Finally, a wonderful six months has come to an end. It has been a great field season filled with wonderful people, memories, and experiences. I have learned so much and will leave here with much more knowledge, skills, connections, and friends than I came with.

Suited up for bullfrog hunting!

I gained a wide diversity of new field and survey skills this season including electroshocking, PIT tagging, locating egg masses, identifying western fish species, monitoring eagle nests, and much more. I have to say though, I will be glad to never look at another Applegate’s milkvetch again. We surveyed milkvetch for hours on end, for weeks, staring at the ground, looking for any tiny seedling of milkvetch. At times I would close my eyes after a day of milkvetch surveying and see milkvetch on the floor and carpet. Some of us even had dreams of milkvetch.  Milkvetch surveying was the only field work I wasn’t very fond of this summer, but it was a good experience either way, and when you’re outside in beautiful weather all day you really can’t complain much.

My favorite work of the field season was electroshocking. We utilized electroshocking for both bull trout and Lost River & shortnose suckers. Electroshocking was a lot of fun to me because it required a lot of action, focus, and quick movements and it was fun to try and capture the fish before they came to. It was also interesting to be able to handle the fish and inspect them so closely, as well at PIT tagging them. I got to know a lot of new fish species this way through close inspection of their characteristics. I realized that I really enjoy more hands-on kind of field work. I really enjoy working closely and personally with a species, up to a certain point of course. I wouldn’t want to do anything really harmful or too invasive to a species. Even though I generally consider myself more of a bird and mammal kind of girl, I found that I really enjoy the field work that is conducted for fish.

I do have to say that I did miss mammal and bird work this summer. I gained a lot of great experience and skills with aquatic species, which I’m sure will be very useful in the summer and make me a more diverse and competitive applicant for future jobs. Next field season though I would definitely like to gain more experience working with birds and mammals. I found that although aquatic species work is a lot of fun and you get to hang out in and near water most of the time which is great, my passion still really lies within the birds and mammals. These are the species that I get really excited about and feel that I identify with and understand more.

All in all, this field season has been an amazing, informative experience that I am very thankful to have had. Klamath Falls will always have a special place in my heart from now on. I will leave here with great experiences and friends, and probably tears. I found an amazing community of caring environmentalists here that are all very special people and I will have a hard time saying goodbye to. Memories and experiences last a lifetime though and shape the kind of person that you become, and thanks to all of these experiences, I know that I will leave here a better person.

I am very thankful to this internship program and to Krissa and Wes, who are two very caring and kind individuals that I’m sure have helped so many people, including me, and have provided unforgettable experiences. Thank you for making my experience possible.

Gearhart Mountain Wilderness with the crew after a long day of work

Red-headed sapsucker!

The big sucker!

Sometimes when you travel down dirt roads for a little more than an hour, it can start to make you wonder whether or not you’re ever going to come out. This past week, we went into the deep heart of the Modoc National Forest in northern California in search of sucker species to see how far up the stream system they travel and can be found.

This past week was also my first chance to be crew lead as I had been designated crew lead for the shortnose and lost river sucker. I really enjoyed taking on the responsibility as lead and being able to make my own decisions on the project with the help of my fellow coworkers and being responsible for all aspects of the project. I feel that I really thrive when I am given responsibility and freedom to make my own decisions and choices in the field because I feel that it really aids in my problem-solving abilities and my performance.

Tuesday morning we set out with all of our electroshocking gear to sections of a steam upriver to a reservoir where we knew suckers were present. The river mostly consisted of small sections of flow and larger sections of pools. We concentrated on shocking the pools since that was where the suckers would most likely be. At first we caught a lot of dace and green sunfish (which are beautiful looking by the way) for the first couple of pools. When we arrived at the third pool though we caught our first small sucker which we photographed, weighed, measured and PIT tagged! A couple of pools later, the water started getting deeper and it was getting harder to shock because the fish could swim away more easily. Then, suddenly, while shocking in the middle of the pool, a huge fish jumped up! We missed it the first time and then it jumped up again and we caught it! Lo and behold it was a large sucker! We were all so excited to have found such a big sucker so far upstream! After that, we continued to find some suckers in different sections of the streams, so the week of surveying was a success!

It was also a success because the area hasn’t been surveyed for suckers in about 20-30 years. Therefore, our findings could hold significance for the scientific community and for endangered sucker restoration/conservation! The lead biologist on suckers here at the office who I am working with is actually going to have me write a manuscript on our findings which may be published! I never expected that to be a possibility this summer, but I am sure glad to have it!

Until next time,

Kaitlyn Farrar

Dace

Green sunfish

These past few weeks have been filled with lots of fish and plants (specifically milkvetch)! I did some of my first fish night work which involved surveying a stream in northern California with a flashlight searching for Modoc suckers. This turned out to be a pretty difficult task as the fish species that we were looking at were about as big as my thumb! Let’s just say I had to get pretty intimate with the fish to be able to identify them. Luckily, down the line my coworkers and I really got a feel for identifying the suckers based on their overall figure and how they moved in the water. I never really thought that I would really enjoy night work as I have always been a morning person but I have discovered that it is so much fun to be out during the night! You get to see and explore another whole new world and atmosphere when you’re out a night. It seems to keep you on your toes more and for me fills me with a bit of excitement and adrenaline. And another benefit is you can sleep in however late you want and have the daytime to get things done and it’s especially nice to avoid the heat in these hot summer months.

We are currently wrapping up our milkvetch surveys at our last field site. The five year monitoring plan is due this year to give an update on the status of Applegate’s milkvetch and determine whether it should still be listed as a threatened or endangered species. We’ve all been searching so hard for milkvetch this past week that sometimes when we close our eyes we can still see it! One of my coworkers even ended up dreaming about it!

Other than that, we have spent some more time in the Gearhart Mountain Wilderness monitoring the bull trout that we have PIT tagged. We have been walking up the streams with a mobile antenna to detect the PIT tags so that we can assess how far the bull trout travel up and down the stream. It’s always really nice to be working in the Gearhart as we get to camp in a beautiful place with some great hiking and birding opportunities. This past week we hiked up to a lookout in the wilderness where we had amazing views and found an adorable brown bat roosting at the lookout! It has been such a great time this summer with such great coworkers and amazing places to work!

Until next time.

My coworkers and I at the lookout!

 Most of this past month of work has been dedicated to monitoring bull trout populations in the Gearhart Mountain Wilderness in eastern Oregon. The Bull trout is a threatened species and we have been electroshocking to capture them in the streams and gathering data on them such as length and weight. We have also been tagging all of this fish that we catch with PIT tags so that we can monitor demographic parameters of the population as well as how far individuals travel within a stream. This effort has been aided by antennas that pick up the PIT tags in the fish as they travel upstream or downstream.

So far this has been my favorite field work as the environment is ideal, especially in hot weather and electroshocking is a very exciting and fun process. You have to be on your toes and ready to capture the fish once they are temporarily stunned from the electroshocking, which has made for many fun and entertaining memories! Bull trout are also an appealing species with beautiful coloration containing cream colored to bright orange spots. It has been a great time to work out in small forested streams with very intact riparian areas which creates the complex habitat that bull trout require to compete and thrive. There has also been restoration work done on some of the streams to see if it increases bull trout numbers and decreases competing fish populations such as the invasive brown trout. The restoration consists of putting large woody debris into the streams to create more pools, riffles, cut-banks and cover for the bull trout. It will be interesting to put the data together from this year and previous years to try and find a trend and to see how far the bull trout are traveling within the stream!

Here are some photos from bull trout monitoring:

The past few weeks have been filled with lots of new adventures, surveys, and sights. One week was spent surveying for Applegate’s milkvetch, an endangered plant species endemic to the Klamath Basin. It just so happens that the largest population of Applegate’s milkvetch is located at the local Klamath Falls airport. Therefore, to survey for this species we had to have a 3 hour information and safety discussion on the airport and airplanes. We then had to be escorted to patches of grass in between the taxi ways and runways by airport crew members to survey for this plant species while planes and U.S. airforce jets were frequently taking off. Needless to say, it was a pretty crazy environment with planes and jets taking off here and there, in such close proximity to us. It was also pretty amusing to try to coordinate and communicate with a crew of about 7 people while all wearing earplugs to protect our ears from the loud jets. Thus far, it was definitely the most bizarre environment I have worked in doing plant or wildlife surveys. To add to the craziness, it was also a very bad weather week with some rain, snow, sleet, hail & strong winds- which does not help at all when you are basically in the most exposed area you can be. Surveying for Applegate’s milkvetch at the airport may not have been my favorite field time this season, but looking back on it now only a couple of weeks after, I am glad to have had the experience and some very comical memories to accompany it.

The past couple of weeks I have been surveying for lost river, modoc, and shortnose suckers, as well as monitoring bald eagle nests around the Basin. We first set up four fyke nets for a week to try and catch some juvenile suckers in a pond, where they had been imported, but we failed to catch any live suckers. The biologist lead of the suckers thinks that it had been a cold winter and that the pond had suffered a hard freeze, consequently wiping out the small sucker population in the small pond area.

Yesterday, one of my coworkers and I traveled to a forest stream in northern California to electroshock to try and find Modoc suckers. Unfortunately, we did not discover any suckers in the stream portion that we electroshocked but we did catch many brown trout, speckled dace, and pit river sculpin. Brown trout are very invasive to this area and are impeding conservation efforts of native fish, so unfortunately we had to practice eradication on the brown trout that we caught. On the bright side though, we will be making some delicious fish tacos now!

Other than fish and plants, my time has been spent checking up on eagle nests that were established earlier this season to monitor them and see how many young (if any) they have. It has been exciting for me to see nestling eagles for the first time! The ones that I have seen this week have been very big baby birds with dark feathers, bright orange beaks and large curious eyes. They seem to be beginning to get a little bit antsy in their nests and in the next few weeks should begin to really stretch out their wings and fledge!

Here are some photos from the milkvetch airport surveying.

Hello All,

This past month has been all about the secretive Oregon spotted frog that we have been putting much effort into gathering data upon and monitoring. As some out West may know, the Oregon spotted frog is a candidate species for endangered species listing under the Endangered Species Act. I believe it is going to be listed as a threatened or endangered species in the near future. Historically, the Oregon spotted frog’s range included British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California. Currently, it is estimated that about 78% of its former range has been lost and is found now only in small pockets within British Columbia, Washington & Oregon and is thought to be extirpated from California (http://www.fws.gov/oregonfwo/Species/Data/OregonSpottedFrog/).

This past week, my co-intern and I have been camping out in the Modoc National Forest in northern California searching for the Oregon spotted frog in what had been identified as suitable habitat in the previous year by the spotted frog biologist. We will be camping again this week for the second round of surveying. So far, we have found some great habitat in the Modoc National Forest, but sadly no frogs yet. After finding some prime habitat but no frogs it seems unlikely that we are going to find any there, but we will still try! It sure has been a beautiful place to be camping and hiking around in. We even saw some fresh black bear tracks this past week and found a snipe’s nest with eggs! There are so many great birds coming back for the breeding season as well, that are very exciting to see.

After this last week of frog surveying, we will be moving on to working with sucker fish that are native to the upper Klamath Basin, so many more exciting weeks to come!

One amusing lesson I learned this month is that Dodge Durangos may be large vehicles, but that doesn’t mean they have a high clearance. This lesson was learned after having gotten the vehicle stuck in snow on a back dirt road that wasn’t very deep at all. Luckily, our supervisor was with us so we had 3 hands on deck to get it out. On another amusing side-note, as I was pushing on the vehicle to help get it unstuck it started gaining momentum and my feet got hung up in the snow and I did a forward face plant in the snow! Definitely making for some memorable moments this month!

That’s all for now folks, here are some photos from this week! 🙂

I am working with the Fish & Wildlife Service in Klamath Falls, Oregon. The Klamath Basin is a great place to be! Klamath Falls reminds me a bit of Missoula, MT where I have spent my past two summers. It’s a great birding area as many birds migrate through the upper Klamath Basin and there are tons of waterfowl here right now! I am really into birding so I am loving being surrounded by such a great diversity of bird species right now. Waterfowl I have seen thus far include: scaup, buffleheads, western grebe, redhead, goldeneye, ruddy duck, white-fronted goose, snow goose, ross’s goose, canada goose, gadwall, common merganser, eared grebe, mallard, northern shoveler, northern pintail, and too many more to remember!

So far we’ve been done some Oregon spotted frog surveys, bald eagle nest monitoring, water depth sampling and we’ve gone out on boats with USGS to help capture endangered and threatened suckers in the Klamath Basin by seining!

Sadly though, I have been learning that the water quality in the upper Klamath Basin is not so great due to many agricultural operations surrounding the basin. Hopefully though we can help gather data to aid management decisions in the future towards improving water quality in the basin!

Here are some great pictures from the past couple of weeks!