Alright! So this is my real, final blog post. Not like that one from earlier in the month, that was just a practice. So, dear readers, what were my goals and expectations for this internship when I joined up, all the way back in March?

Well, my main goal was to learn as much as possible. I am, always have been, and always will be an enormous geek, wanting to learn as much as I can about the things that interest me. On that, I can definitely say I have succeeded. The CLM program has given me an amazing opportunity to learn about desert ecosystems, about life working for the Feds, and about essential land management skills. My plant ID skills have greatly improved, I got some great experience with vegetation and invasive species surveys, with seed collection, with herbicide use. Unlike most interns, I was mostly working in one particular area, but my mentor let me assist others around the office, so I do think I got to see enough of what goes on in this BLM office. All totaled I definitely got lots of great experience, and a new centerpiece for my resume.

I was also hoping to be able to stay with the BLM for a little while longer, but that was not an option. There’s just not enough money to go around. In my time here I’ve seen several people more qualified than me struggle to keep their jobs, and despite my mentor’s efforts, there isn’t any funding for me to continue on here. Obviously, I always knew this particular goal was a stretch and would have a lot to do with luck, so I’m not too disappointed. And on the bright side, I’ve just accepted a job with The Wetlands Initiative, a non-profit habitat restoration organization based in my home state of Illinois. I’m very excited about that job, and looking forward to getting started.

All in all, I have been very happy with my experiences with the CLM internship program. I’ve learned a lot, picked up some great work experience, and got to spend some time getting to know an incredible part of the world.

Thanks!
Joe

A few years ago, I started keeping a bucket list. Being a predictable person, about half of it is just places I want to go hiking. The rest of the list ranges from the mundane (cook Thanksgiving dinner – check) to the cartoonish (throw something into a volcano – not yet accomplished), and it keeps growing about as quickly as I can tick things off. I bring this up because when I came out to Palm Springs, I made a desert bucket list composed of all the things I want to do before I leave, and I am sad to say I have less than a month left to work on it.

But stars must have aligned, because recently I’ve been able to make good progress on my desert list. This weekend I felt my first earthquake (check), which still counts even if I initially thought it was just a particularly heavy truck driving past my apartment. And then the week before, I was lucky enough to get to help our office’s interpretive specialist with some family outings, where I caught a scorpion (check) and saw my first ever wild sidewinder (check). Somehow, the kids were even more excited to find the rattlesnake than I was, and I had to step in and keep them from poking at the poor potentially lethal critter. It was an amazing time, and seeing kids excited to learn about nature never fails to make me smile. Hopefully I managed to get at least one kid interested in botany by showing off how desert willow fruit bursts open and releases a puff of winged seeds into the wind, but my bit on how to identify the features of an animal skull was predictably more of a crowd pleaser.

At work, we got to go out and see the Salt Creek (check), the waterway that connects my oasis to the infamous Salton Sea. I spent a fair while poking at the thick layer of salt covering parts of the creek: as water evaporates, the salt precipitates out to form a surprisingly thick crust – much like a horribly unpleasant crème brulee. But despite that obvious hardship, the water itself is teeming with life: pond skaters, tadpoles, swarms of brilliantly colored damselflies laying their eggs in the water, tiny fish that dart out from cover just long enough to grab an insect. It is absolutely amazing to see that this tiny trickle of salt-saturated water, surrounded by so much empty space, can support so much life. Reading that desert life is dependent on rare water sources is one thing, but it’s entirely another to go to an actual oasis and see first-hand just how stark the contrast is. That’s one experience I am very thankful to be able to tick off my list.

I’ll be taking care of a few more bucket list tasks in the coming weeks (Joshua Tree, here I come), but my work time has been occupied with the usual end-of-field-season duties. I have herbarium samples to prepare and mail, a heap of data to enter and start to analyze, maps to make or update, and a next adventure to arrange. It was great to meet so many of you at the workshop, and I hope you all enjoy your internships as much as I have.

Joe

For most of my time here in Dos Palmas, I’ve been working in the desert scrubland surrounding the oasis: lots of creosote, saltbush, mesquites, and a few small trees like the smoke trees I gushed over last month. But in the last week, we’ve been working on a new project, placing new transects for future vegetation surveys in the dense marsh near the area’s main outflow. I have to say, seeing grasses again is a big change, and wading into trackless stands of reeds, saw grass, and cattails, chasing after a point on a GPS unit – well, thats something I didn’t think I’d be doing in the desert. But as someone whose nature experiences begin with playing in cattails (if you hit your little brother with the ripe ones they’ll burst), getting back into a marsh is always good.

Of course, there have been other projects, some of them less fun. My boss (and his boss) are involved in a tense negotiation with the organization that owns the nearby canal: they are required by NEPA to feed water into the oasis for to preserve habitat for its endangered species, but parts of the oasis are drying up dramatically. My part in this process is mostly data management, making sure that our conclusions are based on the best possible research. Its great work, and it is exciting to know that your data work helps support local conservation policy, but its less fun than hiking through the marsh.

And in “sorry I don’t have pictures” news, this month I was lucky enough to see a ringtail cat (imagine a cross between a lemur and a raccoon), and more excitingly a yuma clapper rail: one of the very rare endangered species that make Dos Palmas home. The rest of my field team doesn’t believe me about that last one, or rather they don’t want to believe that the one day I was out on my own a clapper rail showed up.

See you all in Chicago next week,
Joe

My last month here has been an exciting one: the desert is in bloom. Every week, a new plant comes into bloom. One week the palo verdes turn from pale green to bright yellow, the next the massive silver-grey ironwoods turn pink, and the dense arrowweed stands are all tipped with little purple flowers. But easily my favorite of all these are one that just came into bloom this week, the Smoke Trees. Normally they’re a uniform grey green color, billowing out in a way that really does look like smoke. But this first week of may, they’re flowering, and the silvery plant is suddenly spotted with rich purple-blue. Looking closely, one can see that each flower is ringed with orange spots on the sepals, and with a deep orange stamen poking out the end. Amazing, and presently my favorite plant out here.

Of course, shortly after flowers come seeds, and shortly after seeds come CBG Interns collecting for Seeds of Success. So I’ve had my work cut out for me there: seven 10,000-seed collections done and mailed off to be cleaned, with plenty more to come. It looks like my fellow interns are also enjoying the desert flowers, so I hope they are all as enamored by the smoke tree flowers as I am.

Joe Brehm

The last time I posted here, I had been in town for all of a week, and was just getting settled in. It’s honestly a bit shocking to me that that was only four weeks ago: I’m already feeling very comfortable with the job, even as I’m thrown/throwing myself into new tasks every few days.

The focus of my internship is the restoration of a desert oasis and the surrounding area, and the main project from the last four weeks has been planting seedlings to encourage recovery following the removal of invasive tamarisk. Since I arrived we’ve planted nearly 200 individual plants in areas that had been opened up or damaged by the removal process, and though we still have some 80 plants waiting to get in the ground, this phase of my internship is nearly done.

The other thing filling my work hours has been GIS training, something I’ve always wanted to learn both because I’ve always been a little geeky about maps, and because it’ll be a huge help finding work in the future. I’m happy to be able to say that in two weeks ArcGIS has stopped seeming overwhelmingly complicated, and is now merely frustratingly complicated, similar to how I feel about R or MATLAB, or every other computer science tool I’ve worked with.

Next week I’ll be starting with the two main projects that will occupy my time and energy through August: vegetation surveys, and seed collection for the Seeds of Success project. I’ve already got experience doing both veg surveys and seed collection from university and previous jobs, so I don’t expect much difficulty jumping into these projects either.

I’ve attached some pictures this time. I’ve always been bad at taking pictures, both in that I don’t have much talent for photography and in that I typically forget that I even own a camera. So I’m sorry to say that I don’t have as many pictures as I’d like to. But let me say: the experience of standing on the San Andreas fault line just after dawn and looking out over Dos Palmas oasis as it is both still shrouded in nighttime fog and lit by the sun rising over the mountains? Definitely worth getting up a few minutes early for. Sorry I don’t have a picture of it! You’ll just have to come see it in person.

habitat restoration in progress

Since I arrived in Palm Springs last week, I have mostly been getting accustomed to my home for the next five months. This place is a little different from my last home in central Illinois. We don’t really have desert oases there. We don’t have palm trees, palo verde, mesquite, or cacti of any kind. And we definitely don’t have mountains, or for that matter anything resembling change in elevation. We also don’t have warm weather in March, as everyone points out as soon as they hear where I’m from. But trust me: looking to the horizon and seeing mountains and cacti instead of an endless plain of corn and soybean is the bigger leap.

My strategy for acclimating has been to gleefully throw myself into work. Which is easy when you’re working outdoors in an incredible desert oasis. After getting to play tourist for a day, we started what will be my main focus for the next few months: planting young plants in a patch of desert still recovering from the removal of tamarisk a few years ago. The tamarisk, invasive to most of the southwest, is a terrible water hog, and aggressively outcompetes native plants. This, combined with years of drought, threatens the health of the oasis communities. But the desert is slowly since the removal of the tamarisk, and we’re hoping to help it along by planting some 200 seedlings over the next few months. This is moderately demanding work, so we’re getting it out of the way before I learn out what summer in the desert is like.

But that heat is a ways away. At the moment, I can happily focus on learning my local plant identification, and enjoy springtime in the desert, and getting to work on such an incredible project.