Well, I have just finished my last month with the Bureau of Land Management in Bakersfield, CA.  I feel like it went by both very slow and very fast.  I learned so much, met amazing people and did things I had never experienced before.  I got to study an ecosystem I had never before witnessed – the desert.  I saw what it was like to be in a region with very little water, and how the plants have come to survive and even thrive here.  I’ve learned amazing things about the native serpentine soils and how they support endemic plants, such an awesome relationship in my opinion and I recommend you read more about it here.  I saw breath-taking stretches of the wild upper Kern River and lower sections where it sadly has been captured and turned into a lazy lake or a or a docile creek or.. nothing – just a dry bed where water used to flow in plenty.
I learned so much about genera and species of California, and how to identify so many plant families based on their characteristics. I fell in love with flowers I never even knew existed, like Salvia carduacea and Cirsium occidentale.  I managed to successfully utilize the mother of all keys, The Jepson Manual, for which I am very proud.  🙂
Through this whole summer though, I am most happy about my contribution to the Seeds of Success Program.  Before I started this job, I had no idea what it even was.  It was in the job description though, and when Krissa described it I was all for it.  Upon arriving to Bakersfield, there had been no accessions collected from CA160 (our collection team number).  It was an exceptionally dry year, and my mentor said I shouldn’t expect much.  A mere three months later though, my co-intern and I had collected 20 different accessions of seed for the Program!!  I am so proud to have made such a great contribution to such a meaningful endeavor, and I plan to utilize my training in the future.
I am beyond grateful to the Chicago Botanic Garden for providing the Conservation and Land Management Program as a great learning tool and stepping stone for myself and others.  Krissa and Marian have been of the upmost help, and I am thankful for the passion, vigor and patience that they bring to this program.  I am beyond grateful to have been selected to participate in such a prestigious program.  I hope you all continue to have wonderful experiences throughout your journey, within this internship and beyond.

Hi all!

Just finished up my third month here in the Bakersfield Field Office with the Bureau of Land Management, and boy is it getting hot!!  Silly humans, making cities in the desert.. anyway, this last month has been a little trying, as we are having to be patient and wait for the few accessions of seeds we’ve targeted become ripe.  It has been an especially dry year here and so my co-worker and I have only gotten about 15 collections in these last few months.  Better than nothing for sure, but in a good year, we would have come away with a lot more.  Oh well, ya do whatcha can.  Most of what we’ve been doing though, has been Seeds of Success work.  We also out out on RHA’s (rangeland health assessments) and travel to sites for maintenance tasks like fence repair and invasive species removal, but a lot of our our summer has been traveling between sites with our fingers crossed that we’ve come at just the perfect time to collecte seed.  Recently, we were back up in the San Joaquin River Gorge and managed to collect four different species on our overnight trip – Brodiaea elegans (Harvest Brodiaea), Castilleja attenuata (attenuate Indian paintbrush), Collinsia heterophylla (purple Chinese houses) and Phacelia egena (rock Phacelia or Kaweah River Phacelia).

I also went to Lamont Meadows recently, on the Back Country Byway, where I saw my very first Western diamondback rattlesnake.  I also saw some great, showy plants which have been lacking down in the dry, sunny valley.  I saw some western columbine (Aquilegia formosa), a sweet penstemon (I believe it’s Penstemon grinnellii, not sure of the ssp.), the lovely indian paintbrush (Castilleja sp.) and a beautiful native thistle (Cirsium occidentale, did not key to ssp.).  We were at 5600 feet, which availed itself to   flowers still in bloom for me to ogle over!

Castilleja sp.

Aquilegia formosa

Western diamondback rattle snake

Penstemon grinnellii

Cirsium occidentale

Digging up the invasive bull thistle, Cirsium vulgare

Yep, we got a flat! 🙂

I’ve yet to experience all the reaches of our field office, as I haven’t been up into the Sierra foothills or over to the coast yet, but our mentor already had a lot on his plate before we came along, so it’s understandable that he doesn’t have all the time in the world to show us around our area.  There’s a small chance though that I’ll get over the coast, to Point Sal and up to Case Mountain in the Sierras before I leave, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed!  The weather has been showing its muscle as it was in the low 100’s for three or four days straight, recently.  I am really scared of this hot weather! lol  I just fill up my camel back and bring some extra bottles of water and hope for the best!  We are in the middle of a high 80’s stint right now though, so I am just stoked about that!  I love seeing how my temperature baseline changes depending on where I live.. a couple months ago it was only like 75 out and I had goosebumps! lol

I hope everyone is having a great summer and is staying cool and hydrated!  Best wishes to everyone for as much education and adventure as you can handle!  🙂

Until next time,

Rachel Snyder

BLM, Bakersfield, CA

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

Hello!! My name is Rachel Snyder and this is my first post as a CLM intern! I’m working as a botanist in Bakersfield, California for the Bureau of Land Management. I started just about a month ago and am already digging into the new plants here! I am used to the temperate rain forests of the Pacific Northwest (Oregon), so being in a much drier ecosystem has been a new and very helpful experience in spreading the expanse of my floral knowledge.  So far, my favorite new flower that I’m obsessed with here is the thistle sage, Salvia carduacea. The petals are so dainty and the seeds are tucked away under what seem like a tuft of cotton. I love it 🙂

Salvia carcuacea

Our field office is located in the San Joaquin Valley, nestled between the Coast Range Mountains and the Tehachapi’s. The range of our field office extends from the Pacific Coast all the way east into the foothills of the Sierras. So far, I’ve done monitoring for re-seeded native species at the Carrizo Plains National Monument; released burrowing owls at Atwell Island; came along on a Standard & Guideline (S&G) at a beautiful grazing site of ours just NW of Paso Robles. An S&G is like an assessment of land that we permit out to private entities for grazing use. This assessment makes sure that no degradation is occurring on our lands as a result of grazing. We visually inspect for the status of plants, wildlife, cultural or archaeological artifacts (if they occur) and an overall rangeland health assessment.  Like I said this was a beautiful property that was not noticeably impacted by the grazing occurring upon it; it is wonderful to see multi-use happening on our lands by private and public entities!

Monitoring for re-seeded native bunch grasses

Me, with a burrowing owl before I release it at Atwell

Vista from atop a rolling hill at a BLM site near Paso Robles

Perhaps the most exciting endeavor I’ve had in my internship thus far, happened just this week. The other CLM intern in my office and I got to go to Nevada this week for training in the national Seeds of Success Program. We drove to Nevada and got to meet lots of other interns and employees from public and private entities throughout the west. It was so great to meet fellow interns from the CBG as well as some awesome ones from the Great Basin Institute! (Shout out to Sam, Elise, Andy, Lara and Krista!) It was so nice to meet everyone and talk about where we were all from and what we were working on.  We spent some time in the classroom and then got to go out in the field, to the beautiful Red Rock Canyon, just west of Las Vegas to do a mock seed collecting.  It was a really great experience for which I am very grateful – thank you Chicago Botanic Garden!!

The visitor's center where we had our indoor training

An amazing view from our classroom

Out in the field, Oenothera caespitosa (Tufted Evening-Primrose)

– Rachel S
CLM/CBG Intern
Bakersfield, CA