So…this is it. These past five and a half months have seen me collecting hundreds of thousands of seeds, planting a couple hundred pounds more, doing plant surveys for everything from post-fire monitoring to sage grouse habitat assessments, and tracking sage grouse all over the (northern half) of the field office. It was a lot to pack into what in retrospect seems a very short time—even if I started the internship wondering if five months was going to feel too long.

I came into Bishop with relatively little plant experience and an attitude towards sage scrub that was ambivalent at best. After spending five months in the Bishop field office mainly focusing on seed collecting and vegetation surveys, I can say with confidence that plants are pretty darn cool (don’t get me started on fire restoration projects or shrub adaptations to arid climates unless you want to be there for a while). As for the scrublands—if it weren’t for the lack of deciduous trees and, well, moisture in general, I could happily spend years really getting to know the ecosystem.

Sage brush as far as the eye can see in the Bodie Hills

Working in a small field office is great for getting to know people in every department, and I really got a sense of how the office as a whole operates. Seeing how the BLM carries out its mandate to manage for a variety of uses at the ground level was an experience that was both fascinating and valuable—seeing the challenges involved in balancing occasionally conflicting activities and the value of working directly with the public was valuable in shaping my ideas on what I want to research down the road.

Bishop proved to be an ideal location to see firsthand a variety of conservation efforts throughout the Eastern Sierra. Being in town for both the announcement of Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog critical habitat and the announcement of the Bi-State sage grouse population as federally threatened provided opportunities to see different federal agencies interacting with the public, which was interesting in itself, and to get a better sense of the differences between the agencies and their philosophies on habitat management, which was fascinating.

Winter is coming to the Eastern Sierra

All good things must come to an end, and once again it is onwards to the next thing—whatever that is. My time as a CLM intern has helped me articulate a few things about where I want to end up in the long run, and even if I don’t end up in a land management position my current research interests definitely reflect my time spent working with land managers on the ground.

Many thanks to my co-workers and friends in Bishop—I couldn’t have asked for a better group to work with. I certainly won’t forget the time I spent wandering the Bodie Hills in the name of all things sage grouse or exploring the Indian Fire any time soon.

Until next time!

The elusive sage grouse

Fall has firmly established itself here in Bishop—temperatures have plummeted at night, the White Mountains are finally living up to their name, and the aspens and cottonwoods down in the Valley seem to be in a competition for most dramatic display of fall color. The falling temperatures and snowfall have effectively ended our seed collecting season and have brought an end to most of the vegetation monitoring projects we had been running throughout the summer and early fall, and as a result much of my time lately has been split between GIS projects in the office and using radio telemetry to track greater sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus).

Sage grouse monitoring is a year-round project that can take many forms depending on the time of year. In the spring, sage grouse congregate in leks (where males perform elaborate courtship displays to attract females)—providing an important opportunity for the field office to count the gathered birds and estimate the size of the local population. Capturing individuals and fitting them with radio collars allows us to track the birds throughout the year and study their movement patterns and what types of habitat they use depending on their seasonal needs. Tracking collared females to their nests gives us a sense of not only the location of the nests but also provides us with an opportunity to survey the local vegetation and try to piece together what makes for an ideal nest site (e.g. lots of brush cover and no nearby trees or power lines). As the year goes on, the birds continue to move around as the needs of their chicks and eventually falling temperatures dictate where they need to go to find food. As we move farther into fall, more birds will be captured and collared to establish a new cohort to track throughout the coming year.

Tracking sage grouse has proven more challenging than I expected. The basics of radio telemetry aren’t particularly complicated, but out in the field things get more complicated: rough terrain can make the signal seem to appear or disappear depending on your position relative to the grouse’s, and even small changes in how deep into a bush the bird is can make the signal vary. There are some days where the phrase “wild goose grouse chase” seems particularly appropriate—but that only makes getting in close enough to actually see the grouse all the more satisfying.

Greater sage grouse are especially relevant right now, because as of this past Monday the US Fish and Wildlife Service officially declared the “Bi-State” population (found throughout southeastern California and over the border into Nevada) federally threatened under the Endangered Species Act. This is going to mean a lot of changes moving forward for our field office: the Bishop field office has played a large role in managing this population for a while, but with the federal designation there are other agencies and groups that will have a larger role in the future. It also means that there will be changes in land use regulations for areas throughout the region, which is always a difficult adjustment but will likely be especially complicated following so closely on the heels of the listing of three amphibian species in the region. Watching these listings unfold has been a really good lesson in the importance of communicating effectively with the public: if we as land managers and scientists cannot adequately explain why certain decisions have been made and what factors contributed to those decisions, let alone how those decisions will play out locally, conservation efforts on public lands will always be an uphill battle—which only hurts everyone in the long run.

A few days ago, autumn snuck up behind me and caught me by surprise. We were up in the Bodie Hills on a particularly blustery afternoon, reconstructing a previously-established aspen monitoring plot, and I smelled it. It was an electrifying moment—surrounded by rustling aspens just beginning turn and reveling in the unfamiliar urge to put on a jacket, I smelled that wonderful crisp, leafy smell that signifies fall in all of its glory to some deeper part of my brain. It was wonderful. This summer was busy and intensely alive, but I have never been one to dream of living in a place where the summer never ends. Give me gloriously colorful falls, deep and snowy winters, and those springs in which the first flowers to emerge feel like declarations of victory after a long fight with the cold over endless summers. Bishop was starting to worry me when it hit 93 degrees before noon last week, but it looks like changes are coming.

It is fitting that fall found me in the Bodie Hills. Autumn ambushes aside, the Bodie Hills are often filled with surprises: hills that appear to be nothing but gray-brown brush from a distance reveal pockets of wildflowers and fields of lupine when approached, and vistas of the Sierras and Mono Lake appear unexpectedly as you wind your way along the bumpy roads. Nestled between the northernmost peaks of the White Mountains to the east and the dramatic eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada to the west, they are best known as the site of the abandoned mining town of Bodie, the oldest unrestored ghost town in the country. For our purposes, it is a sage grouse haven and home to numerous aspen groves that reveal the damper soils in the region.

Ah, the aspen groves. Now that we have wrapped up our SOS collections for the summer and surveyed most of the sage grouse nests, fire monitoring and aspen surveys have begun to dominate our weeks. The aspen monitoring, a deceptively simple project involving re-surveying permanent plots to track aspen regeneration after different management strategies to encourage aspen growth (mowing, thinning of other tree species, and in some cases burning), has in fact resembled a giant scavenger hunt. Finding the plots themselves has proved the challenge; a few have GPS points associated with the permanent posts, but most are either identified by a grove or simply by a vague description in paper records. Needless to say it has been an adventure, with frustrating GIS sessions more than compensated for the satisfaction of finding T-posts in a grove with no previous GPS information whatsoever. Lesson learned: always create good metadata records as you go, your successor will thank you.

Fall has arrived, our tasks are shifting—did I say our? The biggest change around here, alas, is the departure of my fellow intern, Bridger, who has been a great coworker, a patient teacher when it comes to filling the gaps in my botany knowledge, and the best hiking buddy I could have asked for. I’ll miss having you around, especially on those long drives—audiobooks just don’t cut it. But so it goes. Time stops for no one, and the changes will continue through the rest of my stay here. Some will be welcome, others will require adjustments—but I hope that more of them will resemble my first formal encounter with autumn in the Eastern Sierra. Standing on that blustery hillside, staring out across the mountains and surrounded by the sounds and smells of fall, it was a moment of clarity and quiet exhilaration that I won’t soon forget.

Fall comes to the Bodie Hills

It’s high summer here in the Eastern Sierra, and, like the rest of the western US, fire season is in full swing. Aside from a lot of smoke from a fire in Fresno a month ago, fire still seemed like a distant problem here in Bishop—that is, until this week. Monday we received word of a fire in our field office, which is the first since I’ve been here. It was interesting to see who was called out to the fire—the BLM doesn’t simply send fire crews, they also send resource specialists (like my boss) to assist in things like deciding where to send the bulldozer to create fire breaks. Even though Bishop and most of the areas that we work in were too far away to see the blaze itself, the noticeably reduced population in the office itself was enough to remind us of the fire on a daily basis.

That particular fire is the only one actually in our field office, but it isn’t the only one burning nearby. We’ve been getting continuous updates on a large fire near Lake Tahoe thanks to our local NPR station that broadcasts out of Reno. But the fire that really made me pause is the one currently burning in the Stanislaus National Forest, clear on the other side of the mountains. From the Bodie Hills (part of a chain to the east of the Sierra Nevada), the plume looked more like a volcanic eruption than smoke from a wildfire, appearing to stretch for miles—perhaps all the way to Reno.

I’m not used to worrying about fires. I’ve always lived in places where flooding is a bigger concern than fire, and what I knew about fire management centered more around the problems with historical fire suppression than working to protect communities from danger. The sheer size of the fire burning in Stanislaus, along with the knowledge that it is both barely under control and threatening the homes of at least two of my friends, has taken living in a wildfire zone out of the abstract for me and really given me a new appreciation for what goes into managing and containing wildfires. Physically, the fires are still a long way off—but their impacts have begun to hit closer to home.

Last August, there was a fire in the hills to the east of Mono Lake. Walk along the burned areas nearest the lake this year, and you will encounter patches where the fire burned so hot that there is nothing left but sand and the charred remains of bitterbrush stumps. But if you keep walking, you begin to notice clumps of Tiquilia nuttallii here and there, small patches of green against the white sand. Farther up in the hills there are areas where entire plateaus appear pink due to a carpet of Phacelia bicolor that has sprung up in a single growing season. Rabbitbrush and other shrubs that can produce new sprouts from existing root systems dot the landscape, and here and there tiny bitterbrush sprouts quietly begin to re-establish themselves. This job has made me more aware than ever of what it means to live in an area where fire is a very real danger year in and year out—but it has also provided me with the opportunity to witness firsthand (and survey in detail) the various stages of succession that come after a disturbance that wipes the physical landscape almost clean.

There are only two tiny clouds in this picture…the Rim Fire, from Bodie Hills

Indian Fire, one year later

An Ephedra shrub resprouting

Tiquilia nuttallii

Hummingbird moth in action in a patch of        Phacelia bicolor

Going from one of the muggier parts of the country to one of the driest has been one of the more dramatic transitions that I’ve experienced since starting my internship here at the Bishop BLM—not that I’ve had much time to process it. It’s hard to believe that I’ve already been here for three weeks…or is it hard to believe that it’s only been three weeks? Coming in at the height of field season has made for a hectic—and exciting—first month on the job, and I’ve been having a blast.

As someone who has spent most of her life within ten hours of the East Coast, shrub diversity was never something I paid much attention to (not with so many interesting trees overshadowing their diminutive counterparts). Here in the scrublands, however, shrubs rule supreme, and I have spent a lot of time these past few weeks learning to distinguish between bitterbrush and sagebrush, wax currants (Ribes cereum) and desert gooseberry (Ribes velutinum), horsebrushes and rabbitbrushes (not to mention rabbitbrushes and rabbitbrushes). Especially interesting is spiny hopsage (Grayia spinosa), a medium-sized shrub that is found throughout Eastern California. The showiest parts of the plant are not its flowers, but rather the seed-bearing bracts—small, colorful structures that look like a cross between a petal and a leaf. In the spring, the bracts are bright pink; as they dry, they turn yellow and crispy. And as the first plant that I collected seeds from for SOS, hopsage is definitely one of my favorite plants to run across in the field.

The most challenging shrub identification task we have to tackle on a regular basis is teasing apart the different sagebrushes. Distinguishing between low sagebrush (Artemisia arbuscula) and smaller big sagebrush individuals (Artemisia tridentata) can be tricky, but it gets especially complicated when you try to separate out the three subspecies of big sagebrush: big basin sagebrush, Wyoming big sagebrush, and mountain big sagebrush. And did I mention that they hybridize? But it turns out that these distinctions matter, and not just to someone interested in taxonomy. These subspecies are chemically distinct, and it makes a difference to the nesting sage grouse that use these shrubs as both shelter for their nests and a critical food source during nesting season. This is one of the coolest parts of my job—getting to work on a variety of projects, most of which depend on each other in some way and really get at the interactions between animal species of interest and the plant communities that they depend on.

Sage grouse nest in a hopsage bush

Until next time!

Going from one of the muggier parts of the country to one of the driest has been one of the more dramatic transitions that I’ve experienced since starting my internship here at the Bishop BLM—not that I’ve had much time to process it. It’s hard to believe that I’ve already been here for three weeks…or is it hard to believe that it’s only been three weeks? Coming in at the height of field season has made for a hectic—and exciting—first month on the job, and I’ve been having a blast.

As someone who has spent most of her life within ten hours of the East Coast, shrub diversity was never something I paid much attention to (not with so many interesting trees overshadowing their diminutive counterparts). Here in the scrublands, however, shrubs rule supreme, and I have spent a lot of time these past few weeks learning to distinguish between bitterbrush and sagebrush, wax currants (Ribes cereum) and desert gooseberry (Ribes velutinum), horsebrushes and rabbitbrushes (not to mention rabbitbrushes and rabbitbrushes). Especially interesting is spiny hopsage (Grayia spinosa), a medium-sized shrub that is found throughout Eastern California. The showiest parts of the plant are not its flowers, but rather the seed-bearing bracts—small, colorful structures that look like a cross between a petal and a leaf. In the spring, the bracts are bright pink; as they dry, they turn yellow and crispy. And as the first plant that I collected seeds from for SOS, hopsage is definitely one of my favorite plants to run across in the field.

The most challenging shrub identification task we have to tackle on a regular basis is teasing apart the different sagebrushes. Distinguishing between low sagebrush (Artemisia arbuscula) and smaller big sagebrush individuals (Artemisia tridentata) can be tricky, but it gets especially complicated when you try to separate out the three subspecies of big sagebrush: big basin sagebrush, Wyoming big sagebrush, and mountain big sagebrush. And did I mention that they hybridize? But it turns out that these distinctions matter, and not just to someone interested in taxonomy. These subspecies are chemically distinct, and it makes a difference to the nesting sage grouse that use these shrubs as both shelter for their nests and a critical food source during nesting season. This is one of the coolest parts of my job—getting to work on a variety of projects, most of which depend on each other in some way and really get at the interactions between animal species of interest and the plant communities that they depend on.

Until next time!