapping Wyoming sagebrush with GPS using ATVs.

In other news, there was a large fire that started near Likely, CA, a mere 22 miles from Alturas. Joe and I were out checking out some potential seed collection sights and saw smoke quickly grow from a small few acres to hundreds in a matter of minutes. The fire started from a RV on 395. Over the next week the fire grew to over 10,000 acres and is still not declared contained.

Looking forward to watching the rest of the leaves turn across Northeast California…

Coming from the East, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Colorado Plateau. Now that I’ve been here for three months, I’ve gotten to explore the epic landscape and familiarize myself with the flora and fauna of canyon country.

I remember my first field day when I saw sagebrush and tamarisk for the first time and wasn’t quite sure what they were.  As I am approaching the end of my internship, I am able to see how much I’ve learned about this ecosystem and have fallen in love with Colorado (which, considering there are so many beautiful outdoors activities within a few hour radius…is not hard!).

I have really enjoyed my work as a range technician.  The focus of my internship has been evaluating the health of BLM land.  We look at soil, erosion, and vegetation, as well as the potential of the land the provide habitat for the Gunnison Sage Grouse.  I’ve gotten to collaborate with the range staff and ecologists and have learned so much about how the BLM manages for livestock and grouse.

Glade Park Assessment.

Fawn sleeping in the sagebrush.

I’ve also accompanied other biologists in the field and learned about rare plant surveys, bighorn sheep radio-telemetry, and fire-effects monitoring.

I learned to identify a lot of new plants.  I had no previous experience identifying grasses in such a dry climate—so I’m always excited when I see one I know and it’s alive!

I have also gotten to enjoy and explore Colorado.

Into Mordor.

I’m sure that you all appreciating this experience as well, but I am so grateful for this opportunity.  I love this job and the chance to work with such knowledgeable and passionate people.   It’s hard to believe that my internship ends in less than two months.  I’ll be sad to leave Grand Junction, but I’m excited for the next journey!

Limber pine, some blisterine, dropping orange fascicles of needles

Your old friend Ribes now carries disease that makes you weep from your branches,

All around you, your fellows stand dead, tall and small, dried and rotting.

Poked and prodded, the humans drill holes, spray paint your trunk, leave little cages over your cones.

And then the silence returns

The field work for my internship is winding down as the summer ends. Just a little more field work and a lot of data work! It’s been great fun and I learned a great deal about WY plants. Good times!

The Farmington Donut Hole

 When it comes to rain, Farmington is still “the hole in the donut”, as I recently heard someone say in our BLM office. Still SOS optimistic, we have been focusing our monitoring and collecting efforts in the rolling Piñon-Juniper hills near Cuba, New Mexico, about 100 miles south of Farmington. This little 25 square mile area at 7,000 ft has been a botanical paradise for us in the dry desert.

While this plant oasis has been absorbing the precious monsoon that has evaded much of northern New Mexico, not all of the plants have been able to flourish. Number one on our SOS target list is galleta grass (Pleuraphis jamesii), a grass that is a powerful species for reclamation projects due to its vigorous growth with robust rhizomes. Last week is when we discovered that ~ 80% of the galleta seed had not properly matured after testing spikelets with our teeth at each population we marked.

Rocky Mountain Bee Plant (Cleome serrulata) we are collecting in Cuba (it’s tall enough to stand up while collecting!)

The plants that have been lucky enough to receive rain were mostly in flower last week. Yesterday we went down to Cuba expecting to collect at least one species. At our first site, 6 species had seeds that were mature and ready to collect! In attempt to expedite the collecting, Henry had the idea of using a vacuum to suck the seeds off the plants. This idea materialized into bringing a dustbuster to the field. Several fluffy asters we thought would do well with the vacuum clung dearly to the involucre. Finally, Heterotheca villosa relinquished its clutch from the motherplant and was swept up into the vacuum. I hope Henry titles his next blog, “Housekeeping with Henry.”

Housekeeping here for Heterotheca– with Henry

We don’t often run into the public when we are scouting or collecting seeds in remote BLM land. When we do, it is exciting to explain why we look like we are digging through the brush and in turn, find out what the public does use the lands for.  The BLM road we were on yesterday oddly had a lot of traffic. Several people pulled over to chat with us, which made for some nice breaks of sitting upright amidst the standard “SOS forward hunch” (though I have begun to collect seeds in a circle around the stool that I sit on so that I really have to twist to reach the seeds directly behind me. It gives my back a little stretch but it looks ridiculous).

The last fellow that stopped at our site was a little Navajo man that waved me over to his truck. He opened the bed cover and I stepped back, overwhelmed with the unmistakable sharp scent of sagebrush. The truck bed was full of it! He had been collecting soft flowering sagebrush tips all day off BLM land. Why? To make little incense bundles that he dries and sells on the internet! A couple years ago he needed a permit to collect sagebrush, but now he no longer does since the BLM is trying to rid their land of the “invasive” native sagebrush. As he was describing to me a-mile-a-minute about how the airplanes have been dropping kill pellets, I thought he may be upset about the BLM sage-attack as it directly affects his business. Turns out, he is very pleased about the sagebrush herbicide because he believes no matter what, the sagebrush will always grow back for him. He also said the new regrowth is bright green and much easier to find! He gave me his phone number to notify him of where sagebrush has been sprayed so he can track it for new growth in the next year. For his sake, I hope the sagebrush stays predictable.

Area where the Navajo man was collecting sagebrush for his internet business

Deidre Conocchioli

BLM, Farmington, New Mexico

Over the past month I have been working on weed removal, seed collections, watering willows to restore a creek bed, watering and protection of baby oaks, and packaging seeds that were ready to be shipped.
We have been working on weeds all over Fort Ord National Monument. The photo taken was a field of Bull thistle and Italian thistle; we then weeded, wacked and racked it into the pile that you see. I also was looking for Yellow-Star Thistle the last week on a site that had been eradicated to make sure there were no stragglers.
This month, I successfully gathered the remainder of the seeds I was planning to collect and sent them to Bend Oregon for cleaning. I have now begun more collection for the next shipment.
I am still working on the restoration project we have going in a creek bend on the east end of Fort Ord. There is over 5,000 feet of fire hose to create an easier watering system then using buckets. This project is becoming a success and the willows planted should making to the raining season.
In relation the creek bed I have been working with volunteers to ensure the success of baby oaks planted in a valley. There has been vandalism lately on this project so we have increased monitoring this site to more than normal.
The past month the range of work done has been great and I am excited to see what else is to come.

Hello! And greetings from Eastern Montana!

My crewmate, Kimberly, wrote an excellent post below titled “Gone Fishin'” about our crazy adventure helping the fisheries girl here finish up her field work for the summer. Since she did such a good job descirbing it, I’m going to skip that and talk about something else.

I’d like to talk about the Bison Pipeline. The Bison Pipeline is a natural gas pipeline that starts in Wyoming, cuts through eastern Montana, and ends in North Dakota, a total of 303 miles. When Kimberly and I recieved an email about tagging along to the pipeline to evauluate how the revegetation’s going we jumped at the chance. I have always been interested in reclimation, and was looking forward to getting out in the field to see what it’s all about.

We met John Beavers, owner of Westech Environmental Services, a company based out of Helena, MT, out at the pipeline and John showed us an area of the pipeline where they had experiemented with a new technique, called brushbeating, to see if it made reclimation easier/more effective.

While out there I also had the opportunity to ask John some questions. A lot of questions. I wanted to know where they get the seeds from, who plants them, how it’s decided if reclimation is effective, etc. John was great and answered all of them in stride. One of the things I really took home was the importance of the work that we do with SOS. When you hear the amount of native seed they need to actually make reclimation work it’s daunting. But when you go out to sites like these, and see reclimation in progress, and think about what we do and how that’s helping, it really makes you feel good. 🙂

-Brandee

It’s been a dry, dry year.  Our range field monitoring has officially ended now that everything is yellow.  So now its on to new projects.  We were able to continue some riparian vegetation monitoring, and will begin analyzing it for the first time when we get some free office time.  We also just finished a limber pine survey, trying to find some healthy trees that have mostly escaped the rust for use in seed collection later. Our main project now is surveying BLM fences, especially around significant wildlife areas.  We’re hoping to get a good survey of the types of fences, particularly not wildlife friendly fences so they can tagged for sage grouse, or have the sheep fence removed for pronghorn.  I’m thinking this will be able to keep us quite busy until its time for another new project.

In the past two months seed collection has been slow and my mentor allowed me to work with other botanists at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden on other projects in the field.  The first project that I participated took me to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks to look for non-native and rare plants in the Jennie Lakes Wilderness Area. This consisted of 8 to 10 mile hikes and lots of surveying. We ran into groups of hikers from all over the world, from Japan to Germany. Leroy Gross, the senior curatorial assistant at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden led the trip. At the summit of Shell Mountain we found pockets of the rare Dicentra navedensis, a relative of the cultivated bleeding heart and clearly related to Dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) if you happen to be from out east like I am. We made vouchers of all of the rare plants and associated species located in the area. No photos exist from the Shell Mountain population to our knowledge, so we snapped a couple and made our way back down the mountain.

Courtesy California Academy of Sciences, 1998 from EOL.org

In the high altitude meadows we visited we collected and documented several populations of Ivesia campestris. To our delight we found no non-native plants in the Jennie Lakes Wilderness. This was suprising, considering the amount of hiking and large number of horses that travel on the trails. My favorite plant was the native Phleum alpinum, a grass that has a light purple inflorescence. At first I thought it was Timothy (Phleum pratense), because of its association with horses.

-Pine drops-

The fall rains are causing the fall fruting annuals to spring to life. In some areas of the desert there has been 10 inches of rain in the past 2 months! We’ve gone from drought conditions and one of the lowest spring melt years on record to recieving 400 percent of the normal fall precipitation, all in one year. In areas above 4,000 ft., the contrast is astonishing. There we find Joshua tree savannahs, with large annual diversity, including 5 species of fruiting Bouteloua. I’m really looking forward to making seed collections, because the mid-summer was almost exclusively Bebbia juncea and Larrea tridentata collections. Insect damage was high, possibly because insects were eating outside of their preferred forage because nothing else was available. I’ve also completed my vouchers for the spring, labelling them and getting them ready for shipping.

This week I’m going out to the central Mojave in an area close to the Old Woman Mountains. This area recieved so much rain a month ago that 2 major highways were shut down because of the flash floods; we were conducting field work at the time and had to return to headquarters because of the conditions. I’ll be heading out with Dunan Bell, a botanist with an encyclopedic knowledge of desert flora. He scouts for populations of rare plants in the Mojave and Sonora deserts and I hope to make seed collections while contributing to his project.

In spite of a drought, the weather in Carlsbad, New Mexico has lumbered along its yearly cycle and reluctantly settled into the monsoon season. Rain is now a force to consider in daily life. Gone are the days of leaving the bicycle in the backyard without thought for rust or a soggy backside. At any time summer showers can drench bikes and gardens alike. Big storms create the Canal Street Lake, a traffic impediment that survives the dry spells between storms on the lips of townsfolk grumbling about the municipal drainage system. But mostly, the rain in Carlsbad is insubstantial. Sometimes, withered by the hot, dry air, rain drops evaporate down to nothing before they reach the ground, a phenomenon known as virga. The gray sheets hang limply in the air, teasing the thirsty plants and animals below. A good rain, though, can make the desert bloom. For some persistent grasses, like Sporobolus, a few inches are all it takes for green growth endure for another year. Helianthus (sunflowers) on the other hand, perk up right after a rain but wilt again within weeks without a repeat performance.
At the office, griping about the rain varies by department. For range, responsible to ranchers and their grass-hungry cattle, whatever rain has fallen is never enough, and even if it were, it didn’t fall in the thirstiest places. Their hope is for the next storm. The cavers, meanwhile, are disappointed. The same rainwater that creates the whimsical features in our limestone and gypsum caves also transforms these passages into turgid, one-way tickets to the underworld. This of course precludes caving. But others are also concerned about safety. To look at a storm and see past the water, talk to a firefighter. For them, storms are carriers of the “money lights,” lighting strikes that magnify both their compensation and the dangers they face when combating a blaze in remote areas whose main groundcover is tinder.

The view below the plane dropping spike pellets

While most rain brings life, for about a month I’ve helped supervise a rain of death. As part of the Restore New Mexico program, the Carlsbad Field Office has been spraying Tebuthiuron herbicide on thousands of acres to suppress overabundant creosote and whitethorn acacia, thereby promoting grasses. My duty in this treatment? I follow on the ground to make sure the herbicide pellets fall where they’re supposed to, avoid where they’re supposed to, and that the pilot returns safely. The Tebuthiuron, or “spike,” is water activated, so the pellets sit on the ground until the next rain releases the poison, which quickly kills the brush. Controlled burns years later remove the remnants and the final result is beautiful grassland. At least, it as long as we get some rain.