My time as a CLM intern has been nothing if not a learning experience. Some lessons are easy to learn and some are hard, but each one was valuable.

Lesson 1: Collaboration is an integral component to creating a well-oiled, functional machine. This is true in any job, but it may be particularly applicable when government agencies work with communities and non-profits to improve environments and save species. When individuals and groups work together, then the whole becomes greater than the sum of its independent collaborators. In the face of an uncertain future, collaboration between bodies interested in protecting the environment will be to conservation what biodiversity will be to ecosystem resilience – one cannot exist without the other.

This is Ronald. He is the love of my ornithological life.

Lesson 2: A coffee addiction is no joke and is really expensive. Starting in May, my co-intern and I spent three days every other week sampling hummingbirds with the BLM and USFS wildlife biologists, Terry Tolbert and Lisa Young, for the Hummingbird Monitoring Network. The Network’s protocol dictates that the sampling sessions begin within half an hour of sunrise and continue for five hours. The three study sites included the Escalante Visitor Center, Calf Creek Campground (half an hour from Escalante), and the Wildcat Visitor Center (an hour from Escalante). Getting to the latter two sites within 30 minutes of sunrise meant that we needed to be up and on the road at some unfortunate hour. Coffee, in those instances, became a sort of a lifeline.

Lesson 3: SOS is a multi-faceted, comprehensive program that is going to be invaluable should the worst of climate predictions come true. As the world journeys to the cross-roads of an uncertain future where the only sure things will be death, taxes, and stochasticity, advanced planning now will be one of the best self-preservation acts that humans can perform. Working within this program has been an immense honor for me because my work has encouraged me to embrace the long-term view of resilient conservation practices.

Terry took us to see a Moki storage building. Jessie Dodge for scale.

Lesson 4: A good mentor is worth their weight in gold. I cannot speak highly enough of Terry Tolbert as a mentor and it is difficult to construct a paragraph to his credit without resorting to superlatives. Terry is a Wildlife Biologist with the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, but boy howdy – that man knows his plants. His knowledge on the local floral diversity and location, in addition to his knowledge of previous SOS teams’ work and BLM land boundaries and treatments, have been invaluable. In addition to helping our team to make sense of the vast seed collection opportunities on the Monument, Terry also introduced my co-intern and me to wildlife biology and taught us how to conduct good surveys. On top of being a first-rate mentor in exposing us to the scientific aspects of the Monument and working within the BLM, Terry was never hesitant to give us history lessons, show us fossil dinosaur prints that only locals know about, teach us about the (confusing) sedimentary structures and layers, take us to see historic dwellings of ancient peoples, and show us pictographs and petroglyphs in order to help us gain a more complete understanding of where we were working. Working with Terry was, simply put, a joy.

Lesson 5: Wildlife biology is rad. Not only did I get to learn the practical skills of what it takes to study wild animals like hummingbirds, bats, and lizards, but I experienced a personal scientific reawakening. My affinity for animal biology in how it relates to conservation biology was raised from its slumber and I have a desire to pursue wildlife field work in the future in addition to building upon my hard earned plant knowledge.

A 30-foot tall mist net to catch bats.

Lesson 6: Escalante is one heck of a beautiful place and if you have never been there, then get thee there soon. Public lands are something that I took for granted until I moved to Escalante and discovered that there are new paths to be found every day and that I am free to wander when and where I please. It is an incomparable feeling to be amidst the desert scrub and know that I am alone. It’s choice.

Lesson 7: Monsoons can put a real damper on seed collecting and driving dirt roads for hours. My co-intern and I learned this the hard way after our seed bags threatened to tear because they were so wet, the lightning struck close to our populations one too many times for comfort, and we slipped and slid back home as we raced the rain.

There you have it. Six months in seven lessons. In the spirit of Bilbo Baggins,

Roads go ever ever on,

Over rock and under tree,

By caves where never sun has shone,

By streams that never find the sea;

Over snow by winter sown,

And through the merry flowers of June,

Over grass and over stone,

And under mountains in the moon.

 

Roads go ever ever on

Under cloud and under star,

Yet feet that wandering have gone

Turn at last to home afar.

Eyes that fire and sword have seen

And horror in the halls of stone

Look at last on meadows green

And trees and hills they long have known.

– The Hobbit

Cheers!

Elise, Escalante Field Office

“Extinction – the irrevocable loss of a species – causes pain that can never find relief. It is an ache that will pass from generation to generation, for the rest of human history.” – Callum Roberts in An Unnatural History of the Sea

In my opinion, preventing extinction should be the premier goal of every biologist, regardless of their specific discipline. Ecologists, botanists, soil scientists, hydrologists, and climate scientists should all be equally concerned with the Sixth Extinction and the ever unfolding Anthropocene. The biodiversity of today is temporally and spatially unique and thus deserves our preservative efforts on principle alone. Beyond this, however, biodiversity on every scale should be preserved based on a growing recognition that it is key to resilience and thus to our own species’ survival.

In an age of unprecedented, human-caused extinction and climate change, maintaining high biodiversity will be integral to the biosphere’s health. High biodiversity has been connected to an ecosystem experiencing greater resilience to drastic changes and a greater ability to recover after disturbances (see a wonderful article here http://conservationbytes.com/2014/01/08/more-species-more-resilience/ for some solid reading). This consensus comes at a time when buzz words like “sustainability” and “renewable” are losing favor and words like “resilience” and “stable state ecosystems” are gaining esteem (see another wonderful article here http://conservationmagazine.org/2013/03/good-bye-sustainability-hello-resilience/ for more solid reading).

The strength of the Seeds of Success Program lies in its dedication to preparing for an uncertain future and thereby promoting resilience. The SOS program is clearly preparing for the future through their collection goals. As a whole, SOS works on conducting research and creating large seed banks of “native winners,” early successional species, and populations of common species that are thriving in drier, hotter, and/or higher elevation locales throughout the country. The SOS Program exemplifies the foresight we all must have to ready the U.S. for the stochasticity associated with the inevitable, yet unpredictable, global shifts before us. My co-intern and I are collecting seeds in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which stands as a testament to the beauty, fragility, and longevity of semi-arid ecosystems and our public lands. I see these collections as a way to help the Colorado Plateau Native Plant Program and Seeds of Success be better prepared for an uncertain future and to bolster resilience in the GSENM.

Cleome serrulata and cumulus

Plant petroglyph near Bluff, UT

In my perfect world, unadulterated logic would dictate the future of conservation biology. Sensitive, unique landscapes like Southern Utah, areas of high biodiversity and low protection like the vast Southeast, and areas of high biodiversity and great threats like the California Floristic Province would be managed for resilience. This would, in my mind, translate into preserving as much biodiversity as possible, all as cheaply as possible. However, this world is far from my ideal, and unprecedented changes are causing deep disruptions that erode resilience and our ability to prevent extinction. Not only are the chemical and physical properties of both the ocean and the atmosphere changing rapidly (on both geologic and human scales), but so are our views of them and the life they harbor. Our biased views have an untold potential to affect ecosystem resilience and the future of biodiversity the world over.

There is an idea in environmentalism and conservation biology that successive generations accept their environments as normal, regardless of historic variations. Thus, whole groups of people lose their collective memory of what the world used to be like because most individuals rely more heavily on their personal experiences than on those of others. This can be hugely evolutionarily beneficial, but it can also be socially and environmentally devastating.

Anecdotally, this idea of “shifting baselines” is intuitive. My generation has grown up with the United States at war on foreign soil because of one day and 60 words (see http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/60-words-and-a-war-without-end-the-untold-story-of-the-most#.yfV1ZD7apa for a fascinating read), but we don’t know what it’s like to see an end to a war. My parents’ generation remembers the horrors of fighting in Vietnam and the fall of the Berlin Wall. My grandparents’ generation lived through the Great Depression, witnessed Pearl Harbor being bombed, and saw the end of a World War. As each generation succeeds the last, ideas that are unthinkable, unimaginable, or simply unconventional become normalized. Thus the collective baseline of reality shifts and the past becomes history. This phenomenon can be referred to as the “shifting baseline syndrome.”

By way of a common scientific example, fisheries scientists and fishermen through the centuries have been chronically susceptible to shifting baseline syndrome. Due to collective shifts in reality, modern day seafarers cannot – or will not – fully comprehend their predecessors’ environments and instead rely on their own immediate realities to assess the world. This is creating a dangerous collective ignorance in the managing and harvesting of marine living resources.

Callum Roberts, in his 2007 book An Unnatural History of the Sea, provides some anecdotal evidence of the shifting baseline syndrome by exploring the oft neglected descriptions of what the oceans were like hundreds of year ago. Accounts from Europeans arriving in North America paint a nearly inconceivable picture of marine abundance that is almost entirely forgotten – or else deemed irrelevant and wholly ignored – by today’s fishing industry. In stark contrast to today’s depleted oceans, John Smith, the first governor of Jamestown, said that halibut were so common on the coasts “that the fisher men onely eate the heads & fines, and throw way the bodies” (qtd. in The Ocean of Life, Roberts 2012).

As another example, the Atlantic cod used to be an economically and gastronomically invaluable species, feeding peoples wherever land touched the North Atlantic. As the species’ value increased, so did fishing pressure. Catch quotas were eventually set, but, without any data, they were more or less arbitrary as far as the species’ health was concerned. As time went on quotas began being set relative to recent quota data. These new numbers, however, were based on an already significantly reduced global population of cod, and were thus set far above maximum sustainable yield (MSY). As catch quotas were set without using long-term and historic data, overfishing became the norm without any pomp or, indeed, any fleeting notice. Decades after the Atlantic cod fishery’s collapse and belated strict protection, the species has still not recovered. It is now generally accepted that the species is not likely to regain its size during the peak of fishing and will certainly never return to its historic peak prior to its boom in popularity.

The incomparable Pacific – full of finite resources

While John Smith grew accustomed to the marine abundance in our Northeast, we are currently baffled by his descriptions. While Europeans and Canadians believed in the limitless bounty of the Atlantic cod, few laypeople know of its tragic story and are filling themselves with frozen fish fillets from the Antarctic instead. When once hand lines and minimal time commitment could feed a family, today’s oceans are filled with an enormous number of hooks, lines, nets, trawls, and weights – all increasing fishing effort but not increasing catches. In all likelihood, as the oceans continue to degrade and as species continue to be lost, successive generations will see the sea as just how it is supposed to be. These stories, and the objective data backing them, exemplify the shifting baseline syndrome. We should all take a moment to appreciate how terribly and drastically our oceans have changed and should simultaneously appreciate that our terrestrial ecosystems must also be in danger.

Purshia mexicana seeds

A canyon tree frog

Though the shifting baseline syndrome specifically refers to how people view their natural environments, the broader idea that accompanies it is that ecosystems can, and do, shift between stable states. In other words, the “shifting baseline syndrome” might be merely the anthropocentric view of ecosystem change acquired throughout a long, complex evolution. However, like with extinction, rate is crucial. Our world is changing fast and our ability to forget past environments in order to adapt to new conditions is no longer a boon. Oceanography and atmospheric science have shown that it is statistically improbable that any inch of the planet remains unaffected by human activity – from the most remote forests or mountain tops to any untouched reef or unseen, aphotic stretches of ocean. In the face of a changing global climate, increasing CO₂ absorption by both the atmosphere and the ocean, and increasing reliance on damaging industrial and farming practices, we are entering into a period where shifting baselines and changing ecosystems are going to create unprecedented environments and challenges.

As our species and our planet are journeying to a great cross-roads and we must decide what is worth saving, remembering, and forgetting. Friends, I sincerely hope that we will not forget what it is like to have wild public lands. I hope that we will be immune to the shifting baseline syndrome and will reject the idea that rapid, irreversible species and habitat loss are natural and normal. I hope that we will not take our terrestrial ecosystems and resources for granted like we have for marine and freshwater ecosystems. I hope that wild places will remind us of our origins, our birthright, and our responsibilities to others. I hope beyond hope that programs like SOS will be able to restore and bolster resilience in our magnificent public lands. And, above all, I hope that our species, our varying populations filled with a plethora of beliefs, ideologies, creeds, values, backgrounds, privileges, socioeconomic statuses, and goals, will work together to preserve this planet’s rich biodiversity and thus protect our collective home.

Side-blotched lizard

Rain here in Escalante, I have come to find, is a double edged sword. On one hand, the recent rains in southern Utah have been a boon for the plants and animals. Enormous populations of globemallow and yellow beeplant have been bursting out from the sand and clay, coloring entire hillsides, valleys, and mesas bright orange and yellow. Annuals are adding sprinklings of reds, purples, and blues among the grey-greens of vast flats near Escalante. Thus the palette of the monument has greatly expanded in the past few weeks with the arrival of several big storms; but these same life-giving rains have prevented travel to about 2/3 of our target populations on any given day. All but one of the main roads on the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument are unpaved, and the majority of these are only navigable with high clearance, 4 wheel drive vehicles. So it is that even in the best weather and road conditions, some populations are troublesome to get to, but with storms, they become wholly inaccessible for days on end.

Collared lizard

As a result of extended weather delays, we were occasionally unable to monitor and collect during late May. On those days my co-intern and I lent our help to the wildlife biologists on the monument and collected data for hummingbird, bat, and lizard surveys.

Male broad tailed hummer

Understanding the animal life in these ecosystems is crucial to understanding the plant communities themselves and their true value in restoration and resilience, so I have found these forays into wildlife biology to be enlightening. Each of the animal taxa being studied on the monument serves integral roles in pest management, pollination, food web stability, and climate change research, both locally and regionally. The hummingbird survey data are especially interesting because many of the species found on the monument migrate through annually from southern deserts and northern forests, thus giving us clues into what surrounding climates are like compared to our regional climate. The data being collected are helping to paint a picture of the temporal changes in migration patterns for each hummingbird species, as well as for the genus as a whole which, in turn, are showing researchers the real-world impacts of changing climatic trends.

Collared lizard

Additionally, my co-intern and I have become particularly invested in the lizard surveys and have taken to catching lizards during seed collection and population monitoring trips, just for the sake of learning. There is no comprehensive list of herpological diversity on the two million square acre monument, and both Jessie and I have decided to help change this in whatever way possible. Herps represent important members of the food webs in these ecosystems, and I believe strongly that documenting biodiversity is crucial to any management strategies. Globally, herpological diversity is declining rapidly as species are being discovered, immediately listed as endangered, and then declared extinct with little more than a description and a name. While most of these tragedies are occurring to amphibians, which are naturally less common in such dry climes as Escalante, other herps are also eluding documentation and are thus at a unique risk of being lost. I don’t think that it is possible to overstate the importance of scientists and managers to know the biodiversity of their study sites, regardless of target organism, and I am thrilled that I am able to help gather data in the hope that the monument will soon gain insight into its herpological diversity and take steps to conserve the species here.

Desert spiny lizard

Despite the inclement weather, we have begun to collect seeds for two species of globemallow, three species of grass, and one species of mustard during the last two weeks. Rain is again preventing certain collections this week and may be knocking out our ripe seeds, but the rain is nonetheless a welcome visitor after such a dry winter and spring.

In the spirit of adventure,

Elise

Escalante Field Office, BLM

P.S. I’m building a theme with my titles because life is too short to not have a little intrigue every once in a while. If you can guess it, then I’ll send you an Escalante keepsake. I’m not joking. Hint: Mr Plant met an elf-friend and grew inspired. These titles are inspired by the resulting harmonious union.

Wandering the desert scapes of the GSENM in search of the target plant populations allows for long hours of careful contemplation. Hours upon hours of my internship are spent driving dirt roads passing RVs and horse trailers, tourists and cowboys, and endless acres of rabbitbrush and countless herds of cattle. All this is in search of the elusive plants divined for collection by the powers that be. Meanwhile my mind journeys over hills and mesas, down canyons and washes, independent of my driving body. I believe that Edward Abbey would have understood my mind’s inclination to wander freely when surveying the American West. And I like to think that Ed paved the way for the rest of us restless desert wanderers, justifying my reflections upon everything and nothing in my dutiful roving. I believe that another man (having no connection to the American West whatsoever) also understood my mind’s need to roam unfettered and wrote many stories of meticulously and whimicically crafted characters to share his thoughts on what it means to wander. Ed had his Desert Solitaire, but Mr Tolkien had Roverandom.

Mr Tolkien famously wrote many stories, but he unfamously wrote many, many more. Roverandom, like The Hobbit, was meant for a much younger audience than the typical CLM intern, but it is nonetheless valuable. The story brims with the simple morality and fantasy that a father attempted to pass onto his bereaved child and distract him from the loss of a beloved toy. The themes, albeit simple and clearly intended to mollify an equally simple child from a fleeting time of grief, are universal and are therefore applicable to my tenure as an SOS intern in Escalante.

If you are not a Tolkien nerd like I am, then you have probably never heard of Roverandom and you probably don’t care about the simplistic novella, but, please, humor me for a moment. It’s a story about a mischievous dog named Rover who is first turned into a tiny, toy dog by a grumpy wizard, then turned into a tiny, real dog by a kinder (but still kind of grumpy) sand wizard, and eventually (after first being given wings to travel about the moon with his moon-dog friend, and then gills to travel around the ocean floor with his sea-dog friend) is turned back into a life-size, real dog. In his journey from real dog to toy dog to tiny dog to legitimate dog again, Rover (later renamed Roverandom to reduce confusion because both the moon-dog and sea-dog are named Rover…Tolkien, you scamp!) wanders the wide world and has many adventures. The main themes that I take from this story are: 1. Adventure and novel experiences will never be found in a stagnant location: one must put forth at least a little effort in creating their own adventure, 2. Wandering is good for the soul because wandering is freeing, and 3. One doesn’t need a definite end destination to arrive at an incredible one. These themes are easily applicable to my time in Escalante, and I owe a great deal to Mr Tolkien for writing such an affirming story.

This train of thought leads me in two different directions: on one hand, I think that stories by the curmudgeony, Western wanderer Edward Abbey and the inventive, fantastical dreamer Mr Tolkien both inspire and encourage roving, especially through landscapes as (relatively) untrammeled as the monument. This thought comforts me on my long drives and my mind’s contemplative walks, and largely justifies both. On the other hand, I think that both writers would encourage me to break free from the expected SOS duties every once in a while and have a scientific adventure exploring a different kingdom.

Clouds are the great muses of daydreams.

In addition to my SOS responsibilities, I also have the great pleasure of working on my interim mentor’s wildlife biology projects. Last week I was inducted into the cohort of hummingbird surveyors on the monument, and I had the delightful task of recording data, capturing the birds at the trap feeders, bagging them for processing, and feeding them prior to their release. I have been eagerly awaiting spring in the desert so I could add hummingbird work to my growing list of life and job experiences, and this work surely did not disappoint. There are many great joys in life, and holding a fat-depleted, desperately hungry male black chinned hummingbird, in his undiminished iridescent plumage, is certainly one of those joys for me. Friends, if you ever get the chance to work with hummingbirds – to hold such a small life in your hands, to feel a miniscule heart urgently beat so close to your own dutifully persistent pulse, to accidentally steal the hard earned heat from the little body of the bird and to feel awe that there is so much energy being exchanged between your two beings – then I highly recommend it. It is so choice.

Processing one of the first black chinned hummingbirds of the season.

Plants are wonderful organisms for study, and they are undeniably important – especially given the unprecedented changes in local, regional, and global climate – but it is my firm belief that every conservationist, regardless of specialty and focus, must occasionally take the time to appreciate organisms beyond their study and the life within them. Merely working with hummingbirds for four hours reinvigorated me and has encouraged me to appreciate my botany work because of its role within the larger ecosystem.

I think that both Ed and Mr Tolkien would have understood the importance of my sojourn and my mind’s consistent tramps through the desert alone. Ed in particular had a distinct respect for and grasp of the big picture within such an enormous landscape. So I leave you now, friends, with an Edward Abbey blessing from Desert Solitaire:

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

In the Spirit of Adventure,

Elise

Escalante Field Office, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, BLM

The journey from my sunny San Diego suburb to my tiny Utah town took me much farther than the 637 miles by car and has shattered my preconceived notions about what a desert is and how one lives without the Pacific Ocean close at hand.

These boots were made for techin’, and that’s just what we’ll do.

For one thing, the journey took me from the endangered Coastal Sage Scrub ecosystem of Southern California to the underappreciated desert scrubland of the southwestern Colorado Plateau ecosystem. Though these landscapes superficially share some similarities, their differences are achingly palatable to my homesick eyes. ‘Wait, it snows here? And in mid-April?’ ‘Monsoons? That can’t be right…I thought that this was a desert.’ ‘But where’s the igneous rock? All I see is sedimentary. There’s no granite anywhere.’ ‘Lake Powell has a “beach”?’ Ah, the naiveté of a bewildered transplant!

The next stage of my journey has involved trying to wrap my mind around the magnitude of my surroundings. Everything about the landscape of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (hereafter: GSENM, as we in the know refer to it) is simply and complexly grand. That’s always the first word that springs to mind when trying to describe the vast array of canyons, cliffs, ancient dunes, fossilized dinosaur tracks, shifting hills, slickrock faces, riparian oases, and fractured crust that compose the indomitable monument. Grand and virtually indescribable.

The view from my tent door.

How does one convey the variety of natural wonders to an unknowing audience? How does one capture the subtle hues of red on a rock when the ever shifting clouds overhead affect the shades on the ground from moment to moment? How, oh how dear reader, am I to brag about this on Facebook when words and pictures fall desperately short of the mark?

The last, and probably most important leg of my journey has been understanding that the answers to my questions are all: I can’t and I shouldn’t really even try. This place is meant to be experienced with all of one’s senses working together to create an honest portrait of what living beauty is. Perhaps the monument is like a reverse of Dorian Grey’s picture – as the world becomes more impoverished of species diversity, wild places, and harmony with nature, locations like Escalante will become lovelier because they will become only rarer in the future – they will be a snapshot of bygone histories that we should always cherish.

Hiking in the Zebra Slot Canyon

With 1/5th of my time in Escalante behind me, I have much to look forward to: a community of like-minded office mates; a brilliant, optimistic, plant-loving co-intern; endless opportunities for exploration on the monument and beyond; a whole new ecosystem and a huge array of native flora to learn and to love; knowledge that working for the Seeds of Success program will have real world conservation implications in the uncertain future; assisting in  early morning hummingbird studies; lending help in late night bat surveys; planting willows for bank stabilization; working for the BLM; collaborating with rangers, scientists, and citizens for a brighter future; and heaps more.

With all these thoughts buzzing around in my head, I can’t help but ponder: what is it that Bilbo used to sing about the Road? Something about where it was going…? Ah well, it will come to me eventually! Until it does, may your paths lead you to new wonders around you and new discoveries within you.

In the spirit of adventure,

Elise

Escalante Field Office, BLM