I remember, back in middle school, how the summers used to lazily drift by. Fall, winter and spring were all terrifically busy, but for those few warm months I had all the time in the world and it seemed like forever (not in a bad way) until the seasons turned. Now, out of college, my experience is reversed. The warm season is full to the brim with work, traveling and of course lots of outdoor adventures, while the winter months can be almost lackadaisical. I have to say though, that this summer may have gone by the fastest out of any so far! As I look out over the Bodie Hills, richly colored with turning aspen, it seems like only a few days ago that those same hills were still white with patches of snow. The sage grouse chicks that weren’t even eggs when I arrived are now fully grown, and plants that I couldn’t ID for lack of flowers in the early spring shed their last seeds months ago. Its pretty crazy, but I can’t complain – life flies when you’re  having fun.

That’s right, even a job can be fun! While I can’t say I will miss the miles of bumpy roads, some tedious surveys and the occasional day where I didn’t bring enough water for the heat, I have genuinely enjoyed my CLM experience here in Bishop. My co-intern Leah, mentor Martin and all of the rest of the BLM staff were truly fantastic and I feel pretty lucky that I got to spend my summer here with them. Every day is spent somewhere beautiful and I do feel that the work the BLM does here is improving the prospects for the area’s flora and fauna, as well as recreational opportunities.

It hasn’t been all fun and games though, I’ve learned to use oodles of new monitoring techniques, how to find sage grouse with radio-telemetry and all about seed collection from start to finish. I’ve also learned a ton about the ecology of the great basin, how to reverse an outlandishly huge truck a mile and a half down a narrow dirt road, and maybe, just maybe, I’ve learned a little about myself. I know that I like being outside, and dislike driving to get there. I know that I can ID plants better than most folks, but have no interest in becoming a professional taxonomist or anyone who specializes in identifying sagebrush. I also know that while the desert sagebrush landscape and the white granite of the eastern Sierra are both beautiful, my heart is tied to green trees and rivers that eventually reach the ocean.

What I don’t quite know still is what exactly I want to do with my life. Working for the BLM has made me more aware of the upsides and downside of a career with a government agency, but I don’t know that the experience has pushed me in one direction or the other. I’d like to find a graduate program in ecology, but after a summer of exploring dozens of different projects, its hard to picture tethering myself to one very specific corner of research. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how the fall goes. I have a feeling that with things not traveling at light speed, I’ll have time to organize my head a bit. Fortunately, I’m sure that wherever I end up, this internship will be good preparation, partly because of the skills that I’ve learned, but mostly because of the initiative that I was allowed to take on projects. Its definitely been a growing experience, and even though my 5 months has flown by, it was certainly a good time while it lasted.

Shoutouts to my mentor Martin and co-mentor Sherri for going out of their way to make my internship experience an awesome one. Also shoutouts to Krissa, Wes and the other staff at Chicago Botanic Garden (and the BLM too, for that matter) for being so easy to talk to and, in the CBG’s case, orchestrating a great workshop. Finally, to all my fellow CLM’ers, especially my co-intern Leah, it was truly a pleasure to get to know all of you, at least a little bit. No matter where exactly we end up, I’d be surprised if I didn’t cross paths with at least some of you later in our careers. Hopefully we can go hiking too!

Until next time, happy trails,

Bridger Cohan

The past few weeks have been a bit of a blur for me. The plants that I scouted and collected specimens from back in June are now fully seeded out and Leah and I have been racing to grab as many as we can before they scatter to the wind, literally, in many cases. Some, like Hopsage (Grayia spinosa) and Prickly poppy (Argemone munita) are almost too easy, with drooping limbs/stalks bearing massive quantities of seed, ripe for thepicking. Others, notably the lupines and vetches, are incredibly frustrating to harvest. Every time you think you have 10k seeds lined up a batch goes moldy or the pods dehiss and scatter the seeds before you can make it back to the site. Win some lose some I guess.

While I think the SOS program is a great idea and generally well carried out, I can’t help but wonder that the difficulties of gathering seed are influencing our collections in interesting ways. Since our time is limited, I have been focusing on the varieties that are easy to collect from, which certainly screens out some otherwise excellent species. Is it worth passing up 2 easy collections of Ribes to get 1 of the less-seedy Amelanchier? I can’t say. Even within the same species, pickers can end up selecting for odd (and not necessarily adaptive) traits. For example, with Lupinus andersonii I’ve found that certain plants have many pods that stay both ripe and intact, while most plant’s pods dehiss and scatter as soon as they ripen. As a collector, I can tell you which plants get their genes represented more in the bags I send to Bend!

On a purely personal note, this past weekend it was lovely to get together with some fellow interns. The Alturas crew came down to the East Sierra for a backpacking trip which Leah and I followed along for a day, which we followed up with another hike with another CLMer from Ridgecrest on Sunday. Good times all around and it made me really thankful for the community aspect of this program!

Cheers, and enjoy your summers!

Good times in the truck, two days after a freak thunderstorm.

Hard to believe I’ve already finished the first half of my internship, but as I filled out my timesheet this week, I noticed that I had just hit the 440 hour mark. I guess time flies when you’re out in the field all the time! June and July are definitely crunch-time for our office, and the race is on to collect seed, monitor fire plots and characterize sage grouse nesting sites before everything with chlorophyll in it is turned into crispy, unidentifiable remnants. On the plus side, this means I’m out in some pretty cool places almost every day.

One of my favorites, oddly enough, is the Indian fire, a 13,000 acre burn in the hills just south of Mono Lake.  It must have been a dense shrubland at one point, but after the burn and without any plants to hold down the soil in the big winds off the lake, it has been turned into a sculpted dunsescape. The only trace of the shrubs, and even the fire, is in the ghostly, twisted stems of bitterbrush, charred by the blaze and smoothed by the wind-driven bits sand. However, even in this desolation, the plants have come back strong, with carpets of annual wildflowers, perennial grasses and even resprouts from fire-adapted shrubs. One of the annuals, Phacelia bicolor, is so thick in spots that from a distance entire hillside seem pink! Its pretty crazy to me that a seed weighing maybe 1/100 of a gram can turn into a sprawling plant the size of a plate in only a few months, and all in one of the driest years on record! Makes me feel better when my entire seed collection won’t even fill a sandwich bag.

Another fun little tidbit from the last few weeks was a Cicada hatch! I didn’t even know California had cicadas, but for a week or so the air was filled with the buzzing and clumsy flights of big orange bugs, doing whatever it is that cicadas do in their brief time above ground. I thought it was pretty cool, and I’m sure the birds and other insectivores were pretty happy as well! Anyhow, I’m looking forward to the second half of my internship, and even more so now that I have a fellow intern to work with!

Signing off,

Bridger

The Bishop field office for the BLM covers a lot of ground, from  Owens Lake in the South all the way to the Nevada border near Bridgeport. Three-quarters of a million acres of habitats ranging from true desert to sagebrush steppe, alkali flats, wetlands and windswept mountains. While tracking down sage grouse nests and populations of seed-bearing plants I’ve come to appreciate all that our region has to offer, but my favorite habitat at the moment has to be low-sage scrub. Artemisia arbuscula is not a particularly showy plant, its grey-green limbs barely rising above the baked clay soils it prefers. Male sage-grouse prefer it for their leks, since females can watch them prance about unobstructed.  The reason I like low sagebrush however, is that our small islands of A. arbuscula seem to contain the vast majority of flowers in our field office. Even in this especially dry year, hardy perennials like Biterroot and Crepis species are turning the barren expanses of clay bright shades of yellow and magenta with their blossoms. Coincidentally, these are some of the same species that I need to collect seed from, so I get to soak in the display as I look for mature seedheads.

On that note, 10,000 seeds is a lot of seeds! I recently finished my first collection, the not-as-showy but still lovable Lomatium nevadense. Even with 20-100 seeds per plant, it still took a lot of searching with my head down to pick enough for a collection. Worth it though, since according to our wildlife biologist L. nevadense is a favorite snack for the sage grouse.  I know that if I spent my mornings jumping to and fro with huge yellow sacks on my chest, I would want a snack as well so I’m glad that we now have this seed to potentially use for revegetation efforts.