As with many life experiences, I’m sure it will take some time to recognize all the learning that has taken place over the last few months, but there are a few things that I can point to now, knowing that they are significantly changed from when I arrived in Wyoming. For one thing, I have a much fuller understanding of what it means to manage land period, let alone manage it for multiple uses. Land management has always seemed an abstraction discussed in college courses or job descriptions, but now I have a close up picture and have hours spent fulfilling various duties required to manage land. First, it entails knowing what is present on the land – vegetation, soil, livestock, wildlife, abiotic and biotic processes. This, when you’re talking about a field office of 2.5 million acres, requires lots of driving and gathering of data – and still there are places that won’t see a soul for years. Then, after the data gathering, comes decision making and consequential implementation of those decisions. From my observations of this process, decision making has appeared formal at times and yet less formal than I imagined when working for the federal government. Meetings in the field for example are often relaxed without a huge sense of urgency or debate. Many times evaluations are subjective and the outcome rests on a casual conversation about the state of things and possibilities for the future. In our field office the decisions being made affect the content of permits given to ranchers for grazing cattle, the fate of wild horses from year to year, the prescribed treatment plan for dwindling stands of aspen.

Monitoring: Erin measuring stubble height in a riparian area.

Recently, Erin and I had the opportunity to observe a bit of interagency collaboration between Wyoming Game & Fish, the Forest Service, and the BLM. Decisions had already been made about how to manage the areas of land that included both national forest and BLM by the time Erin and I entered the picture, but it was still very interesting to finally see how collaboration between agencies works and who is involved. We had a team of four wildlife biologists (including one from each agency) as well as several ecologists on hand to look at old growth aspens stands that were being encroached upon by more competitive conifers. The Game and Fish department had mapped sections of the aspen stands for us to flag the perimeter of for easy visibility by contractors when they come in next year to cut the conifers.

Another land management issue that Erin and I have been working on is the hot topic of wild horse management. We’ve spent the majority of our time lately chasing down wild horses within the northern “horse management areas” (HMAs) in our field office. Despite many hours spent in the truck, this has been a rewarding endeavor. The horses are enchanting. Many times, when we get close enough and the horses have adjusted to our presence, Erin and I will spend our lunch break just sitting and watching them from a short distance. We’ve begun to pick up on key elements of their behavior and look for trends in when and where they are spending their time.

Some herds are less concerned with human presence than others.

A lone paint stud, healthy and strong

There are close to 50,000 horses currently on BLM land in the western US and a comparable number in holding. The Appropriate Management Level (AML) as stated by the BLM is ~26,000. Controversy on the topic lies in management of public land for multiple uses. While environmentalists advocate for the horses’ rights to life, health and freedom, the ranching community would like their numbers to be kept much lower for preservation of rangeland health for their cattle. Erin and I monitor the horses by visual counts, recording location, behavior, and health and taking photographs. Monitoring should allow BLM staff to make more accurate estimates of horse numbers and track their behavior in certain areas to make decisions about when to round up horses and remove them from the HMAs.

We’ve learned how to earn the horses’ trust and what will make them run.

Our SOS season is winding down quickly. There are still a few collections left to be made, but it is no longer taking the majority of our time. We are waiting for four species of sagebrush seed to be ready to collect, as well as a population of winterfat. All of this, including the processing of all of our SOS data, should take us right up until the end of our season in two months!

Sometimes Erin and I don’t need a map to get where we’re going anymore… that’s how I know we’ve been here a while, though the summer has seemed to pass so quickly. People in our office sometimes ask us how the summer is progressing and our answer is mostly the same; we are grateful for the variety of tasks this internship has offered over the last few months. Although the majority of our time is spent monitoring for the rangeland department, we have also juggled in some SOS collections, wildlife projects and will be monitoring wild horse populations starting at the end of the week.

Because our SOS collections were concentrated on sage grouse important forbs, most of our seed collections, presently totally seven, were squeezed into July. August has been spent waiting on sagebrush to begin flowering and keeping an eye on a couple late-blooming forbs. We are hoping we will end the season with a few more collections including green rabbitbrush, several types of sagebrush and Bigelow’s tansyaster. Also in the next few weeks our attention will turn towards boxing up our seed and shipping it away for official record and cleaning.

Erin & I collecting common yarrow seed for SOS

Machaeranthera bigelovii – one SOS species left to collect

One exciting project we helped with this month was greater sage grouse collaring, which requires working late into the night. This was my first time riding an ATV, but it also happened to mean riding it with only one hand and in the dark until 2 am. I could only use one hand to steer the ATV because the other was occupied by a spotlight to spot the sage grouse and keep them still until we could launch a net over them to keep them down. All this didn’t prove to be as enormously difficult as it sounded to me at first and turned out to be a bizarre, but fun first experience. Unfortunately our luck ran out after the first hour, during which we had collared only one female hen and we didn’t see many more after that. The project, which is run by a grad student from the University of Wyoming, is aimed at studying sage grouse habitat preference under manipulated habitat conditions. The GPS collars are important for tracking the female’s choices for nesting habitat and movement year round. He reportedly had much more success later in the week finding hens in a different area.

After collaring female sage grouse hen

The end of July corresponded with the end of data collection for a large on-going vegetation study Erin and I were doing for the range dept, which made up the majority of our field time. With this field work behind us, we have returned to sequentially monitoring riparian areas in grazing allotments for overgrazing. On Monday we were given the feat of monitoring a pasture encompassing an 8 mile canyon called Sweetwater Canyon. It’s considered a hidden gem in the field office because it’s difficult to get to and it harbors the beautifully cool Sweetwater River and its surrounding lush vegetation. Our job was to photograph the key areas along the bank for data about the utilization and to look for any cattle that may have been left behind in there before the fall/winter. Through hiking was made easier by a patchwork of cattle and game trails along side the river, but was still convoluted and slow-going in the steepest parts of the canyon. Despite the added shade it was still a hot day, but very rewarding by the end.

Showing the height of riparian species in Sweetwater Canyon

Weekends here have been spent zipping from one adventure to the next, from the Wind River range here in Lander to the Tetons and to Yellowstone. Although I’m looking forward to the fresh coolness of fall, my friends and I here are scrambling to get in the last weekend adventures before the end of summer, with its long days and the absence of snow.

The month of July has been a very full month! My partner, Erin, and I have been splitting our time between collecting data for an on-going vegetation production study and SOS collections, both of which are time sensitive projects.

Our SOS collections have been focused primarily on key pollinator and sage grouse forbs, as well as a couple grasses and antelope bitterbrush. Even though we started with 16 vouchers of specimens that we had the potential to collect seed from, the reality will be that the final number of seed collections we make this season will be much smaller. I’ve learned this month how unpredictable and time-consuming the process of locating and monitoring a potential collection can be. I don’t mean these adjectives in a particularly negative sense, but I’ve had my eyes opened to some of the basic hurdles a seed collection program such as SOS must face. As we’ve monitored species, trying to predict the dates of prime seed readiness, many of the seed populations have gotten swept away or chomped to dust by wind and insects. Managing our time for two projects also meant that some of our seed was ready for us before we had the time to snatch it up.

In light of this, we are proud and excited to have completed our first few collections this month with the help of the Montana Conservation Corps crew that came to assist us from the Wind River Reservation. We were fortunate enough to have their help for two days collecting seed just outside of the Red Canyon Wildlife Management Area. We are hoping August will bring several more successful collections!

When we are not busy collecting SOS seed, our other task has been to gather data about the annual vegetative production of rangeland across the field office and make comparisons between grazed and ungrazed rangeland. Each study site we visit has an exclosure that has been preventing cattle from grazing these small sections of land for many years now, which allows the grass and other plants to proliferate (hypothetically) as the rest of the land would if cattle were not present. Our job is to collect data about the cover by species and production by species weight for plots placed inside and outside the exclosure. Part of this process is clipping small circular plots, dividing and bagging species separately and then weighing them. Today we finished our tenth and final study location and are excited to see what new projects August will bring!

Wild horses within the Lander BLM Field Office

Just two weeks ago we were arriving in Chicago for our week of training at the CBG. The training, as well as the symposium that was held at the end of the week, served as a great opportunity to grab hold of the cause that we are working for during this internship. It’s always helpful to widen your perspective to a bigger picture of the conservation goals at stake and to identify your role in making those become reality. It’s great to continue on into the season with this vision – knowing that some of our days may be long, hot and tiring, but also knowing that we’re making a contribution toward the progress of largescale native plant restoration and to the science that will keep these western ecosystems healthy.

Collecting the height of key species to monitor rangeland health

Now armed with our matching muck boots, we’ve begun collecting rangeland monitoring data, measuring the stubble height of key species in riparian areas to determine if grazing has been too heavy in an area. Eventually Erin and I will be on a monitoring rotation, visiting the same sites every couple of weeks. The riparian sites we’re collecting data from are where cattle particularly love to spend their time mowing the grass to the ground, but which are also some of the most important sites ecologically. Other than grazing the grass down too short, the cattle also have the potential to cause something called hummocking, which is severe small-scale mounding of the ground (see photo). Since the soil in riparian areas is so wet, the cattle’s hooves cause depressions where they walk, leaving mounds around the areas where they have not stepped. Over time these will worsen and water loss can become a problem. Less water is held in the soil and protected from evaporation or simply flowing down stream, which changes the function of the ecosystem on an essential level.

Monitoring rare Astragalus sp. in Dubois , WY