Turkey Creek Restoration Weekend

Back in July we participated in a restoration planting weekend alongside members of the Sky Island Alliance and the Nature Conservancy at Turkey Creek and Cobra Ranch (in/near the Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness). We stayed at a fantastic house on the Nature Conservancy Property. They had a sleeping porch and it was AWESOME!! The only thing that was not awesome was that I hadn’t put on bug spray the first night and in one hour of being outside around 6pm, I had gotten over 20 mosquito bites. That has been one constant in my life; if there are biting insects within a one mile radius of me, they will find me!! HAHA

Nature Conservancy Guest House – Our home for the Planting Weekend. It sure beat camping!!!

The sleeping Porch at the Nature Conservancy House. Loved sleeping “outdoors” but with the screens to keep the bugs out!!

At both our sites we were planting Giant Sacaton. It is traditionally found in flood plain ecosystems. In the areas we were working, past land uses had disrupted the flood plain cycle and taken the area towards a more river-channel model. So historically this area experienced rain events and the water would be caught up in vegetation, spread over a large area and stay for a relatively long time and soak into the ground. However, with roads being cut into the earth by ranchers in the area (who have not been in the area for 50+ years) and grazing taking away much of the vegetation that used to slow down the water, now when there are rain events the water flows into the channels formed by former roads and speeds off the landscape. This then allows fewer plants to grow, due to lack of water, as well as these roads/streams continue to be cut further into the earth and when rain comes it won’t spread across the landscape because it now has to crest a stream bank. It is in an effort to stop this cycle and restore a floodplain cycle that BLM and the Nature Conservancy are manually filling in old road channels and planting Giant Sacaton to try and slow down the water of new rain events.

Turkey Creek

The whole goal of the involved planting process is to allow the small plants the best opportunity to survive in this desert environment they are suddenly thrown into. Holes are dug and then filled halfway with water. This water is then allowed to soak into the ground. This provides the plant with a moist environment so that it isn’t immediately stressed out when it is planted.

Hole that is pre-watered and ready for planting!

Once the holes are pre-watered a glop [a very scientific term, I know] of DriWater is added to the bottom of the hole. DriWater is a gel that is about 97% water and the other 3% is cellulose and some other materials. Apparently how it works is that when it is placed in the ground the microbes in the soil will eat some of the cellulose and other materials and the chemical reaction that that produces will release water to the plant(?!?!). That’s at least the gist that I got from trying to research the product.

Sky Island Alliance Volunteer Alan holding DriWater

Then the plants are placed in the holes and the dirt is back filled into the hole.

Planted Giant Sacaton

Then the plants receive a layer of water on top in order to help settle the dirt around them and to once again give them the best chance to survive. Then a layer of mulch is added to help trap water as well as keep direct sun off the dirt surrounding the plant. The more water you can give to and the cooler you can keep plants in the desert, the better!

This is a field of our plantings. They have been top watered and are just waiting for mulch. Everywhere you see a yellow or black tube, there is at least one of our plants there! We planted about 5 times the area you see in this picture.

And no trip would be complete without some seemingly disastrous turn of events forcing biologists to be resourceful in order to save their project!!! To begin with the water trailer we brought with us was leaky down where the hose joins the tank and the motor. And the drive out to the Turkey Creek planting site was…rough?…undeveloped?….insane? Any of these would work. And when we drove up there we had to haul the large water trailer behind our truck. Needless to say there was always concern that something bad would happen. We made it through the first day of plantings at Turkey Creek, using as much water as we could, as quickly as we could, in order to get as much out of the tank before it all leaked out. The next morning however, on that INSANE drive out to Turkey Creek, we were about 0.1 miles from our site when we looked behind us and the ground was getting soaked. On the last big set of rocks the leaky hose had been completely ripped off the tank. Then a 20 minute ordeal ensued of trying to get all possible water into buckets, while trying to plug the hole with hands and find some way to get it so we could drive to our site and start using the water. Eventually a pair of leather work gloves were shoved into the pipe and we were able to limp up to our site. Then using some wire off of plant flags and some major ingenuity, the leaky hose was attached and we were once again in a race against the leak to use as much water as possible. It was a level of excitement that we weren’t expecting that morning! But we were still able to use a lot of the water and complete our plantings!

The Water Trailer of DOOM!!

During this weekend I saw some other awesome animals. I saw my first tarantula in the wild. While walking in the stream bed at Cobra Ranch we saw a turtle near the bank. It kept trying to climb the bank to get away from us, but the angle was too steep so then he would tumble over backwards! 🙁 After he did that twice we placed him on the top of the bank so he could get away and stop stressing out. Later that day we startled a rattlesnake and in its attempt to run away it fell off and tumbled down the side of a fairly large stream bank too. We were just an epidemic of scaring animals that day!

The planting weekend was a great experience. It was fun to work with and learn from a group of dedicated and impassioned people who come out on their weekends to help restore ecosystems!

Heather Paddock
Safford, AZ
BLM

How is it the end of August?!?

This last month has flown by once again. At the beginning of the month my Dad came to visit me and we took a road trip up to Northern Arizona. It was an amazing experience to see the Grand Canyon for the first time!

Beautiful Day at the Grand Canyon in Northern AZ

We have had 4 trips out to Bonita Creek for Green Sunfish Removal. It has been very interesting to see the stream change over the past 4 months. The site that we went to our very first day in Bonita was a large open expanse of water that we were able to walk through up to a few pools further upstream. When we visited that same site just last week the stream was almost entirely choked with tall plants and we couldn’t even walk through it. Nature is definitely not a constant thing!

Also, I SAW A COATI!!!!! Well, to be more exact I saw 6 coati, a mom and her 5 babies. We were driving into Bonita Creek and they scampered across the road and into the trees on the other side. I didn’t have my camera with me, and when I tried to get a picture on my phone you couldn’t see them in and amongst the trees. But I saw them and it makes me so happy! 🙂

I have also had the opportunity to get a GIS Tutorial, which is how to use a fancy mapping program (ArcGIS) to locate possible areas of interest based on preexisting water, vegetation and ownership maps (etc), without having to drive to every single site first. It will be very useful in selecting sites for Seeds of Success Collection. I also completed an online NEPA training which concerned the formation and structure of the National Environmental Policy Act. I think it is great to be able to take advantage of the resources available to me as a BLM intern and receive trainings like these. You never know when you will/can use some random information you learned!

This past week we had an American Conservation Experience Crew based out of Flagstaff come down and camp at Sands Draw for a full week. Sands Draw is a large livestock exclosure (keeps cows out) in the middle of the San Simon Valley. The crew planted and seeded native grasses and dug hundreds of planting holes for BLM to use in future planting efforts.

The plants are put in the ground, then have gravel placed around them (acts as a windblock, support and to catch more water), and then additionally have straw placed on top (keeps direct sunlight off to keep plants cooler and will eventually break down into a mulch).

The Crew’s last day in the field we switched over to working at a site called Howard’s Well. This was a large pool that houses native fish, but it becomes over-grown with sedges (cat-tail like plants). If this is allowed to go unchecked, then the sedges will completely choke the pond and it will dry up and all the native fish within it will die. So nine of us (the 6 crew members, then myself, Rosalee and Heidi) spent the whole day ripping and cutting the plants out of the pool. At the beginning we didn’t think we would get too far and hoped for getting half the pool done. But by the end of the day we had completely cleared the pool! That was definitely a great feeling of accomplishment.

Here is what the pond looked like at the begining of our day.

Here is what the pond looked like at the end of our day! Felt extremely accomplished to get everything cleared out!

The over-arching theme of this past month for me has been DATA ENTRY!! I have completed over 100 hours in the last month. I have been consolidating and cleaning up the data files for Heidi’s Green Sunfish removal from 2009, 2010, and 2011. I have also then been confirming all entered data against the physical data sheets. Needless to say this takes quite a bit of time, especially when some of the files are as messed up and confusing as these have been! However, I can’t complain too much. I am one of those strange people who likes to sit down and organize things, likes to sort and figure and get everything worked out. So though it is hard on the lower back to be crouched over a keyboard for 10 hours a day, I still enjoy it!

I am going home for a long vacation around Labor Day Weekend and I am very much looking forward to seeing my family! Once I return I am excited to knock out my last 3 weeks here in Safford. Then it’s back to California and on to other opportunities!

Heather Paddock
Safford, AZ
BLM

Rain? In the Desert?

The past month has been full of new adventures, including our first time working under Jeff, on the plant component of our internship. We have had two visits from a group of contract fishers out of Tempe, AZ [and I apologize for not knowing the name of that company]. They come into Bonita Creek and act as a high-effort and high-impact fish removal squad. On a typical overnight set of our nets, Heidi, Rosalee and I typically set out a maximum of 120 nets per trip. These contractors set 500+ nets each night and camp in the area in order to set for 2-3 nights in a row. This allows them to remove fish from a greater area, and in greater numbers, than our BLM staff is capable of doing.

Bonita Creek had begun drying up in a lot of places. Some of the drying pools contained native fish that Heidi wanted us to move to pools that were more likely to stick around until the monsoons came in to raise the water levels. On the day we were out in Bonita Creek cleaning out some drying pools I was stung in the finger by a bee of some kind. I am not allergic (luckily), but I have since learned that you are not supposed to just grab the stinger and pull it out (like I did). This squeezes extra venom into the wound and will greatly increase your body’s reaction to the sting. Needless to say I was surprised when I woke up the next morning to a finger that was so swollen that I could not bend it at all!! I was on Benedryl, elevating my hand and keeping ice on it for 2.5 days before I was able to bend my finger normally again! It wasn’t how I intended to spend the better part of my 4th of July time off, but what can you do?

The Monday after the 4th of July weekend, we traveled for almost two hours to a site along the Gila River called York Canyon. Here we performed electro-fishing monitoring of fish populations. We then turned our sights to preparing for our upcoming weekend “camping” trip. We participated in a restoration planting weekend alongside members of the Sky Island Alliance and the Nature Conservancy in Turkey Creek and Cobra Ranch (in/near the Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness). We spent the preceding week testing and coiling over 600 feet of garden hose and loading trucks full of plants and a product called DriWater. So much cool stuff happened over the course of that weekend and I took so many pictures that I plan to have another post just about that trip (coming soon, I promise).

We have also participated in a Spring Snail survey with Arizona Game and Fish staff on BLM lands. I also spent a couple days calibrating and constructing a Rain/Temperature Gauge that will eventually be deployed at a site called Sands Draw in order for our supervisors to get a more accurate representation of local precipitation levels received by restoration plantings in the area. The most recent project that we have started is a re-organization of our office’s Herbarium. Over the years, specimens have gotten out of order, mis-numbered and mis-entered in our database. It will be a fairly long term project that we will complete before we leave to get everything updated and organized. I know it might be strange, but I enjoy semi-grueling organizational tasks, so I am excited to be working on this during our office time! We are also using this herbarium collection to learn to identify our Seeds of Success Target Species for this year. Once we are able to identify these species (and the rains slow down) we will begin SOS scouting, and further down the line, collection of native seed materials.

And now for something COMPLETELY different: Who knew that the desert could be this HUMID? Well, this California girl certainly didn’t!! June 28th, monsoon season was off to a bang with a huge thunder and lightning storm that passed right by our house. We went to take the dogs for a walk before it started raining too hard and at one point we had lightning strikes on all four sides of our complex. For the next two weeks straight, we had storms roll through nearly every evening. It was pretty incredible to lie down in bed and have the room lit up sporadically by lightning strikes. I have seen lightning in every hue, from white, to blue to orange, and in so many fascinating patterns.

Storm clouds near Cobra Ranch at Sunset

Now don’t get me wrong, I LOVE thunder and lightning, but I highly don’t approve of the humidity that comes with them. Give me dry heat over 105 any day rather than being in the mid-90s and 50% humidity. It just makes you sweat like crazy!! [Or as my boss Heidi says, “Women don’t sweat, we glow”, so GLOW like crazy.] The toughest part of the humidity is that it stops our evaporative swamp cooler in our trailer from cooling down the air. It will still move the air, but it’s not cold by any stretch of the imagination. I actually look forward to driving into town/home from work because my car has actual AC and I can feel cold air!!

It’s hard to believe that with the timesheet I turned in last week, I have completed over half of my hours for this internship. With weekend plans filling up between now and the end of September, I somehow feel like the rest of this experience is just going to blow by! I am still enjoying everything I am learning and doing and I hope to absorb all I can in the last two months I have here!

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”
–Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Heather Paddock
Safford, AZ
BLM

A Month of Wildlife and Water

It’s hard to believe that almost 2 months of my internship are done. This past month has been a whirlwind of work-filled weeks and busy weekends. The biggest adventure of this past month, and perhaps of my entire internship, was a two night float trip on the Gila River. I had never before been on such a trip. It was physically difficult due to the extremely low levels of water flow. In fact, it was the lowest flow trip that any BLM team from our office had ever completed. This trip began my month of animal encounters, with a rattlesnake at our campsite the first night, and the next day we encountered seven different Desert Big Horn Sheep, including a mom and her lamb at the riverside getting a drink of water. During the trip we used an electro-fisher and seine nets to monitor fish populations at four different sites along the river. In addition to our sampling efforts, our days involved approximately 10 hours of paddling, dragging loaded canoes over rock beds and plenty of getting in and out of the boats! Needless to say it took a while to feel fully recovered!

I feel like I was not very detailed in my last entry with exactly what I am doing during our fish monitoring/removal work, so I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about it now. When we plan to set nets in Bonita Creek (as we did 4 times in the past month), it is a two-day process. We leave the office at approximately 12-12:30 and drive about 45 minutes to the Gila Box National Riparian Conservation Area. There are many different areas of Bonita Creek that have perennial pools (ie, they have water year-round). We typically try to set our nets either in large pools or areas of the creek that have running water. The most important thing is that the water be deep enough to mostly submerge the nets in, otherwise we run the risk of a raccoon or other animal trying to get into the nets to get the dog food (which we use as bait). We allow the nets to sit overnight and collect fish. The fish enter the traps, but due to the design of the traps, cannot leave. However, they do still swim about inside the trap. In this manner the fish are not harmed and remain alive to be measured and put back (if they are native), or measured and removed (if they are non-native). The second day of our effort involves leaving the office at 6 AM and once we arrive we collect all the nets together and process the fish trapped inside.

One of the pools we set in for our Green Sunfish Removal Efforts

Example of how our nets are set in the water. Note how the black Promar is not 100% submerged. Sometimes Sonoran Mud Turtles enter the net and we leave them an air pocket.

Example of how our nets are set in the water, we usually tie them to a tree or something solid on the bank to prevent the nets from being washed downstream in case a storm surge comes.

We use two types of nets in Bonita Creek: Promar Mesh and Metal Minnow. They have very different mesh sizes and typically catch different compliments of fish (based on size). The Promar tend to catch most of the Bullfrog Tadpoles, Sonoran Suckers, Gila Chub, and the non-native Green Sunfish and Bullhead Catfish. The Metal Minnow traps tend to catch mostly the smaller, non-native Mosquito Fish and Flatheads, as well as young/small individuals of the other species.

Collection of Nets to be Processed

We collect all of our nets together in order to count and measure the fish within.

Measuring Set-up

We dump the fish out of the nets and into the blue bucket. Then they are measured on the white board and recorded. Natives are placed back in the pool while invasives are placed into the white bucket that contains a fish sedative.

Fish in the Bucket

Includes native Gila Chub, Bullfrog Tadpoles and native Sonoran Suckers.

Using these nets almost every week leads to damages. A large quantity of time this past week has been devoted to repairing both Promar and Metal Minnow nets in preparation for a team of contract workers to come and camp out at Bonita Creek for 3 full days of fishing aimed at causing a collapse in the breeding population of Green Sunfish. As a side note, in Bonita Creek we have also had a fair share of animal encounters. We have seen white-tail deer, juvenile brown bear, as well as a grey fox.

We also visited Pategonia, AZ one day and assisted Caleb (one of the other interns who traveled with us to Boise for the SOS training course). He works for Borderlands Restoration. We helped him to complete their monthly survey of pollinator supporting plants at 100 random points on a parcel of Nature Conservancy land. The group is trying to formulate a nectar-calendar for their area. They are going to look at when they currently have plants that support pollinators, and what periods on the calendar currently do not have plants to support pollinators. Then, once they have completed this process, they will plant new species into their system that will fill in the gaps. They hope that by creating a year-round supply of food for pollinators, they may cause a chain reaction that will allow their system to grow and recover from the bottom of the food chain, up to the top. I think it is a very interesting concept and will be excited to hear about the progress of this project in the future!

We also began work on creating a brand new BLM Junior Explorer Booklet. It will be called “Across BLM Lands: Desert Fishes and their Aquatic Habitats”. It has been very educational to collect information for this booklet and to create different activities in order to communicate the information to 8-12 year olds. I am excited that by the time I leave this internship I shall (hopefully) have a booklet to take home that I co-created!

The last major thing that we have done is two hiking trips in the Aravipa Canyon Wilderness to Horse Camp Canyon. The pools that remain in this canyon during the dry season are a sort of refuge habitat for Green Sunfish, from which their population survives the monsoons and then re-colonizes the main stretch of the stream in the spring. The hike out to this site is arduous to an inexperienced hiker like me, to say the least. It is 5.5 miles of hiking each way. In total we hike approximately six hours each time we go out there. The trips are very physically demanding as the route requires hiking over a variety of surfaces as well as in and out of the creek for long periods of time.

Our first trip was to pick up 10 Promar nets and 10 Red Promar nets that had been set the night before by another research team. Between our efforts pulling those nets, seining, and the efforts of the research team the day previous we removed approximately 600 Green Sunfish. It was an incredible day for wildlife as well! We saw a black bear on the road, on the drive into the Wilderness, and we also saw four white-tailed deer within 10 minutes of hiking. We thought that would be the extent of our wildlife experiences for the day. However, around an hour into our hike we rounded a corner and saw a Mama black bear and two cubs. When the mother noticed our presence, she sent her cubs up a tree. We were able to walk around them at a safe distance and kept on with our day. We also saw the same family group on the hike back out. As if those weren’t enough, we also encountered a fully coiled and rattling rattlesnake on our hike out as well. Jeff was the one who startled it, and I am very glad it wasn’t me; I am not 100% sure how I would have reacted. At the very end of our hike out to the truck, Rosalee and Heidi came across a troubled juvenile red tail hawk from the Creek. Rosalee formerly worked at Wildlife Rehab Centers and so she was able to help secure the bird. Heidi and Jeff took the bird to Tucson the following day and apparently it will make a full recovery. Our second trip into Aravipa a week later didn’t involve any pre-set nets, we only used seine netting and we removed 400 Green Sunfish. Though it was not nearly as exciting for wildlife, we did see a juvenile bobcat on drive in.

It is incredible to see so much life thriving out here in the desert. The last thing that I expected when I signed on to work in the desert was to almost constantly encounter animals in their natural habitats. I have been incredibly lucky so far and I can only hope to continue to see more animals. My goal/dream is to see a coati in the wild. My last internship was at the Oakland Zoo, which involved taking care of our troop of six coati, so I am very fond of these animals and would be beyond excited to be able to see them while I am here in Arizona. Even bought myself a coati hat when I visited the Desert Museum in Tucson last weekend [which is well worth the trip and I would highly recommend it!]

The Coati Hat that I bought at the Desert Museum in Tucson

This will be my first weekend to stay in Safford, with nothing to do, since the beginning of my internship. It will be amazing to relax and recover from a long month of work.

Until next time! 🙂

It starts!

There are two CLM interns here at the Safford, AZ BLM field office this Summer, myself and Rosalee. We will be working together on multiple projects for our two mentors, Heidi and Jeff. Between now and the July monsoon rains we will be working mostly with Heidi on native fish monitoring as well as some non-native fish removal in local stream, rivers, and pools. In the fall, we will switch gears and begin helping Jeff out and utilizing our Seeds of Success training as we aim to complete over 30 collections for the SOS program. In between these major projects, we will work on some restoration projects both here in the Safford area, and in the Patagonia, AZ area. Once construction is complete on the common greenhouse for the Safford BLM/Gila Watershed Partnership/Eastern Arizona College, we will also be helping out there with the propagation of native plants for various restoration projects. Additionally, when we are not in the field we will be completing data entry for both mentors and helping to create digital herbarium specimen for the BLM Office.

I can’t believe 3 weeks of the internship is already gone! It has been such a whirlwind! After arriving and moving into my housing on the 1st of May and settling in, work began on Monday May 6th. That first week was mostly paperwork, meetings and trainings, with a small amount of field work thrown in. For some reason I find it highly ironic that probably the only job for which I will ever have a cubicle, is for a field-work based internship! After our first Monday-Thursday, we then had Friday and Saturday off before we began our roadtrip up to Boise, ID for the Seeds of Success – Seed Collecting for Conservation and Restoration course. The training was very fun and informative and I had a great time. Idaho is a beautiful state with great people! Our third week was very fun. We caught up on reimbursement paperwork and surveys for our training courses as well as more data entry. Wednesday was extremely cool. We got to complete Utility Terrain Vehicle training and are now certified to drive UTVs!

I find that I am still just as excited about the vast number of learning opportunities this internship offers as when I signed on to come to Safford 3 months ago. I can’t wait to see how much more I can learn not only about the ecological communities in which I am working, but about the agency in which I work. I am definitely looking forward to the next 4 months! And now I am off to relax and explore the area during the long Memorial Day weekend!

Gila Chub from Bonita Creek