As I put field books back on their shelves, make neat piles of vouchers in the lab, clean out my filthy backpack, and get rid of useless papers that have accumulated on my desk, I think back to all the amazing places I have seen, wonderful people I have worked with, and all of the botanical knowledge I have gained over the past 15 months.  This internship really helped me shape where I want to go in the future.  It has helped me focus on what I want to pursue in the form of a career and has inspired me to go to back to school and earn my master’s in biology.  I will be attending Humboldt State University this fall to pursue a degree focusing on insect community ecology with an emphasis on plant relationships.  I have always had a strong interest in insects, but it wasn’t until this internship, where I obtained so much information about botany, that I realized that the greater ecological role they play in plant cycles is something I wanted to study further.

Good luck to all of you with whatever you choose to pursue next.

-Mason London

Hello Fellow CLMers,

Our 2015 collecting season is already off to a good start!  I have been here in the Medford, OR BLM office since early March, watching plants transition from their winter dormancy to spring blooms and in some cases already seeding.  My collecting partner for the season, Ryan King, started on April 20th and we have already been out and about; covering a lot of diverse landscapes, elevations, and floristic habitats. Since this is my second year working on the Seeds of Success program, I have been getting Ryan up to speed on the protocols and techniques to be most efficient in the field. We have already shipped off 11 collections to the Bend Seed Extractory since the start of 2015, and we currently have 5 other species drying out in our seed shed getting ready to be shipped.

Since out district office has been participating in the Seeds of Success program for over 13 years, we have been focusing on making collections in areas that have not yet been targeted, or areas with rare and endemic plants.  This has proven to be successful and quite fun.  Over the past few weeks we have explored lots of amazing places in our own backyard that neither of us had ever seen.  We hope to keep this momentum going as the season progresses.

-Mason

Medford, OR BLM

Ryan and I admiring Rhododendron occidentale

Looking out at the Siskiyou Wilderness

me vouchering Darlingtonia californica

Darlingtonia californica flower

Darlingtonia californica

a large fen of Darlingtonia californica

Ryan and I collecting Carex spp. along the beautiful banks of Deer Creek

I have been working here at the Medford District BLM for just over 9 months now and my appointment is rapidly approaching its end.  I am saddened to be leaving, but with the weather becoming so nasty and the fact that the plants in the Rogue Valley are dying and going into dormancy, there wouldn’t be much for me to do even if I could stay.

The past few weeks have been slowing down.  I have been doing a lot of wrap up data entry and tying up loose ends here in the office.  There is a good chance I will be coming back next season which will be nice seeing as how I feel I really got the hang of this job and I know I will be able to hit the ground running early next spring.  Because of this potential in a renewed appointment, we have been loosely framing a plan of action for the 2015 collecting season.  I recently mapped over 12 years of Seeds of Success collections for my district and this proved to be insightful in terms of visually assessing what areas have and haven’t been targeted and hit hard with collections.  For this future collecting season we are going to target areas that have had little to no collections made, many which are located in the Illinois River Valley and along the Wild and Scenic stretch of the Rogue River.  This will be a great opportunity to explore new territories that are not so easily accessed and focus on rare and endemic serpentine plants.

Prior to this internship, my botanical knowledge was very much lacking.  Building a strong foundation of botany over the past 9 months has truly reshaped my interpretation of ecology.  It appears I have been approaching environmental settings with a major piece of the puzzle missing, and now that I have established this understanding, I can view ecosystem in a whole new cohesive light.

I am very grateful for this opportunity I have been granted with and I look forward to next year where I will be able to expand and fine tune my new skill set.  I leave you now with a few highlight photos of this field season.

Happy Winter.

Mason London

Winter is rapidly setting in and it feels as if it has been nudging me out of the field and back into the office.  Well the weather isn’t solely to blame for this, it is also due to my appointment coming to an end and needing to catch up on miscellaneous office work that I have put off for the past 8 months and working on the SOS end of the year wrap up.  But I like to think of if more as the forceful winter chill laying down its icy fist and forbidding me from collecting anymore seeds…

My time working for the Medford, OR BLM is rapidly coming to an end.  It has been a great season of opportunity for me to expand my botanical knowledge and learn about how difference agencies function, bureaucratically as well as biologically.  I gained valuable skills pertaining to surveying, report writing, and communicating with the public as well as other employees within the agencies, all while upholding a professional demeanor.

I spent over 3 weeks in October leading a crew of 8 convicts in a reseeding project of a burnt up forest.  We reseeded some BLM plots within the 36,000 burn zone.  We successfully reseeded over 1,100 of those acres, using  over 14,000 pounds of native grass and forb seeds.  This was a great learning experience both being a crew leader, as well as working with convicts.  This may have been the most enjoyable project I have worked on since starting this internship.  I definitely feel it was the most enriching, granting me an opportunity that I don’t think I would otherwise have been able to experience. This project did not only help me gain people skills but I also utilized some scientific method by setting up 50 picture plot points in order to to back for the next few years and monitor the successes of the project.   It is too bad I won’t be around to watch these grasses grow!

With the collecting season rapidly coming to an end, our duties have begun to shift, but still maintain seamless relevance with our prior work. Southern Oregon was hit hard this year with some large forest fires that completely torched some BLM lands.  Our seed collecting work early this season has now come full circle as a result of reseeding projects in these burnt forests and meadows.  The seed we are using was collecting in past years but former CLM interns, and was sent to a number of different farms around the Pacific Northwest and grown out to increase the number of poundage.  It is these seeds, of the same ecoregion, that we are using to repopulate the native grasses and forbs.  I will be spending this week and next onsite, where the Oregon Gulch fired occurred, with 8 members from a community justice crew.  We have already covered roughly 300 acres and will be covering much more in the days to come.

We have still been out everyday scouting and collecting.  Although it has finally felt like things are starting to slow down here in Southern Oregon.  There are a few exceptions, which are lending themselves to unique species that are late bloomers.  These late bloomers appear to have slipped below the radar in past years and we are able to make some collections that have not been made in previous seasons.

We spent yesterday up on Mt. Ashland (the largest mountain in Oregon east of the Cascades) standing at 7,533 feet and were amazed to see how many species were still ripe for the picking.  Some flowers, such as Monardella villosa (coyote mint), were still flowering! We haven’t seen flowers on this plant for about a month and a half, so finding this ecological pocket of botanical wonder gave us hope that we might be able to keep on collecting for a few more weeks!

Monardella villosa

Mentzelia laevicaulis

Rudbeckia glaucescens

Mimulus cardinalis

Fire season has been ramping up down here (or up here depending on where you are) in Southern Oregon.  Not only did the largest fire in Oregon, The Oregon Gulch fire maxing out at ~36,500+ acres, just get contained roughly 20 miles south of us, but 7,000 recorded lighting strikes on Monday has lead to 12 new fires that are getting bigger as I type.  The socked in smokey valley, mixed with 100 degree days, has made going out and collecting not so enjoyable.  But being the diligent seed heads that we are, we have still been keeping up with collections and as of last week we met our target collection number of 60 and have since then surpassed it by a lot.  With the vast diversity in eco-regions and elevation in our district, our number of seed collections don’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon.  It has been nice to think that maybe the seeds I collect today, will be used to rehab these burned sites tomorrow.

Oregon Gulch Fire

Oregon Gulch Fire

The top of Grizzly Peak