It’s my second month working in Vale and I finally feel like I am getting to know the plants around here! In the last few weeks, my co and I have been busy visiting SOS sites and sensitive plant sites, checking on potential collections and monitoring a few sensitive species. Last week we started collecting Nothocalais troximoides seed, our first collection of the season! Unfortunately, it has been pretty windy and wet (very unusual here this time of year), making seed collection a little difficult. In the upcoming weeks, we are hoping to start collections of some Allium spp., Phlox longifolia, and orange globemallow. It’s exciting to finally be collecting seeds, and it’s fun to see how much each site changes with every visit.

Nothocalais troximoides seeds

The site where we’re collecting N. troximoides is one of my favorites because it is flat, and the volcanic rock doesn’t allow for much grass growth (walking through fields of cheat grass can be a pain). The site is also covered in one of my favorite flowers, Lewisia rediviva! We first visited this site at the end of April, when the flowers were in full bloom. I’ve wanted to see Lewisia in real life for a long time. It has been on my plant bucket list for a few years now (I’m not realizing just how nerdy it is that I have a “plant bucket list”). I spent probably 20 minutes trying to get the perfect picture on our field camera.

LEWISIA!!!!!

A couple of weeks ago, we started monitoring several sensitive species including Hackelia cronquistii, Mentzelia mollis, and Stanleya confertiflora. Some of our surveys have been more successful than others. We have visited a few sites where the population has declined in recent years, or become potentially extirpated. Around here, population decline is usually due to fire, competition from invasive grasses, or grazing, and often a combination of these factors. We have also found a couple populations that have flourished since their last survey. One population of Mentzelia mollis in particular has grown drastically, increasing almost 30-fold in the last two decades! Seeing sensitive populations thrive is one of the many rewards of land management.

With the field season picking up, I am really looking forward to more collections and monitoring!

My first two weeks working for the Vale District BLM have been pretty atypical. The first three days of my internship were filled with some GIS based workshops; ArcPad and GeoBOB. During these workshops, I got to brush up on my GIS skills and learn the basics of GeoBOB, a biological database used by the Washington/Oregon BLM. I also got to meet my co-intern, Amanda, and two other CLM interns from the Wenatchee field office, Jenny and Justin. I apologize for not taking a picture of all of us using our GPS units to make point data of garbage cans in the parking lot (the closest we could get to recreating real field observations).

This week, my mentor, Susan Fritts, was away at a seed conference in Sante Fe, so Amanda and I didn’t get a chance to go out into the field for botany. We did, however, get to spend a day rearranging our herbarium (it was previously being digitized out of office), and practicing our skills keying dried specimen!

Our beautifully arranged herbarium!

We made the mistake of trying to key out a species of  Astragalus for practice. They are notoriously tricky to key out in this area because there are so many species here.

The rest of this week was spent in the field with other technicians in the office. On Wednesday, I went into the field with a range technician, Bob, to check on the quality of a nearby road. I learned a lot! Bob grew up in rangeland on a ranch. He was able to provide me with a lot of perspective on grazing and ranching, things I am not very familiar with since I grew up in the suburbs of Minnesota and went to college on the west side of the Cascades. I realized that not only in this area is there a lot of conflict in belief between conservation and land utilization (be it grazing, hunting, or mining), but even in this agency, particularly this office, there is quite a spectrum of beliefs. Bob and I continued to discuss the history of this rangeland while we lunched on the banks of the Owyhee River.

A typical view of the range around Vale.

The Owyhee River. Not a bad lunchroom!

On Thursday, Amanda and I went out with two wildlife technicians. Our day started at 4 am, when we left the office in the hopes of spotting a sage grouse lek. Unfortunately, after driving for an hour and standing in the cold for another two hours (a brisk 20 degrees, with wind), we didn’t see a single sage grouse. We drove to a different location to check another lek site, but still no sage grouse. By this time in April, the mating season is coming to an end, so it is not unusual that we didn’t spot any sage grouse, but I was still pretty bummed since I’ve never seen one before.

At 9 am, it was time to start our Columbia spotted frog (soon to be listed) and egg mass count at Dry Creek. Trying to find egg masses along the edges of the creek turned out to be pretty hard. With so much algae growing in the creek, almost everything looked like an egg mass.

An actual egg mass!

Once it started to warm up, we spotted more and more frogs (no pun intended). At some points it became difficult to count because there were so many frogs out in the sun!

A female Columbia spotted frog. In this species, adult females are often much larger than adult males. This lady was pretty little at only about 4 inches long from nose to tail.

Amanda and I finished our week by learning to change the wheels on our giant 4×4. Again, I apologize for the lack of pictures. If any photo documentation of this event existed, it likely would have involved two very sweaty CLM interns each with a grimace that rivals that of Grumpy Cat. After spending a lot of time practicing tire changing, we ended our day with a drive with the district’s range specialist, Bill, learning about Vale’s ecological and cultural history.

Over all, it was a pretty fun two weeks! After spending many hours in a truck, my biggest takeaway lesson is that people use the term “road” very generously here. A freshly graded gravel road is practically a highway!

I am looking forward to getting out in the field to learn more about the local flora, start surveying sensitive species, and collect seed!