Today is the last day of my internship. My mentor and co-workers took me out for Thai food. They are such warm and fuzzy people!

Every year that I’m out in the field, I learn a bit more about my beloved shrub steppe plants. I really enjoy keying out plants. It’s like doing puzzles. Once I was stuck (well, more than once!), and I desperately googled “3.5 mm ligule, open sheaths”, etc. and I actually came up with an answer for a grass that had lost all of its seeds. I had keyed out this grass last summer.

This is the first summer I collected seeds. Collecting seeds makes a person take a close look at the plants when they’re beyond the flowering stage, which is good for doing “sleuthing” botany when all of the plants have dried up.

This year I was sent on a few different missions. I went for a day with the bat woman to look in old mines for bats. No success, alas. But, it was really neat seeing the old prospector cabin and all the tailings. We had great views of the huge fire northeast of Republic.

I spent a couple of days downloading three game cameras that were set up at watering troughs at Juniper Dunes. I counted the number of times each species showed up in the frames. Lots and lots of magpies! These birds just have a party at the trough–they relish their baths. Mormon cricket, porcupine and coyote photos were also plentiful. We had a single kestrel, a single great-horned owl, some ravens, doves, elk and deer.

I did some monitoring in more mesic plots this year, which forced me to learn a few more grasses (like quackgrass, finally) and forbs.

Just two days ago, I was hiking by myself (seven miles that day) and wondering out loud how far away the sagebrush was from the mesic area, when I noticed a coyote just right there. He didn’t even look up. He stared hard at the ground.  Suddenly, he made a most beautiful, catlike pounce, and next thing I know I am hearing him crunching bones. He happily trotted away without ever noticing me!

Yesterday I packaged up all my vouchers and shipped them off to Smithsonian and the University of Washington.

Today, my last day, a package came to the office containing neatly labeled bags of the excess seeds that we requested for restoration projects. It made me so happy that I collected enough (except for one species so far) to have excess. You always wonder if you did the calculations correctly. What a nice going-away present.  

Extra Seeds Arrived on my Last Day of Work!

We have had crazy hot weather for ever, it seems. The air just sucks the moisture out of you. I’ve been drinking a gallon to a gallon and a half of water during the day. One day I felt my nose running and was very surprised to find it was a bloody nose. It’s only the beginning of July! What is August going to be like?? Maybe the entire state of Washington (and beyond) will dry up and burn. We’ve already had several wildfires; the air smells like smoke. My long-awaited backpack trip was cancelled because the trail was closed due to a wildfire. How can anyone deny climate change? (And we are STILL all driving our cars!)

Oh blessed relief! The Rain God took pity and it has been raining since midnight last night. It smells like moist hay outside.

I’ve been busy collecting seed. The plants are desperately finishing their reproducing. However, I think the buckwheats, Eriogonum heracleoides and E. compositum, for example, have suffered from the lack of moisture, because the seed was mostly no good. I’ve recently collected blanket flower, fleabane, and squirrel tail.

My other preoccupation at work is monitoring Silene spaldingii, Spalding’s catchfly. Three Wenatchee BLM interns came to Spokane to help monitor, and also to locate patches of weeds to be eradicated. They were Reed, Justin and Jenny. It was way more fun hiking around with Reed, and for one day, with all three interns, monitoring the catchfly. It’s not a particularly beautiful plant. It has no showy flower, just a tiny white rim of a corolla, but I am fond of it. It’s green when most everything else is senescing or senesced. It’s wonderfully sticky and has little bugs and vegetative debris stuck to it.

This coming week, when I SHOULD have been on an eight-day backpack, I will be collecting seed and monitoring more Silene. I do love it out there, despite the heat, and the entire next week will only be in the 80’s, instead of 90’s or low 100’s.

A white bitterroot, normally pink, found at Swanson Lakes Wildlife Area

Bug at Juniper Dunes, seen while monitoring Cryptantha leucophaea in June.