Unlike most of my co-workers at the BLM (and most of Roswell in fact), I was curious about the whole alien thing upon arrival. I expected to see people in the streets dressed as sci-fi characters, preaching about how they will return and save/destroy humankind.  That is not the case at all.  Aside from the alien newsletter that only the 6 alien themes shops carry (which coincidentally is collaborated by the owners of those 6 shops), no one really cares about extra terrestrials.  Despite this, something inspired me to watch sci-fi movies during my time here, as well as westerns.  Anyway that’s all I have on aliens, “the truth is out there.”

As I finish up my last handful of days here, I realized that I learned a lot in the past five months.  I learned about an ecosystem that I was completely unfamiliar with beforehand, regards to biology, geology, and a little anthropology.  My favorite part was seeing new species of all kinds; crazy insects, succulent plants, variety of reptiles, new birds on my life list, and lots of big game mammals.

Something I didn’t expect to be a part of the job was the amount of manual/mechanical labor. What I mean by that is assembling wildlife waters, fixing fence, and using things like water pumps and tractors.  I never experienced any of that before and now i can say that I am somewhat “handy.” 

In my last post I mentioned that I was working on my own wildlife project dealing with species diversity in an old mesquite treatment.  In case you were wondering, bird and plants species were greater on the treated side by about nine species each.  Birds and plants were the easiest to observe, but i did notice differences in reptiles, mammals and insects too.

Also since my last post I helped with the Lesser Prairie Chicken surveys – it was really cool to see the males do their fall dancing display.  Another great opportunity was helping with the Restore New Mexico tour organized by some folks in the office. Restore New Mexico is a program that is run primarily through the BLM but with other partners like US fish and wildlife, The Nature Conservancy, NM game and fish, ranchers, and several others.  The office put on a tour of all the major projects they completed to show the partners where their money went.  I assembled the booklet (which is harder than it seems), prepared posters, and helped clean up at each stop.  Although that doesn’t sound like much fun, it was. I got to hear a lot of good speakers discuss what’s best for the land and have an awesome lunch. 

I accomplished other things outside of work. I studied for the GRE and took that almost two weeks ago, which was not fun.  I also participated in a 20 mile bike race and finished sixth, which was fun.

So overall, I had a great experience here in New Mexico. I learned a lot of great information, was able to go places that most people can’t, met cool people, see things unique to the region, and lots of valuable things that I may be forgetting right now. Now time to focus on that next step, whatever it might be.

Thanks everyone

Grant Izzo
Wildlife Intern-Roswell Field Office
Roswell, New Mexico

I’ve officially been labeled a short-timer here at the Buffalo Field Office in Wyoming.  As I prepare to head back to the Pacific Northwest I’m finding it hard to think of words to describe my time in Wyoming.  Ever since I arrived here I’ve struggled to full accept that the Powder River Basin is energy country.  Energy production is the reason I have a job, the reason everyone in my office has a job, the reason my lights come on at night, and the economic backbone for the majority of this beautiful state.  Yet I still can’t shake the voices of my environmental philosophy professors preaching the horrors of exactly what’s going on in the area I work.  I do not support the thousands of miles of two track roads, the countless produced water reservoirs, the fragmentation of habitat, the draw down of aquifers, the possible extinction of the sage grouse, or the risk of selenium tainting the Powder River – and yet I think I’m starting realize I can only lament so much when I don’t have a better solution.  The reality is I enjoy electricity, I enjoy driving my car, and I enjoy having a job.  I guess all I can really do is observe how things are done here currently and continue working to be part of better solutions in the future. 

My job itself has been a great experience and I have learned a lot of new skills.  For the last couple of weeks I have been working on a project to sample soils in the reservoirs filled with water that comes from natural gas production.  I think I would have enjoyed this project just as much as an eight year old child.  Basically I’m getting payed to play in the dirt.  Using a hand auger is messy, especially when used in the bottom of a reservoir.  I come home everyday with my jeans ruined and my hands smelling like a vulgar mix of mud and cow poop, but it’s fun work.   Hopefully though all my dirty days will produce some valuable information that will influence how reclamation is done in the Powder River Basin. 

As I think  I stated in my last blog, the best part of this experience continues to be exploring the beauty this part of the country has to offer.  I spent the last weekend basking in the glory of autumn in Yellowstone.  It’s hard to complain about walking the boardwalks around Old Faithful without the yammer of a thousand people or standing alone at a view point over the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.  It may also be worth mentioning that we saw a very large grizzly bear near Yellowstone Lake and two wolves snacking on a carcass in the Lamar Valley.  Besides Yellowstone I’ve also gotten to travel to Grand Teton and Glacier Nation Parks in addition to the time spent in Big Horn Mountains a couple miles west of here. 

I’m going to miss Wyoming.  The sky, the landscapes, the geology, my friends, and co-workers are all things I’m going to look back on fondly.   The internship has been a wonderful experience personally and professionally.  I could not of have gotten my next position without the skills I’ve learned in Wyoming. 

Jacob Dyste

It is hard to believe that 6 months has gone by already! In that short time I learned the SOS protocol from mapping suitable populations in the beginning all the way to the end product at the Bend Seed Extractory. It is the first season of SOS for BLM Surprise and my project was SOS from start to finish. I really enjoyed working with BLM volunteers Ed and Wendi Lutz who have a ranch over in Nevada about 25 miles from the office. They are doing germination studies of native plants and small scale garden studies. They really kept spirits high even on scouting trips which weren’t so successful and on days where the weather was not ideal.  Our trip to Bend was made exciting by the fact that we got to see our collections at every stage of the process. The workers at Bend don’t just stand there at a machine and push seed through-they have to be inventive for those tough collections that can’t go through the machines. We had a collection of Balsamorhiza which consisted of mostly flower heads and they put the entire collection in a wire mesh tumbler that reminded me of the things they use at the grocery store for raffle tickets and drawings (see picture). Turn the crank to mix them up and the achenes drop through to a collection bin.  We watched as the workers pulled seed out of the brown paper bag I helped put it into and then feed it into the hopper of a deawning machine and see the seeds come out one end and all the awns out another. We saw x-ray photographs taken at this stage that show the ratio of filled seed to empty-our Thurber’s needle grass looked excellent! We saw material that looked like lawn clippings being fed into a Clipper and watched as the machine sorted the material out by weight separating seed from straw-my mentor Kathryn and co-intern Maike really enjoyed this!  The neatest thing was seeing the package of seed with our office code on the label along with information on seed purity and quality. I enjoyed the small town of Cedarville even without the services one is used to in more populated areas and I really enjoyed seeing some of the beautiful back country of northwest Nevada and northeast California. I saw, for the first time ever, wild mustang and bighorn sheep and I got to camp at High Rock Canyon which requires a 4×4 with adequate clearance and at least 8-ply tires to get through safely. I may not have had the adventure of a lifetime but I certainly accomplished my goal of working on a project from the beginning and seeing it through to the end and I call that success.

Almost 4 months in. We recently spent a week working with a USGS hydrology team surveying the Tongue River (the river with our very favorite riparian zone! Acclaimed and adored location of the Mighty Welch Riparian Area Monitoring Program [MWRAMP]!). It was interesting to branch out a bit, both into new techniques and into another government agency. As the government’s main data-collecting agency, USGS is more science- and procedure-oriented and less management-focused than the BLM, and it was helpful to get another perspective as I’m beginning to think about what I might want to do next.

The BLM, USGS, and several other federal, state, and tribal agencies are working together in an aquatic task group that addresses the effects of the water produced by coalbed methane extraction on aquatic ecosystems. To that end, we were sampling for macroinvertebrates, collecting water quality data, and surveying some of the river’s physical characteristics.

After the USGS week, we headed up to the southern Bighorns for a week of sage grouse tracking with radio telemetry. The yellow autumn aspens were stunning, we learned a new skill, and we saw lots of grouse! It’s difficult to imagine a much better way to spend time; after long days of walking around in the mountains, we drove back down the rough road to a little game warden’s cabin overlooking a fork of the Powder River.

As usual, most other days have also been fairly dynamic:
A rancher wanted help loading hundreds of sheep into a huge semi truck. Meet in the corral at 7 and learn fast. “Wear your walking shoes.” (Translation: you will be stepped on by many bleating fluffballs).
Wolf spiders have eight eyes and look like old men. This is not something that I realized before, but check them out with a hand lens, they are AWESOME.
Which is a better method for grouse pellet counts, circle quadrats or transects? If circles, how large? I think that this is the only time Anya and I have ever had what our supervisor approvingly calls a “spirited discussion.”
On rare occasions and with a cursory look, a cow looks alarmingly like a black bear…

… Still very much enjoying my time in Buffalo and looking forward to what’s coming next.

The CLM internship is winding down like the leaves and weather in Anchorage and we are about to be whisked off to our respective corners of the country. Just now, I am experiencing my first snow in Alaska (besides the time I had my accident sliding down a snow drift). Since the last time I posted, our team has traveled to Nome, Fairbanks, and Central, where we performed the usual scouting, collecting, and other official protocol. In total, we made 222 collections this season.

Anyways, here are a few splotches of  interesting experiences from our trips and from our homebase in Anchorage:

Nome: Dan and I hitchhiked to retrieve our boss with 2 bearded local characters. The back of their vehicle looked like a junkyard from Star Wars: dusty and a large assortment of scrap parts. One recounted how he repelled bears from his premises by shooting them. Before depositing us at the airport, our drivers expressed how they would not have picked us up had there not been a pretty girl with them. Dan almost retorted that the pretty girl would not have gotten in the car with them without a big strong man. Haha. The tundra was heavy with blueberries, crowberries, and lingonberries. I gorged myself and filled bags full of the delectable fruits as I collected. We saw muskoxen, reindeer, a dead beluga, and the rare CLM intern (Genus: Copp; Species: Belton). Belton Copp and AK930 had a salmon/ falafel bonfire on the shores of the Bering Sea. Dan and I took plunges into the Bering Sea. At the conclusion of the trip, I was temporarily by myself stranded in Kotzebue– which is a small town situated on a peninsula north of the Arctic Circle. Fortunately and the relief of everyone else, I was able to return to Anchorage with a complimentary plane ticket.

Anchorage: Belton Copp paid his jedi mentor (kidding, his mentor is really an employee of the BLM) and us a visit. We brought him to the Alaska State Fair where I had a confrontation with a puppet.

Fairbanks/ Central: Carl Norlen (another CLM intern) and I made birch hats in our spare time. Carl also charmed 2 moose like a pied piper with his trumpet.

Anchorage: Our mentor Paul Krabacher had us over for a shindig last night. In the office, we are working on finalizing the fine details of our collections and producing reports/ posters. Additionally, we have our minds on conceiving the beginnings of seed transfer zones for Alaska.

Anya Tyson
Buffalo, Wyoming

September has up and gone, but at the moment, summer lingers on. Last week, I worked in the southern Bighorn mountains as the seasons mingled and the aspens turned golden. This region, at around 8,000 ft. is an interesting transition between the rangelands and the montane. The headwaters of the Powder River slither through canyons and firs, and the surrounding country is sage-brushed and expansive. This summer, I did all of my work for the BLM here in Buffalo out on the range, and nearly all of my play in the Bighorns; now I was paid to enjoy myself silly with an important task where both landscapes coalesced. Miriam and I used radio telemetry by day to locate sage-grouse and radio collars of deceased sage-grouse, and stayed in a mountain cabin by night. I loved radio telemetry! I already enjoy map and compass work, but even more exciting—we then got to turn topo lines into actual hills and draws beneath our feet in a biologically significant treasure hunt. We saw 41 grouse in 5 days, far more than we have seen all summer in perhaps more typical (though disturbed) grouse habitat down in the basin. The radio-collared grouse are addressing the question of whether habitat in the area is used by grouse from the different basins separated by the spine of the Bighorns. Distinct populations of grouse in the Bighorn, Powder River basins, and possibly North Platte drainage, may blur at the edges and intermingle here—which may be exceedingly important from a conservation standpoint. This small-scale BLM project is drawing to a close, and I look forward to working with and learning from the produced geospatial data.

The BLM Bunkhouse in Central, AK

Fall has come to Alaska. While normally I delight in colored leaves, crisp air, and the return of sweaters and scarves with earthy hues, autumn here is more of a warning: snow is coming soon.

The reds of the shrubs accent the brown of the moose quite nicely, no?

Despite the transitory nature of anything but winter in Alaska, this brief season continues to astound. On a recent SOS collecting trip to Central, Alaska, we were privileged to stop at Denali National Park. As most of the park is above the tree line, the shrubs of the tundra had turned bright red and purple. Further north, in the hills surrounding Fairbanks, the aspen and birch turned a brilliant yellow. When looking up from a seed collection, I always noticed how the dark green of the spruce mingled with the changing colors.

No. I have no desire to climb that.

Our drive home gave us possibly the most astounding views in Alaska yet (and that’s sayin’ something!). Denali (aka Mt. McKinley) was out in full force, nary a cloud to be seen around it. This behemoth is rarely seen, even on days with nice weather, so we got quite lucky.

The changing season also has implications for our work with the BLM SOS program. Just as the trees are dropping leaves, so too have most of the forbs and grasses dropped their seeds. Aside from one last, quick collecting trip to Homer, we’re moving our work from the field into the office. A pile of data sheets (222 to be exact) and voucher specimens beg for our attention.

And while I am sad to be leaving the best part of our internship behind, there are benefits. As I sit here typing, the first flakes of “termination dust” are falling upon Anchorage.

Jordan attempts a herculean keying task in the UAF Herbarium

My time here in Zion ends with an adventure which feels like has only just begun.   I have to admit the desert hasn’t always been my favorite place.  I believed in the past that these places are far to dry for my liking with vegetation that seems monotonous to the eye.  With my time here in Zion National Park I have gained a greater understanding of this landscape. I was brought here to further develop their “working herbarium” and I must say I feel lucky in having done just that.  I have discovered and surveyed moisture loving vegetation in hanging garden after hanging garden, rivers, and monsoonal driven habitats.   I have been lucky enough to collect plants in places that are only rarely seen by researchers and park service employees alike.  Far from any trail lays secret springs and seeps which feed the Virgin River, here you can find native ferns, their allies, shrubs, forbs, and grasses that inhibit these microhabitats. You see, after being here for a couple of weeks I realized that what specimens the herbarium currently had were mostly plants which occupy dry habitats.  I made the discussion then to make it a priority for my time here to provide the herbarium with a collection representing moisture loving plants. So I began.  It all started with study conducted back in the 1970 when there was an inventory done of Zion’s hanging gardens to discover the biogeography of them for a doctoral dissertation.  I discovered this only after discussing my love for hanging gardens with colleagues.  They pointed me toward this dissertation which had been filed away many years ago only to collect dust.  In this dissertation I found species lists, maps, and coordinates for the hangings gardens surveyed.  So I looked back into the “working herbarium” to see what plants needed collecting.  I worked to update the coordinates into the correct datum and created a comprehensive map to lead me and a volunteer on our journey.  Success!  With this project and many more I initiated I have added over 60 species to the herbarium.  I have worked with the GIS team to document every collection site for species collected thus far in the park, with hopes that documentation will continue to create tool that follow distribution of the parks native, rare, and invasive plant populations. I feel good about leaving this position knowing that I have worked hard to re-organize the herbarium, add specimens, and develop a database which documents its collections.   Zion in return has given me a greater appreciation of a landscape I once thought of as being drab and too hot to enjoy. Further more, it has allowed me too further my botanical knowledge.  

Kolob Canyons, Zion National Park

This brings me to the people I have met along the way.  The people here in Zion have been another highlight of my adventures over the past four months.  Only being here a short amount of time, I feel comfortable in my surroundings.  I am greeted everyday with smiles and people who know you by name.  During my time as an intern here I was lucky enough to present and meet with the local chapter of Utah’s Native Plant Society (all older women).  These ladies really know there stuff and are eager to learn more.   We have learned a lot from each other.  As an intern in Zion you also get to work and share knowledge with various other departments beyond the “Veg Crew.”  I have helped and shared with Interp, Wildlife, GIS, Archeologist, etc.  Much depends on plants and the people here in Zion understand this.  I help them and in return learn more about them and their work.   It’s a great relationship and I am thankful to have been given the opportunity to work in Zion National Park where…

The work is fun

The people are nice and …

The place is truly amazing!

Donna Peppin, Botanist Intern – Zion National Park