Hello, from Worland, WY! My name is Nate and I come from the distant and exotic land of New Jersey. I began my internship on May 15th but not before a nice little 2,000 mile road trip and getting to see parts of our beautiful country along the way. The Worland BLM field office has 2.8 million acres and the more I see the more I like.  The land varies from a dry sagebrush scrubland to harsh yet gorgeous badlands, canyon carved country side, and finally stopping at breath taking mountain foothills. The flora and fauna here are amazing in their own right, all adapting to this hard environment and thriving. There is a definite learning curve coming from such a different ecosystem but I dove in head first and I’m learning everything I can from weed management to local geology to fire ecology (and most importantly how they all tie together). My mentor, CJ, and the rest of the Worland field office have been great (we even started a weekly ultimate frisbee game) and are more than happy to answer any and all of my questions, which is perfect because I have a slew of them. I am really looking forward to getting into the thick of this internship, tackling some weeds, and seeing all the iconic places WY has to offer (and figuring out how to upload pictures so I can share them with you all). I’ll see you all at the CBG in only a few weeks, have fun, learn a lot, and be safe!
P.S. Let’s go Devils!!!!!
-Nate T

Summer has come early to drought stricken Cedar City, Utah.  With temperatures rising and not a rain cloud in sight, many plants have already flowered and are about to go to seed. One such plant is the dreaded scotch thistle (Onopordum acanthium); a noxious and invasive plant here in Utah. Even though scotch thistle is beautiful when flowering, it competes with native plant species for the meager resources available in this high mountain dessert region. To combat this invader we have spent many hours chopping it down and digging it up.

However, not all my time here in Cedar City has been spent controlling the weeds. These last two weeks that I have spent with the Bureau of Land Management have been filled with new experiences and opportunities to learn. I have been able to participate in Mexican spotted owl (Strix occidentalis lucida) and southwestern willow flycatcher (Empidonax traillii extimus) surveys, been refreshed on how to operate a 4WD vehicle and toured the field office with the regional botanist. I have had the opportunity to see some native wildlife that, although a native myself, I had never seen in the wild –  the Arizona mountain king snake ( Lampropeltis pyromelana pyromelana) and the threatened Mexican spotted owl.

On the weekends I have been able to enjoy the national parks that are nearby; summiting Lady Mountain in Zion National Park was an awesome feat! Thank goodness for public lands!

Germination tests are extremely important for seed collections because what is the point of storing a seed if one does not know how to make it germinate after it has been frozen? Once a seed lot has been processed it is put into a humidity controlled room. The seed lot is placed in such a room so the moisture content in the seed can be brought down to about a 5%. Once the seed lot reaches this percentage it is ready to be stored in the freezer. We place seed lots into the freezer for at least one month before performing any germination (germ) tests on it.

I’ll use Trixis californica as an example. When we pull it out of the freezer, we take 100 seeds to use for the germ tests. The seeds are put in a weigh boat with deionized water for 24 hours, which is called the imbibe step. The imbibe step is important because it allows the seed to uptake water, thus increasing its moisture content. The next step is to pick the proper germ test for the seed. I am still learning this part. More, once I’ve got it down!

I spent an entire day a few weeks ago re-learning GIS so I could make a map of the San Joaquin River Gorge. We were getting ready for a bioblitz, specifically a plant- and bug-blitz, a three-day long marathon of biological surveying combining the skills of our mentor, a photographer, a coleopterist from Berkeley, and a member of the Southern Sierra Foothill Conservancy, who provided the initial inspiration for the event.

The SJRG is a gem of a parcel just outside of Yosemite, featuring its own interpretive center with outdoor education programming, something of a rarity among BLM land. It is best known for its stunning views from the large footbridge which crosses the San Joaquin River.

Anyway, while mapping I noticed a layer called “cave.shp” describing the length of Millerton Cave, a pile of granite boulders. For some reason, I thought this map had been made with a GPS unit, but after a few failed attempts at getting satellites inside buildings and cars, I realized that cave mapping has to be done the old-fashioned way, using radar and tape, a compass and clinometer.  Cave maps are also three-dimensional, and Millerton cave has a 40-foot drop and descending back passageways.

I had forgotten about the cave until returning to the Gorge this past weekend for the second time with Eric, an ACE intern in our office who also happens to be an awesome local botanist. He agreed to come out and collect seeds with me and chop down some nasty scotch broom that has been residing in the gorge for at least 15 years (we counted the rings!) We also wanted to say goodbye to Andrew, another ACE intern working strictly in Squaw Leap (SJRG’s nom de plume) whose internship ended on Memorial Day.

One of my favorite California flowers is in the genus Clarkia, and goes by two names, harbinger-of-summer and farewell-to-spring, a cool name describing its phenology. It puts out a good number of seeds so we should be able to collect an abundance for the Seeds of Success program. We have at least four species in the gorge!

Farewell, spring!

While Eric and I were walking down the trail surveying the castilleja and clarkia, we suddenly heard running water, and I remembered the cave.

After searching around and following our ears, we found the cave entrance. To the west were what looked like a spilled handful of boulders, where the sound was loudest and a small waterfall ran through several pools, eventually descending into an insurmountable darkness. It was one of the coolest things I’ve seen so far in California. Another person with a waterproof camera took some pictures here.

Hello all. This is my first time posting a blog, so bare with me (if you are even reading this ha). My CLM internship has brought me to the beautiful town of Lander, Wyoming working for the BLM as a botany intern. My passion and interests lies with wildlife, but there wouldn’t be any wildlife without plant life so I am still enjoying my research and work. Plus, anything that gets me out of the office and in the backcountry dealing with nature is a good job in my book!

I have been working for three weeks now and I am already learning so much. My partner and I, who has her M.S. in Botany, have been given the duty to create an herbarium for the Lander BLM office along with carrying out the SOS program. It has been a lot. There is no botanist in the office so we are doing all of the planning and research. This has made it hard for us to make it out in the field, but I have been gaining crucial planning and management skills. I am also learning my way around the ArcGIS system, which is suuuch a good skill to have. By the end of this summer, I will be a gps/gis, map reading pro! We do a lot of map studying, map plotting, and map creating on ArcMap. We also heavily use the topographic maps given to us from the office. They are really awesome maps.

Our work is not limited to maps,  however haha…  we also have been doing research on the local flora, figuring out what species are important to collect, when they are in flower/fruit/seed, and where we can locate a healthy population. When we are confident we have gathered this important information we head out into the field and that’s where the real fun begins! Wyoming has so much public land, and it is jaw dropping. I am lucky to be working in the Northwest area because I am close to the National Forests (Tetons and Yellowstone anyone? Yuup). There are canyons, rivers, rolling green hills and barren lands that hold their own type of empty beauty. It is an amazing feeling to be on top of a butte with a 360 degree view of just nothing but sky, sage brush, and the occasional pronghorn or wild horse herd.

The herbarium is going to include mainly the species of concern in our area. This is a list of 12 plants that have different flowering periods. So we focus on the group that is in flower and try to find a healthy population to collect, map and collect data on the GPS. Then we take the collections back to the office to press and mount and upload the data onto ArcGIS. I am very lucky to be working with a botanist who has herbarium experience. She is teaching me a lot.

We had to come up with our own list of plants to collect seed from, figure out when they seed (as there is no good source on the local forbs of Wyoming), and find where their ranges are. My partner and I are not from Wyoming, so we are shooting in the dark here. We have just been picking brains around the office and researching in different books and online sources to find our information. It has been a process for sure. We are still not sure if our list is right and it consists of 100 plants that I know we will not be able to collect from. But we are meeting with Adrienne next week and I am sure she will clear things up for us. I am excited to meet with her.

I have only been in Lander for a month, but I have already fallen in love. I hope to get connected with the Fish and Game and the University of Wyoming and figure out my next step after this because I do not want to go back east!

Peace and Love,

Rebecca Stern

Hi all!!

I just finished month two of my internship with the Chicago Botanic Garden at the  BLM at the Bakersfield Field Office in California. This month has been crazy-great! At then end of April, I went to my Seeds of Success (SOS) training in Red Rock Canyon, Nevada. Here, I learned a great deal of information from the instructors and met some great people from offices all over the west! I even got to go out with some interns from the Great Basin Institute and collect some Astragalus seeds with them for their SOS collections! Our field day got rained out (in the desert!!) during training, so I was so happy to have been offered such a great hands-on opportunity! And being in that gorgeously breathtaking canyon didn’t hurt the situation! 🙂

Red Rock Canyon from the Visitors Center

Astragalus seed pods

I got to partake in my first ever Bioblitz a few weekends ago and that was such a great learning experience!!! This blitz was a little smaller than usual, with only 6 of us. This was the third time we had rescheduled due to inclement weather so we just decided to go for it this time and the small group of us focused on pollinators and beetles as well as updating the plant list for our chosen site, the San Joaquin (pronounced ‘wa-keen’) River Gorge Recreation Management Area.  We spent three days collecting specimens, setting pit-fall traps and keying out plants.  We had a beetle specialist on hand, as well as a photonaturalist, who took some fantastic photos of the bugs and insects that we collected.  He has helped out at other bioblitzs as well; you can see some of his work here:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/dvdhntr It was absolutely amazing and the river was so, so, SO very gorgeous; it made me think I was back in Oregon for a second..

Clarkia dudleyana

Several bugs, drawn to our light and white sheet set-up at night

Asclepias californica (milkweed)

My co-intern and I have also been able to start collecting seeds for SOS and for local restoration use. This year has been especially dry in our area, so there has been less to collect than in other years, but we have managed to collect some grasses, my lovely thistle sage and Ericameria (interior-leaf golden bush), and it looks like there are still some species higher up in elevation that we can come back to collect at a later time.

And what is possibly the best moment of my life so far, happened out on this seed collecting trip.. I SAW A BOBCAT!!!!  I was out at Carrizo, at Painted Rock and I came around the corner to this cool, shaded ledge and went to take a picture of it, and there was a bobcat sleeping on it!!!  I freaked OUT!!! lol  I was watching this guy(?) for about a minute before he stirred and saw me, and then he just laid there and watched me photographing him, without a care in the world!  Didn’t move, didn’t flinch, didn’t seem agitated or scared or really caring at all.. it was literally breathtaking.  I could not breathe and had no idea what to do with myself, so I basically did silent screams of excitement until I calmed down somewhat enough to keep wandering on and let him get back to his nap.  Oh my gosh, best thing ever!!!

Thanks for reading; hope everyone is enjoying their internship and their summer!!  Talk to you next month 🙂

Rachel S

Bakersfield, CA

Bureau of Land Management

In addition to the valuable career experience gained through the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Conservation and Land Management (CLM) Internship program, there are plenty of good times to be had as a CLM intern! It’s important for people who work together to also…celebrate festive occassions together!

BIRTHDAYS. To celebrate the birthdays of those with whom we work on a regular basis, we go out for lunch together. (No photo available.)

PUMPKIN-CARVING CONTEST. For Halloween, our office promoted a pumpkin-carving contest for staff participation and a pizza party. I work with another CLM intern; our mentor supplied the pumpkin, and we took care of the rest, utilizing our carving skills and incorporating our botanical work into our jack-o-lantern creation.

Carving out the mouth of our botanical jack-o-lantern

That's a BIG mouth!

"Botany Jack" on display--notice the buck-"eyes" and the sharp, pointy teeth (yellow star thistle!)

The decorated Christmas tree

The theme of this Christmas tree: the BLM Mother Lode Field Office

Hey all! My name is Becky and this is my very first post for CLM. I am intern for the Chicago Botanic Garden working at the Bureau of Land Management State Office in Billings, MT. So far this has been an incredible opportunity for me. I have been doing some exciting work with this office. One of the programs I am lucky enough to work on is the Native Plant Materials Program. What that involves is an agreement with the Special K Ranch, in Columbus MT,  in which we  have an existing grow out program for sagebrush and other native forbs and grasses within their greenhouses. This year we will be adding seed production acreage to those existing grow out programs.  The main focus of the program  is to develop sage-grouse forbs for restoration of habitat. This is a unique program in that the Special K Ranch is home to about 32 special needs adults who work and run the ranch. These are amazing individuals that I have grown very close to.

Here are some bitter-brush babies that made it through the winter and are getting ready to be shipped out to there new home!

Here we are removing the sagebrush that didn’t survive the winter.

Also I have been out surveying different SOS collection sites to get an idea of what is currently blooming and seeding out already.  There is a lot to learn, but I am excited and ready. I haven’t been working very long, but I am enjoying every minute of this internship and my mentor is amazing. Here are some pictures that I have taken while out in the field.

Steamboat Butte

The prairie in Montana is so beautiful. It is only a section of the diversity that this state has to offer.

I almost stepped on this hidden treasure!

Bobcat Pass near the Pryor Mountains

Greater Short-Horned Lizard Phrynosoma hernandesi

This will wake you up in the morning!

 Here is a small fraction of the plant life I have encountered.

I walked over the hill and wow a field of purple, pure luck!

Of my first week in the field I have learned an incredible amount. For the first time in my short field career, I am experiencing a project where the field dictates the work to be done. In my past, although the plants may be unpredictable, the methods that I experienced were mostly predicable. Currently, however, I go out to a location that threatened plants occupy to map how the landscape has changed and how it may affect these sensitive species. Most of my work concerns the species commonly known as the bladder pod and the twin pod. These plants grow in areas that are  inflicted with cattle grazing and ferrel horses. When I wander across an area occupied by bladder pods, I may find horse “highways” that must be mapped, or I may find nothing at all, and the hiking continues!

With this, I have learned to be even more observant in the field. My observation skills must expand beyond what plants are growing below me,  and out into what is all around me. It is so easy to get lost in the search for tiny plants in broken shale, but it is so necessary to keep my awareness cycling all around me. I am certainly developing my abilites to focues while multi-tasking… a certain benefit for all areas of my life!

Hello!
My name is Catherine Reuter. I am here in Cedar City for a second round as a CLM intern. In 2010, the program provided me with an amazing experience working with the Bureau of Land Management in eastern Montana. Through this opportunity, I built confidence and skills and cemented my desire to participate professionally in conservation fieldwork. But more than anything, that summer showed me how much I have to learn about conservation and left me with innumerable questions.

So I am back this year working again at the BLM hoping to explore some of these questions and no doubt generate new ones! This field office deals with many of the same issues as Miles City Office. Sage grouse are a huge concern in Utah as they are in Montana, prairie dogs as well. However, while energy/mineral development was a huge factor in MT, here it is almost non-existent in the Cedar City Office. So I am excited to build on issues I already have some experience in. But southwestern Utah is NOT eastern Montana! On a basic level the habitats are much different, drier, less diverse plant makeup, the wind (avg. 37mph today!) comes tearing across the Great Basin Desert till it strikes the mountains that begin in earnest behind Cedar City. My nostrils suffered terribly the first week from the desiccated air, so many bloody boogers! But my body is adjusting. Coming from the east coast (my home is in NE Georgia, which is humid and really lush) I’ve do have a lot to adjusting to do. My eyes already ache for green.

But the landscape has so much to offer in its own unique way. In the evening, the low sun just glows on the area’s red rocks and cast deep shadows off the juniper trees and sagebrush. The coloration is more subtle, grey-blues and purple greens. And I’ve already found pockets of verdure. The other night for example we hiked up a small box canyon to survey for a Mexican spotted owl. We will be hiking up this canyon once a week to keep tabs on a male that has been living there for the past few years, sometimes with a mate. A stream runs through the canyon and it is alive with box elder trees, cottonwoods, willows, and horsetails. Apart from the owl (we got an amazing look at this rare species) we spotted a red, yellow, and black king snake, heard the cartoon call of a canyon wren (reminiscent of the sound of Mario falling off a cliff), and found some beautiful blooming penstemon. In fact the array of wild flowers everywhere have really stunned me, even though it has been an extremely hot and dry spring. All colors, purples, pinks, blues, orange, red, yellow, and many of them with a delicious scent. I can only imagine the glory of a wet spring!

Beyond wildflowers, the dry spring will also impact other field office activity: wildfire for example. Cedar City does a lot of fuels projects concerned with providing protection of local communities from the threat of fire. Often these projects (which frequently entail removing juniper and pinyon pine from areas to diminish the threat of fire) are coupled with goals for wildlife habitat improvement. This is a whole realm I’ve had little experience with and I look forward to learning more!

So far, the last couple weeks have been chock full of required training and reading to orient myself in the field office along with a couple of tantalizing days out in the field. On top of the owl survey, we’ve done some other surveying for another threatened bird species, the the southwestern willow flycatcher, along with some vegetation trend surveying for a fuels project. I’m just getting my feet wet and getting familiar with the plants and animals of the area. Can’t wait for the season to get into full swing! I am also excited because during this internship I will have the pleasure of working with another CLM intern on a day to day basis. It will liven up those long ten hour field days that I hammered out completely alone in Montana! So all in all its looking to be a good next few months; I am so thankful for the opportunity to explore new area and a new set of management paradigms and practices.