When I headed out to Safford, AZ in May I came from the mountains of Wyoming, a place I absolutely loved, in a move I knew would be a huge change of pace for me.  I had never lived in a desert environment before, and all of my family and friends wondered why I would move from one of the most beautiful places on earth to a small town seemingly in the middle of nowhere.  To them it may have not have made any sense, but inside of me I knew what my goals for myself were and if they were left unpursued, then I knew I would soon feel restless, even in the shadow of Tetons.  In high school I decided that I wanted to pursue a career in field biology, and chances like this that the CLM program offer do not come around often, so when it was offered I knew it was something that I had to do.

I will be the first to admit I often find myself daydreaming of hiking or skiing back in the high country. However, this experience has not only changed me for the better but also given me experience and opportunities that would not have been offered had I stayed in my comfort zone.  As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, our main project we work on is invasive species eradication on a National Conservation Area.  While sometimes monotonous, for the first time in my life I had a job that was goal-oriented with tangible objectives and signs of success, which led me to feel personally invested in what I was doing.  Not only did I enjoy what I was doing, I also felt that there was a reason to do what I was doing.  With the temperatures dropping, fish are not moving as much so we have halted fish work for the season, but our biologists feel pretty confident that our project (which has been going on for around a decade) is complete and the Green Sunfish has been extirpated from Bonita Creek.  With this objective complete, it means that I can look back on these eight months spent in a small desert town in a positive light.

This internship also proved to be a vital stepping stone going forward, as I will continue doing fish research with a private company in Phoenix that the BLM in Safford works with quite extensively.  This opportunity would never have come to fruition without this internship, which is another reason taking the internship has proven worthwhile.  Due to that, I would like to thank the Chicago Botanic Garden, the CLM program, Krissa, Rebecca and everyone else that gave me this opportunity.  Future interns, if you are reading this, know that this program can be a great stepping stone to that career you have in mind.

Thanks,

Taylor

I had always figured the desert was going to be a hot place.  That’s just part of the whole “Desert” deal…You get sand, cacti, and heat.  I knew that going into this job.  However, knowing and experiencing are two totally different things.  It’s similar to jumping into a mountain lake. You KNOW it’s going to be freezing, you’re geared up for it and mentally prepared, but once your feet hit the water everything changes.  You gasp for breath and can’t think coherently, even though you KNEW it was going to be freezing.  That being said, it was obviously hot, very hot in the Arizona summer.  The saving grace was that most of our work was in water and early in the morning so usually the heat was not a huge issue while working, even though I’m not sure “breathable waders” manufacturers know the correct definition of the word “breathable”.

Besides a few days here and there where we did work in the middle of the day, we were able to beat the heat on the job, although I wouldn’t recommend spending a lot of time on blacktop.  Sidenote: I’m still not sure how all the high-schoolers handled football practice during July and August but that’s neither here nor there.  A week or two ago I was absolutely shocked when I went outside one morning to get something from my truck and legitimately shivered.  My brain had no idea what to make of that, but there was definitely an internal celebration because autumn had finally gotten to Southeastern Arizona.  Growing up in Texas (where it’s also absurdly hot), fall was always my favorite season because it meant that you could be outside running around doing whatever, without suffering from heat stroke.  I realized not much has changed since childhood, because I immediately perked up the first time I had to put a jacket on. (They also evidently don’t believe in Daylight Savings Time in Arizona, so come November it’ll mean more time working in the cool temperatures!).  A few weeks have passed since then, and we’re still in that awkward phase where you have to wear a jacket in the morning, then start overheating when the sun gets up, and then take it off but its perfect weather in my book.

The coming of Fall also means that we did our bi-annual monitoring of Aravaipa Creek.  If you are unfamiliar with Aravaipa, I would recommend looking it up.  It’s an absolutely stunning place, and considered the crown jewel of Southeastern Arizona and also of our field office (Edward Abbey even called it home for a while as a Ranger).  A good portion of the creek falls within BLM wilderness, along with The Nature Conservancy property, as well as a few private inholdings scattered in.  We teamed up with a group of students from the University of Arizona to monitor nine different sites along the creek for fish demographics.  Aravaipa Creek houses two species of endangered fish (Loach minnow, and Spike Dace) and this monitoring has taken place twice a year since 1963 to assess different statistics about how they are doing.  It was a wonderful experience because A. I got to work in a beautiful and almost unknown area of the country, B. I got to interact with a lot of like-minded people in my age range (You’ll never believe it, but there aren’t a lot of young conservationists in a ranching/mining town of 10,000 people) and C. It’s an extremely fulfilling feeling knowing that you are doing your part as a cog in the machine of something much larger than yourself.

That last sentence I think sums up the number one thing I have gotten from this job.  I wrote on a previous blog post that our main project is removing invasive fish species from a creek within a national conservation area.  When I first started, if I was in a bad mood or a sleep-deprived/lack of caffeine state of mind it was easy to think of negative thoughts like “Well, how big of a difference can one person make?… It’s just one creek, even if we remove all the invasive species, it’s just one creek. How big of a difference will that even make in the broad spectrum of the world”.  After reading blog posts on here for a while though, an epiphany hit me like a ton of bricks, and it has made all the difference both in this job and my outlook in the future of nature.  Ya, I’m just one dude slowly but surely repairing and ecosystem.  Just by myself, I’m making just a mere blip on the radar in conservation.  BUT, I’ve read about people doing the same thing in Alaska, In California, In New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, the Eastern U.S and probably others I’m forgetting.  My point being is that to save the world, it takes a village.  One person has nowhere near the amount of man power to do everything that needs to be done to conserve the natural world, but if a large group of people that truly believes that they are making a difference in their neck of the woods do their part, then we all act as spokes and keep this wheel moving.  Hopefully the students we worked with this past weekend enjoyed the work enough to enter this line of work and add to the number of people working toward a common cause.  Hopefully someone somewhere has seen what you are doing and understands how important it is and has been inspired to do the same.  Hopefully you can see a goal involved in what you are doing, because it gives you a perceptible meter of how your project is going and something to strive for.  And finally, hopefully everyone reading this has had a least one “Ah-Ha” moment where you have seen success in your project and felt that extremely rewarding feeling inside of you where you look across the landscape and honestly tell yourself that you HAVE made a difference.

Anyways, I’m going to hop off the soap-box for now, best of luck to those finishing up their time with the CLM program, and good luck to those continuing.  As Fall continues and dips into Winter I’ll write again.  In the meantime keep trekkin’ along, saving the world.

Theres somethin’ about those Saguaros…

Taylor.

When I moved from the mountains of Wyoming to the desert of Southeastern Arizona it was obvious things were going to be different.  The landscape, the culture, the flora/fauna, and especially the climate all greeted me with a stark contrast with what I had been used to.  With all that being different, one thing never wavered, and that was my love for the outdoors and biology.  I work with the BLM field office in Safford Arizona monitoring native fish and controlling invasive fish populations, which means getting down and dirty in the water and muck on a daily basis.  It’s awesome.  Recently, our field team went on our annual monitoring trip on the Gila River to assess the populations of the fish in there.  The section of the river we were in falls into the Gila Box Riparian National Conservation Area, which restricts motor vehicle access, meaning that our typical protocol of driving to each site would not fly.  This restriction meant that in order to do the job we needed to travel the old school way: via water.  Roughly twenty miles of river and four monitoring sites greeted us over the course of three days.  At these sites we delineated areas based on habitat, electro-shocked to census various fish species, and used a device called a gravelometer to measure the size of the rocks on the river bottom.  The whole time I was in awe of how beautiful the landscape was and the fact that it was an incredible thought that this was ACTUALLY my job.  I mean, there’s not many jobs out there where one can say they get to be outside in gorgeous scenery doing a fulfilling job like conserving life on earth.  Although I am only a month into this job,  it has already taught me invaluable life lessons, such as the fact that no matter where you are there is a beauty in being outside and away from everything.  I can’t wait to see what the next four months have in store and where this opportunity takes me.  Until then though, cheers.