A slow but consistent exodus has been occurring in the Lincoln, as the markers of fall have begun arriving and summer comes to an end. Several times an hour the high and strained call of an elk bugle will pierce the air, and the nights down in the desert have called for closed windows and warm blankets. It seems like every day is another seasonal’s last day, and our crew has dwindled down to a handful of people. Some are road tripping, moving on to their next job, or traveling back home. The last few weeks have definitely been busy as we’ve finished the work left for us in the forest!

Currently we’re just finishing up our last bits of botany surveying. While we haven’t found any rare plants actually in our survey areas, we did accidentally find a robust population of Wooton’s Hawthorn (Crataegus wootoniana) one day earlier in the season! During one of our Mexican Spotted Owl habitat monitoring days, we sat down in the shade for lunch and noticed the branch right next to one of our crew, Joe’s, face was that of a hawthorn branch! We recently traveled back to the location to check and get an estimate of the population, and there were definitely at least several hundred!

Some other work we’ve recently been doing is helping out with seed collection of Goodding’s Onion (Allium gooddingii) for long-term storage, or seed banking. The seeds will first be sent to the Arboretum at Flagstaff in Arizona (which is a neat little place that does some cool botanical projects- definitely check them out!) and then to the National Laboratory for Genetic Resource Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado. Collection involves hiking out to known populations that are currently seeding, and collecting a specified percentage of the population depending on the area. We were able to collect a large number of seeds, which hopefully will help out with future research!

In other office news, we did gain a new crew member! Miss Malaxis (named after the orchid genus that we’ve been seeing a good amount of in our surveys) has been appearing often in front of our district office. There’s an ongoing debate on whether Miss Malaxis is a male or female, but the name will remain regardless. They’re extremely affectionate, sweet, and loves climbing the trees outside the office! If I wasn’t traveling so often and didn’t already have three cats at my home in Indiana, I for sure would just take Miss Malaxis with me!

Besides Miss Malaxis, this season has been full of other fun finds! I think my time here in the Lincoln was made 100x better by the fact that our entire crew was awesome. I definitely was concerned about coming out to the NM desert in a small military town, knowing no one, and wondering how I would fill up my free time after coming from an environment of living with 5-20 other people! As it turns out, the environmental field is a small world, and I actually knew people from ACE working in the same forest- besides that, our crew and the other seasonal crews (wildlife, trails, etc.) often got together outside of work for exercise, hanging out, and other fun times. It was great having a network of people to explore NM with, as most of the others were also from all over the country as well. I am extremely appreciative of how welcoming everyone was! NM itself is also a really neat state, with lots of opportunity for hiking and adventures (when it’s not too hot out!). I saw my first wild bear in the Carson NF, and I’ve now been to the tallest point in both AZ (Humphrey’s) and NM (Wheeler)- my next goal is doing a 14er in Colorado!

Working in the Lincoln has been a great first-time Forest Service experience, made all the better by our awesome botanist, Aurora, and other supervisors Jen and Pete, who we helped with their projects. I definitely want to say thanks for making this internship such a good time! As for my future plans, I’ve got many applications in with the Forest Service for next spring, and am definitely hoping to get another season in. While COVID has made doing grad school a concern for me (I really don’t want to do an essentially virtual master’s), I am in communication with a couple potential advisors- we’ll see where the next few months take me! When I leave here in a few days, I’ll be heading up north to Colorado for some solo hiking and camping, and then heading over to Flagstaff to visit friends and scope out NAU’s programs. In November I’ll probably be heading to IN, since it’s been almost a year since I’ve been back. I’ll be signing off here with a little photo dump of my last few weeks in NM! Thanks for reading!

After a brief period of pretty warm weather, it’s started to cool down here in the Lincoln NF! It’s definitely crazy to think that we’re over halfway through the season- I’ve already learned so much more about botany down here in the southwest, and can’t wait to put my experiences to use in the future! Meanwhile, we’ve been assisting several different projects along with our plant surveys, the latest being some monitoring of known populations of Goodding’s Onion (Allium gooddingii), one of our listed rare species. In the Lincoln, these are persisting on the floor of spruce-fir and mixed conifer forest, generally around 9,000-10,000ft of elevation. This is in our Smokey Bear district, among the Sierra Blanca mountain range, which contain some of the highest points in the forest and makes for some pretty sweet (and literally breathtaking) views! We did a couple days of monitoring in this area, along with the state botanist and her assistant, Missy, who was the best hiker among us!

This particular area was home to significant recent fires, including the Little Bear fire in 2012 and the Three Rivers fire just this past spring. Part of our monitoring efforts were to compare these disturbance areas. This species is disturbance-dependent, and debris left by felling does cause issues in terms of space for populations and not harming existing populations during debris removal. Several populations were pretty vigorous!

Another project we helped out with was constructing some beaver dam analogs, to slow down water flow in stream/riparian areas and prevent further erosion. This included some post-pounding and lopping of willow branches, which is what we used to weave through the posts and create a woody barrier through the stream. It definitely was reminiscent of my fencing and trail work days! Helping out with such projects always provide a nice variety of tasks throughout these weeks, and provide even more experience in different functions of the Forest Service.

Besides these projects, we’re also continuing our plant surveys and making progress on the amount of area we’ve covered. No unknown populations have popped up yet, but we still have several weeks more of surveying!

The past few weeks here in the Lincoln National Forest have certainly flown by! Each week is a whirlwind of activity- we’ve been completing a good amount of surveying work, starting out with helping the Natural Resources crew with Mexican spotted owl and New Mexico meadow jumping mouse habitat monitoring. This process includes gathering data on the vegetative growth in protected plots, and has given me practice on identifying grass species in the field. In turn, they’ve been helping us botany folk with our rare plant species surveys! I was pretty excited to start those, since that indicated switching the majority of the time to being in the field.

Our survey days have been pretty adventurous so far! With the NR crew, we have about 5-7 people covering at least several miles of surveying and have been able to complete almost 7000 acres in just a few weeks! A large portion of that was pinyon-juniper habitat, and while we haven’t found any rare species in that particular area, it’s mostly previously unsurveyed ground so just gathering data there is helpful for future analysis and the South Sacramento Restoration Project in general. Our other major site was mixed conifer, which while botanically more interesting, still yielded no rare plants. But even negative data is still data!

 A typical survey day consists of all of us hopping into our Ford Explorer (the Botmobile!) and driving up to a couple hours to our survey site- luckily, we’ve specially curated a playlist that includes plant-themed bops such as “Plantasia” by Mort Garson (1976), early 2000s hits by Fergie, Shakira, Rihanna, etc., and even the internet viral sensation “Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf”- an eclectic warm-up to our long days of hiking. Some of our sites have included some interesting 4WD challenges, but our Botmobile has consistently exceeded expectations and remains as reliable as ever. Upon arriving, we plan our routes using our GPS units and Avenza. I’ve already gotten much better at reading topographic maps, a skill that saves a ton of energy when you can predict how steep an elevation gain might be. Once we have our plan, we set off, hopefully scrambling over brush and fallen logs as successfully as we’re able and in whatever (safe) weather happens upon us. I’ve definitely taken my fair share of falls over a tree or on a muddy slope, but it certainly adds to the excitement of being out in the field! We typically each are able to bushwhack about 5 miles before we have to head back, and the entire time we’re keeping our eyes peeled for any rare species that may pop up. Hopefully by the end of the season we can claim to have found an unrecorded population!

Our next few weeks we’re starting some Goodding’s Onion monitoring, as well as continuing the botanical surveys for this restoration project. I’m definitely looking forward to spending more time out in the field and exploring even more of New Mexico in our off time!

I pulled into Alamogordo, NM, my Honda Fit stuffed with everything I had to my name (which admittedly, is not a lot), ten days unshowered and racing to my second-dose vaccine appointment. I had been driving since 4am, just coming off an extended road trip routing that included the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Escalante, Joshua Tree, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, and down Highway 1 on California’s coast (my first time seeing the Pacific!). I’d just finished a 6-month term in Americorps’ ACE program based in Flagstaff, AZ, and took advantage of the time in between my end date in AZ and starting here in the Lincoln National Forest to do some solo-travel and live the #van (Fit) life. After 6 months of hard manual labor consisting mainly of trail construction, much of it backcountry, I was excited to get back into the world of botany, data analysis, and actual beds!

Coming from rural north-central Indiana, a flat hunk of land consisting mainly of corn and soybean fields, the West has been an entirely different planet full of jaw-dropping vistas and crazy conservation corps misadventures. This is my first time in New Mexico, and I’m excited to see what new experiences the Chihuahuan desert has in store.

 Here in Lincoln NF, my co-intern Natasha and I are going to assist a small part of the ongoing South Sacramento Restoration Project by conducting rare plant surveys that will contribute to the project’s database of federally listed endangered and threatened plant species, as well as regionally sensitive species that exist in the forest- this data collection will also help with building a dataset for a habitat sustainability model that is being developed for the Lincoln NF. Although we’re in the Chihauhaun desert, much of the Lincoln NF consists of sky islands, isolated areas that are ecologically radically different from the surrounding desert, often found in mountain ranges such as the Sacramentos. This leads to an extremely biodiverse region, with high species richness and many endemic species. 

While waiting for our rare species’ to flower so we can accurately identify them, we’ve had several different learning opportunities working with different Forest Service employees- we’ve been helping the natural resources crew here build one-rock dams to control soil erosion in riparian areas, as well as learned about local wildlife through some birding with a local expert. We’ve also been collecting plants to practice keying them out and refamiliarizing ourselves with botanical terms and plant families, and have been practicing driving out to sites and using our GPS units to track and find points. My favorite find so far has been Viola canadensis, which is not one of our rare species, but a familiar sight to me after having done research on prairie violets during my Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) internship at the Chicago Botanic Garden itself. I was excited to see Viola again for the first time in the West! 

Working with Aurora, the forest’s botanist, as well as the other Forest Service seasonal techs has been great and I’m already learning a great amount from them! The flowering season here is almost upon us, so we’ll soon start our rare species’ data collections. I can’t wait to update everyone on how they go!