We’ve been focusing on willow plantings and scouting for plant populations for the seeds of success program for the past few weeks. We’ve also been preparing for outreach events on Memorial Day weekend at Sand Mountain.
We planted a large amount of willow cuttings from previous interns at the site of the Red Rock Fire. This site has been part of a large rehabilitation effort for the past couple of years. We are trying to control erosion along a stream bank by planting these willows to stop the sediment from washing away. Since we finished this site in super speedy, due to the efficiency of our intern team, we ended up heading back towards Carson City to plant willows in a site known as Winter’s Ranch in Washoe Valley.
After this planting, we spent some time scouting for wildflower populations and different potential collections sites for the seeds of success program. This gave us an exciting time to independently explore and identify the plants growing in the Winter’s Ranch site. We found some interesting species including a healthy population of the native Penstemon rybergii, Ranunculus aquatilis, and a few types of paintbrushes. The botanist in me was itching to ID some of the beautiful plants we’ve seen blooming all over our sites. Although I spend a lot of my free town in the mountains and hills with keys or field guides, I was incredibly happy for a chance to key out plants on the job.
Right now we are preparing for an outreach event at the popular ATV and dirt bike riding spot known as Sand Mountain. This mountain has a fascinating geologic history. It is a giant, isolated, inland dune in Nevada. Sand Mountain is unique because it is one of seven dunes in the world that can “sing.” This singing dune produces a booming, whirring, or squeaking noise often compared to the noise of a propeller plane. This occurs when a large amount of sand sloughs off from an angle of repose. Sadly, this unique feature is hard to notice due to the use of off-highway vehicles (OHV) that have deteriorated this crucial angle of repose as well as the noise of the engines overpowering the song of the mountain. Sand Mountain is also home of the endemic sand mountain blue butterfly (Euphilotes pallescens arenamontana) which is specialized to a species of buckwheat that occurs in the area. The debate about listing this species as threatened was a very hot topic just a few years ago and still, there is much controversy surrounding Sand Mountain. Until now, most of the outreach we have done has been with environmentally friendly crowds at earth day events or with easily fascinated kids. It will be interesting to try to connect with a new audience and listen, first hand, to the thoughts of the public, even if they may oppose the actions of BLM. Plus, I’m hoping that maybe, just maybe, in the darkness of night when I’m curled up in my sleeping bag and all the OHV riders have worn themselves out and turned off their engines, I’ll be lucky enough to hear sand cascading off of the mountain and listen to the lullaby of the shifting earth.
P.S. I’ve included a link to an audio recording of Sand Mountain. Just scroll down and the first “Sound Recording” link on this page is of Sand Mountain.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nori/booming_sand.html

On February 1st, I began my journey as a CLM botany intern. I was all alone in a city I knew nothing about, surrounded by an ecosystem much different than my experiences in two biodiversity hotspots including the tropical, diverse ecosystems of Hawaii and the remarkable landscape of California. I landed in Carson City, Nevada and was surrounded by what seemed like nothing but sagebrush and rabbitbush. Despite my initial shock at the landscape around me, I grew to love the wide open spaces and expanses of mountains in Nevada, I found interesting plants that fascinated me and broadened my abilities as a cryptobotanist, and developed many skills in field biology.

My internship is just about the end, and I am moving onto my next opportunity. I landed a position with an environmental consulting firm in California and I am excited about the opportunities it will bring. This internship and the opportunities it gave me really helped to line me up for the career I’ve been dreaming about for years. Once you have the skills, it is just networking and persistence that gets you there. My experiences with this internship have taught me that if you make the best of your experiences, instead of focusing on the negative, and really put the effort out there to take advantage of every opportunity, you will find the career you want. Talk to everyone you can in the offices you work in. They have the job that you want or they may have held it before, and they will know the exact steps you need to take to get it. My experiences with this internship were definitely different than I expected, but despite some momentary frustrations, these experiences have given me the opportunities I need to start a career.

I’m excited to move back to California, but I will definitely miss the landscape of Nevada, the snow on the mountains, and the random oases of aspen groves and canyon creeks in the high desert. This internship has led me to a greater appreciation of the value of public land.

Over the past few weeks we have completed a wide array of tasks including fire monitoring, learning how to use pesticide pumps, scouting and collecting seeds for the Seeds of Success program, monitoring sensitive plants, and mapping the intensity of the 7,500 acre topaz ranch estates fire right near the border of California and Nevada. The field season has started picking up and it is exciting to have more opportunities to explore the different facets of work at BLM. I’m also proud that my knowledge of Nevada’s flora is really starting to improve. I’m learning more and more about policies surrounding listed species. This has helped me to explore and learn more about the politics surrounding these listings. I’m looking forward to more field work and more camping, more animal sightings, listing to coyotes howl from my tent, perfecting my knowledge of the great basin plants, and more scenic views from sandy mountaintops.

What is in a name? Well apparently the name you give a plant, sensitive, endangered, threatened, means quite a bit! In light of a pressing evaluation of BLM sensitive species listings by the USFWS, we’ve been rushing to enter data and use Access to analyze information about a BLM sensitive plant that previous interns have been collecting data on for years. Later in the week, after a monotonous period of data entry, lightened up by an exchange of funny faces with my fellow cubicle-sharing intern, we finally got a chance to see the plant we’ve worked so hard on.
Eriogonum diatomaceum is its name. It’s a type of buckwheat (polygonaceae) that grows only on diatomaceous soils in Nevada. Diatomaceous soils are neat. They are soils created by the evaporation of water from the ancient lake lahontan and the settled layers of diatoms (microscopic algae) whose only known habitat is in Churchill Narrows, a large parcel of BLM land containing interesting rock outcrops, randomly placed train tracks, a bizarre company called “Hodges” that gets paid to use vehicles and other equipment until they break down to test their durability, paleontological sites, and of course our favorite little plant.
We filled in the blanks on the datasheets from previous interns and got to know this little plant as a random hodges tank drove back and forth in the distance on an adjacent dirt road, leaving the occasional cloud of dust in its wake. The site was gorgeous, wide-open expanses of sagebrush and greasewood with the rolling hills and mountains in the background. We also saw a couple of nifty non-botanical artifacts at the sites including fossilized bones from a large mammal and a chert flaking site created by Native Americans. So now we know what the plant looks at and got a glimpse of its habitat. It will be interesting to see if its listing changes due to the research of past and current intern teams.

There is something remarkable about the contrast of the burnt finger-like remnants of a stand of willow trees sticking out of blackened soil in a snow-covered creek. Despite this ominous view, if you look close enough, new life can be seen sprouting through the snow and along our trodden path. Thanks in part to reseeding efforts, these feeble patches of green will grow strong and help to stabilize soils and recolonize this burnt landscape. For four days we’ve been hiking up and down a beautiful canyon with amazing views of a small farming and ranching valley shrouded in a ring of mountains. The reason: public concerns that the erosion of the stream in this canyon on Bureau of Land Management land will lead to flooding and damage to adjacent homes and properties. To minimize the erosion and prevent the flooding, we are trying to establish a new stand of willow trees in highly eroded areas near their burnt relatives. To do this, we hike past the fire into un-burnt areas and collect cuttings of healthy willows. After packaging and burying them, we leave them for a couple months to induce root formation. Ultimately we will dig them up and plant the willows in dense stands. We have already managed to collect four-thousand willow cuttings, not the mention the cuttings we’ve been working on at other fire-affected sites.

In addition to the remarkable views, fun willow cutting experiences, and surreal burnt landscapes, the past few weeks have also been full of road trips to Salt Lake City and Chico for training. In Salt Lake City, we attended a five day long pesticide applicator and integrated pest management training session. This was a great opportunity to learn more about weed science, integrated pest management, and biocontrol, among other topics. As someone who has considered integrated pest management as a potential area of study in graduate school, I was fascinated by this training and incredibly happy to have the opportunity to hear about its application in real-world scenarios. It was also a great opportunity to connect with the other interns over dinner or while playing in the snow on our nightly walks back to the hostel. To finish up this week, we drove home, spent one night in our own beds, and woke up before the crack of dawn to drive to Chico and attend a class on lichen identification. This training was totally worth the early morning wake up call. Now we now longer have to wonder what the bright green and orange crusts on the rocks are, we have been given the tools to identify then and understand the physiology of these fascinating organisms.

Oh! and I can’t forget to mention, we also saw wild horses!!!

Lauren
Carson City, Nevada