It has been a while since I have posted, so I am going to try to make up for lost time.  Things have been fairly consistent over the course of the summer.  I have been doing juniper clearances for most of the summer, interspersed with with setting up bat detectors and a couple of days of building fences.  I got to explore some of the farthest reaches of the district in search of bats.  Along the windy dusty roads I drove my old chevy for the last time and broke in my new Ford-150.  Parting is such sweet sorrow, but I have gotten to like my new Ford F-150 with its new car smell and USB charging cord.

I have continued with my juniper clearances and have actually made great strides.  I managed to finish huge section that I was assigned over a year ago, only to be assigned to help design the next one.  No good deed goes unpunished eh?  Finishing this lifted a weight off my shoulder and now I can start doing small clearances on a project by project basis instead of having another massive workload hanging over my head.  Some highlights of the juniper clearances include walking miles down a slow babbling brook.  It was a beautiful warm fall day with the fall colors finally starting to come into their own along the river.  I finished all of the clearances I had in store and got to eat a relaxing lunch along the stream.  Other clearances have yielded numerous sheds (in this case mule deer antlers).  The best day I found three as you can see from the pictures below.  

Besides juniper clearances I have continued to deploy bat detectors.  This brought me out to the far reaches of the district and to some real beautiful hidden gems.  I also got to head out with some of the range staff to help construct a fence to protect a post-fire restoration area.  Although I am comfortable working with my hands and with tools, it was great to have the opportunity to go outside my comfort zone and tackle a new challenge and learn a new skill.  We quickly got things started with a nice flat section of fence that we finished quickly the first day.  The second day proved to be much more of a challenge as we were working down a steep hill.  We also had some technical difficulties which arose due to the very sandy soil.  IT ended up being a long exhausting day, but we managed to finish the fence up in the nick of time.  I really enjoyed my time with the range staff building fence as cross-training is always valuable and it was enriching to see another perspective on the problems that the Prineville office faces.  It was also a great break from the day to day grind and it is great to accomplish something tangible instead of completing a project with an immaterial or delayed result.

I currently am finishing up for this field season with a lot of time indoors both due to work load and to poor weather.  I am going to be headed home for the holidays for an extended period of time and cannot wait to spend time with my family.

-Andrew

It has been a while since I last posted, but things haven’t really changed too much.  The major news is that the golden eagle nest that I have been closely monitoring has produced 2 chicks that have survived.  They should have fledged a couple weeks ago, but still are hanging out at the nest, apparently reluctant to head out into the real world (I get where they are coming from).  This was a major victory for us, as the eagles in this area have been unsuccessful many consecutive years, presumably due to climbers in close proximity.  To celebrate the occasion I even made a cake (I am going to bring it into the office tomorrow).

In other non-eagle related news, I just got a new work truck.  While I really loved my 2012 white Chevy, after a short drive from Portland back to the office, I have really come to fall in love with my sparkling new 2017 Ford F-150.  Starting off with only 5 miles on it, I should be able to add some miles this summer!!  I am sure the whole wildlife department are also going to be quite happy in the upgrade to the truck.

In terms of what I am doing now, I have finished up a flurry of bat-related work and am going to go back to Juniper clearances to improve habitat for sage-grouse.  For the bats, I set up acoustic detectors and then return then next day to collect them and the memory cards which stored the recorded calls.  I also got to go out mist netting with my boss, although I was not able to handle bats due to my lack of a rabies shot.  This was really fun and I even got some cool photos and some video.

Townsend’s Big Eared Bat

Cool video of a bat flying away (sorry that you have to download it and then open it).

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All in all things are going quite well as we make our way into the heart of summer.  Hopefully, the work continues to be diverse and diverting through the rest of the year!

These recent weeks have been a whirlwind of activity.  After returning from a long vacation I got back into the office and strait to work.  I had to catch up on my ongoing eagle monitoring whilst juggling various other projects with seemingly ever shortening due dates.  We headed up to the Columbia River to check on Washington Ground Squirrels while they are still active.  They are only active from March till early June and then they spend the summer and winter underground.  That is the life!  Those surveys proved to be long days, but we did locate some new colonies and confirm previously mapped colonies.

More recently I have been working on Special Recreation Permits (SRP’s) as the wildlife point of contact.  I have really enjoyed the SRP’s as it brings together field work and decision making together to determine the effects of a proposal and whether or not it should go forward.  Hopefully I will be able to work on more projects like these including some NEPA work, possibly CX’s or other smaller projects.

Currently temperatures have spiked into the 90’s, making hiking up and down hills slightly less exciting and surely more exhausting.  The silver lining is that roads are no longer muddy messes and instead are a wonderful dusty beige just waiting to be explored.  It looks like it is going to cool down for the next couple of days, so that will be a welcome respite.

In my spare time I have been working on a owl survey with a local birder and I am having a great time.  Surveys can run a little late (1am) and waking up the next morning to work isn’t always the most fun.  However, it is a wonderful opportunity and we have already heard great-horned owl, northern-pygmy owl (We saw it fly over and it was calling non-stop from within 15ft) and even Flammulated Owl, the bird for which we were surveying.  I have continued to go birding and have had a great time watching the great horned owl chicks around town goofily walk and fly around.

The next weeks and months are sure to be busy, so I will try to enjoy a relaxing Memorial weekend and keep everybody updated to my goings on as they go on.

Recently, I have had the opportunity to attend a couple of training sessions.  The first was a NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) training right here in the Prineville office.  It was a 24 hour training spread out over three days.  Since I had no real experience with NEPA I took some pre-requisite courses on DOI learn and familiarized myself with the process.  After reading up on NEPA and taking some relatively hard learning assessments, the day of the course finally arrived.  We entered the conference room and were greeted by donuts, a ploy to keep us coming back every day.  The course was very informative and led by a wonderful instructor.  We learned about the fundamentals of NEPA, as well as applying what we learned to existing EA’s (Environmental Assessments) in the office.  Hopefully I will get the opportunity to put the training in practice by working on some easy NEPA stuff, to gain experience and simultaneously reduce the workload of my supervisors.  

Between the two trainings, I did some more golden eagle monitoring and learned the true value of patience.  To submit a negative observation of a nest (no eagle present on the nest), one must wait four hours to ensure that the nest is monitored for a sufficient period of time to avoid false negatives.  So, I hunkered down by my scope in the cold with a good book on owls and waited, and waited, and waited, until finally the four hours elapsed and I escaped back to my car and to the office.

Then after some office work, I headed east to Vale with a co-worker to attend a GeoBOB (Geographic Biotic Observations Database) training.  We took a mountainous route to get there, not my idea, and after about five hours we finally arrived in Ontario (Oregon, not Canada).  We stayed in a nice hotel there and had to adjust to Mountain Time, instead of Pacific Time.  We rested up and then left in the morning for the first day of the training.  Vale is a really small town that smells like manure and onions, unsurprisingly because they grow onions with manure.  They were especially hard hit by the winter, losing millions of dollars of onions due to snow collapsing many roofs.  The training was informative in the sense that it taught me some of the basics of GeoBOB, but was plagued by technical mishaps and other problems.  Both of the instructors (different people taught the class on the first and the second day) were teaching the class for the first time and therefore it did not go quite as smoothly as they intended.  However, it was nice to learn a new program and get out to Eastern Oregon, an area where I had not spent any time other than briefly driving through.  

Well lek season has started, but I don’t want to use up all of my material, so you will just have to wait until my next blog post to hear about the excitement of watching sage-grouse at leks.

Until next time.

Andrew    

In the recent weeks, winter has slowly released its grasp on Central Oregon.  Things were so bad at one point that we recently celebrated being able to see the ground and especially grass.  However, most of the snow has melted, opening up opportunities to head back out into the field and escape the doldrums of the office.  At the end of the snowy period I had the opportunity to go out into the field and trek through the snow.  I set up closure signs that needed to be set up for golden eagles.  These signs restrict travel into areas near golden eagle nests to ensure limited disturbance to allow for successful reproduction.  While heading out to the field was wonderful, hiking miles through 4-12 inch snow was slightly less fun, although it was much better after the fact than during!!  Two hikes were especially tough, post-holing (sinking deeply into the snow with one leg, then extracting it, then rinse and repeat) for miles to put up signs, often without clear trail demarcations due to the deep and ubiquitous snow.  I also got to to install deflectors on fences to reduce sage-grouse collisions with fences.  All in all, I have really enjoyed getting back out into the field, and cannot wait for the beautiful spring weather and the emergence of the forbs.

In other news, two major events are occurring in the office.  The first is a fitness challenge where teams of 7 people record the number of minutes they exercise daily and enter it into a spreadsheet.  Out team is crushing it, with all of the team members greatly contributing towards the overall goal.  It ends in a while, but if we can continue our momentum it looks like we are going to be on our way to victory.  There is also a state-wide photo contest going on.  Our office had open entries and the top three in each of the eight categories will move on to the State office and the overall voting period.  I entered 8 photos, but it looks like one will move on to the state round.  While I was hoping that my photos would do better, there were some great photos to contend with.  Below is the photo that I believe will make it to the State round.

Ferruginous Hawk

Well, the next few weeks are going to be full of training, so I am not sure that my next post will be terribly exciting, but I will see what I can do.

Over the holidays I was able to go back home and spend 3 wonderful weeks with my parents.  Before that, I worked with my supervisor so that I could telework at home.  The process was very simple and I am extremely grateful to my supervisors for taking the time to work through the process with me.

I left Oregon the day before a huge snowstorm and managed to make it back to Ohio and back home.  Everyday, I would work from 7am to 11am so that I could spend the rest of my time with my wonderful parents and my cute puppy, Jasmine.  Jasmine just turned one and is still a ball of energy.  I got to play with her in the yard, and attempt to snuggle her.  I played board games and watched movies with my parents, and all in all had a great time. We headed over to my mothers side of the family for a pre-Christmas celebration.  The kids spent most of the time downstairs, which left us adults to have a peaceful time.

Back home we prepared for our own Christmas celebration.  We decorated the tree while listening to Christmas music.  It really brought back memories from childhood and it felt great to be spending time with family.  As for Christmas day, it was a quite peaceful event which went off splendidly.  Shortly after Christmas, my brother came to visit, so we had the whole family back together.  We played even more board games and got outside and visited some parks while walking Jasmine.  Eventually, he left and I got to spend the final days with just my parents and dog.  Towards the end, some part of me just wanted to stay home and forget about work, but I boarded my plane and headed back to work anyways.

I originally planned on working on the plane ride home, but I saw that they had free movies through their wifi service, and couldn’t pass that up.  I watched some decent movies, but heck they were free.  Towards the end of the flight I was pretty stressed out as we left late and arrived even later due to a mix up with the flight controller.  Eventually, I got off the plane and I ran towards my next flight.  I made it just in time before they left, my heart pumping.  Then I proceeded to wait on the flight for another 20 minutes, while we were apparently waiting for another passenger.  I didn’t mind since I could have almost been that passenger.  Eventually, I arrived in Redmond and my roommate picked me up at the airport.

Shortly after, I arrived at the house and I went to sleep immediately (time zones are a real pain).  The next morning I woke up to snow falling, and it just continued to snow and snow.  The snow really piled up over the weekend, but I braved the elements and made my way to the grocery to pick up much needed supplies.  As the weekend faded into the week, my telework-athon faded back into office work.  It was actually nice to be back in the office and be around a bunch of my colleagues.  As the winter weather continues, the office actually closed a couple hours early on Tuesday.  It was almost like a snow day, except it was only a couple of hours.  Well that about sums it up, I look forward to being back in Oregon and continuing to work over the winter.

November has started to fade into December and things haven’t seemed to change much.  While the temperature has continued to fall and now there is a fairly consistent snow on the ground, things seem to keep on going.  Much more of my time has been devoted to office work, given the fact that it is actually winter.  However, I have managed to get out into the field scouting for pygmy rabbits, learning the basics of fence repair, scouting out Oregon spotted frog habitat, and checking nests for eagle activity.  These field days are a breath of fresh air after staying in the office for days on end.

However, I am currently writing this from home, (not Oregon home, but back in my real home in Ohio).  I am working on finishing up descriptions of sensitive species to be used in later NEPA documents, and since that can be done electronically, I am able to telework. The whole process for teleworking was not too arduous, I just needed to jump through a couple of hoops, get some forms signed, and watch a training video.  My supervisor and her boss were wonderful in supporting me to be able to spend the holiday with my family and to help me though the process.

In my pursuit of knowledge of sensitive species, I am currently investigating the Oregon spotted frog, and I am actually reading the paper in 1996 that found strong genetic evidence of a separate species of spotted frog that would eventually become the Columbia spotted frog.  This kind of literature review can be extremely rewarding, especially once you have a finished product after organizing and compiling all of your notes.  If I have to be working over the holidays, there aren’t a lot of other things that I would rather be doing.

Aside from work, I was able to get some good birding in back in Oregon, and hope to be able to do some in Ohio.  There is a red-phase screech owl that seems to be roosting in a set location, so I may take a drive up there and see if I can find it and take some photos!!  Recently, I was able to get some really nice photos of sage-grouse out on a wintery morning in late November, and finally got a decent photo of my frustrating barn owl.

Things have really slowed down in the office.  Not only have people been leaving left and right, there is just a different atmosphere.  It doesn’t help that temperatures have recently plunged to their normal range, and that daylight savings time stole an extra hour of daylight from everybody.  It is really a drag that it gets dark at 5.  Getting off of work and having an hour of daylight left can sometimes be demoralizing as well.  But I guess this happens every winter and we just have to adjust.

However, shifting back to work I have been spending much more time in the office.  While it is nice to not be totally worn out after a long day, I am starting to really miss the field.  I am still managing to get out every once in a while whether it is to locate a cave that we missed or to try to finish up some wildlife clearances from earlier in the season.  The cold isn’t too bad, but I am really missing the diversity of birds.  Occasionally I see some interesting birds, but this is mostly while driving instead of actually out when conducting surveys or looking for caves.  I managed to see sandhill cranes, snow geese, trumpeter swans, bald eagles, belted kingfishers as well as the more normal species.  While these birds are fairly exciting, these are rarities and the total number of birds I have seen has taken a nose dive recently.  Hopefully this will be remedied by an influx of winter birds (hopefully Evening Grosbeaks)!!!!

However, in my time off I did manage to locate a lifer that I had been searching for a long time.  With the help of a local bird guru, I found and took some fairly poor photos of a barn owl.  I went back there later with a tripod to try to get a better photo, but the barn owls were not cooperating.  I am planning on heading back again to get a really nice photo.

Looking forward, the holiday season is upon us.  I am really excited about having 3 days off for Thanksgiving, but I am not really sure what I am going to do.  I might just take some time and relax without really doing anything, but I think more realistically I am going to go out and pick up some other new bird species.  After that I am really excited about Christmas as I am planning on heading home and spending time with my family.  I cannot wait to update you once again after all of the holiday goodness.

As summer has come to an end and Fall comes into full force, the field season is wrapping up.  As the leaves turn color from greens to dull yellows and reds (I am thoroughly unimpressed by fall out in Central Oregon, Fall in Ohio puts it to shame), so do the opportunities to head out to the field.  While I have been able to go out into the field sporadically, both the weather and lack of field opportunities have kept me in the office.  Recent storms that hit the Pacific have led to dreary rainy windy days and office work.  Due to this recent shift from primarily field work to more and more office work, I have changed my schedule from working 4 ten hours days, to 5 eight hour days.  I like the new schedule, it is really nice getting into the office later and leaving earlier, but when Friday rolls arounds, I regret not having the day off and all of the opportunities that a three-day weekend entails.

While the days in the office sometimes drag on, it is a nice change of pace and an opportunity to focus on another set of tasks and problems.  Another shift in the office is the slow but steady exodus of seasonal workers from the office.  Only this Friday I went to a going away party for another seasonal that I had spent quite a bit of time working with.  I too would have already left if I had not been extended, so it is starting to feel kind of quiet and almost empty in the office.  Hopefully, my time in the office will be broken up by some excursions out into the field to search for caves, survey pygmy rabbits, and other expeditions.

After an initial surge of momentum for surveying caves for bats, it has slowed to a crawl. Surprisingly, these caves that have been previously located, are extremely hard to find. Furthermore, many of these caves are simply erosional caves or shelters that are not able to support bats.  While it has been frustrating to not be able to locate these caves, the search is quite fun.  I spent most of my summer hiking through junipers and sagebrush, it is nice to have a change of pace and explore rocky ridge lines.  The hiking has been physically demanding, but has also been equally rewarding through extremely beautiful views.

View from a shelter cave on a ridge line.

Another shelter cave.

I cannot wait to see what the upcoming weeks have in store for me and I look forward to sharing that experience with everybody.

While the field season is winding down and things may have started to become routine, I can promise you that I am not going crazy.  Instead, I am starting to work more with bats now.  For the past couple of weeks I have been putting out audio surveying equipment near water sources to collect bat calls.  The audio equipment records the calls that they use to echolocate and then software at the office can transform the call into a sound range that we can hear and even identify the species of bat making the call.  This is a part of an ongoing effort to learn more about bat distribution in central Oregon, especially determining the distribution and habitat of each individual bat species.  I have really enjoyed this break from my typical routine as it gets me to new areas.  

Audio recording device at a watering trough.

I am about to transition to working more directly with bats, but not in actual contact with them due to the threats of White-nosed syndrome that has recently been detected in Washington State.  We will be going through decontamination procedures, which are crucial in being able to go into caves safely and minimize and hopefully eliminate the possibility of disease transmission.  My supervisor has many years of experience working with bats, so I will get to learn more about bats from her and watch as she and other experienced professionals remove bats from mist nets and take some measurements that are used to conclusively identify the species.

Recently we headed out before dark to set up mist nets at a cave just outside of Sisters. We drove on Forest Service roads and then parked on a non-descript pullout.  We then proceeded to walk about a quarter of a mile and a cave suddenly appears out of nowhere. I was not expecting a cave out in the middle of the forest, but there it was.  We set up three mist nets near the mouth of the cave and then waited.  Shortly after the sun set (and I think that we even got a couple while it was still light) we started getting bats in the net.  I was not able to handle the bats as I don’t have a rabies shot, so I helped to record data. The bats were removed from the net, the sex, age and species was determined and then we tested them for Pd (white nose syndrome).  In the end we captured four different species of bats (California myotis, Western long-eared myotis, Long-legged myotis and a big brown bat).  This experience turned out to be much more fulfilling than my previous experience, where we were only able to capture one bat the whole night.

Big-brown bat caught while mist netting.

 Now I leave for a week of vacation touring the National Parks before heading back to work for the BLM and exploring caves and searching for bats.  I am really excited to be able to take a break from work and go explore the West, but I cannot wait to get back and start going Batty with the BLM.