After a fun and educational week at the Grand Canyon, it was time again to return to seed collecting in the Mojave desert. The July heat is causing plants to crisp up, and my team has been scrambling to collect the remaining seed off of browned out plants before all of it falls to the ground.

As the field season progresses, I find myself working on a number of new projects in new places. I’ve had the pleasure of doing botany at high elevations in the San Bernardino National Forest, where I have been working with other botanists at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden doing rare plant surveys and collecting vouchers for the herbarium. Not only have my forest adventures introduced me to a whole new flora, but I’ve also been enjoying summer temperatures in the mid 80’s, about 20 degrees cooler than the sweltering desert heat. Our field teams up in the San Bernardinos have been working in areas that were previously under collected or not surveyed at all, and we’ve been rewarded with sightings of a whole host of sensitive and endangered plants. This week my field team found a thousand plus population of the rare plant Oxytheca parisii var. parishii which, according to my mentor, was the largest population of the plant she had ever seen.

Besides all of the interesting botany I’ve been doing here, I’ve also been immersing myself in Southern California cuisine. The abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables has made cooking a fun and delicious enterprise. Avocado season is now upon us, and I’ve been perfecting my guacamole recipe. The key is to use plenty of cilantro and to cut out the stems to avoid a bitter taste. I’ve also been frequenting the Mexican food restaurants in the Claremont area and out in the desert and have had my fill of giant quesadillas and carne asada burritos. As my internship winds down, I’m starting to think about my future and would absolutely love to stay right here in California.

-Andrew Monks, Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, Claremont, CA

Hello from Cedarville, CA! My Internship is focused on the Seeds of Success program and this is the first year for BLM Surprise. So far I have shipped three collections and as of this posting there will be 5 more to be shipped next Monday. So far my favorite is Idaho Fescue which was the easiest to collect and painless as well. I learned first hand about Needle & Thread! Balsamroot was okay and smelled great too but the bugs hanging out in the foliage were almost too much to bear. As of this writing we collected Indian Ricegrass and Thurber’s needlegrass bringing our collection total to 8! I also have been doing some Rangeland Monitoring and went out with the Archaeology Tech once as well. It was with the latter that I saw my first Wild Mustangs so I was thrilled about that. As beautiful as Northeastern California and Nortwestern Nevada are I will be glad to spend some time away next week in San Francisco and visiting friends in Humboldt County!

Wild Mustangs

Idaho Fescue

Hairy Balsamroot

Avena Fatua, is an oatgrass, invasive in this area of southern California, which dries out in early summer contributing to the high fire threats.

This internship is placed at the San Diego Zoological Institute for Conservation Research, our main goal is to collect SOS seeds for restoration. This location is nice since we have the opportunity to not only collect in the desert, but also chaparral, and coastal sage scrub.  We were also fortunate enough to help with various other research projects including, Herp Array monitoring for biodiversity and Stephen’s Kangaroo Rat Habitat Monitoring, which included a prescribed burn.

The Biodiversity study, located on the 900 acre preserve adjunct to the Wild Animal Park, is meant to monitor small mammals, reptiles and amphibians living in the preserve. A series of several herp arrays with buried buckets trap creatures at night and then are assessed by scientists and volunteers the next morning.

Three arrays radiate from the center bucket of herp array 9. The plastic fencing serves to drive the creatures towards the bucket as they look for a way around.

My fellow intern and I got to help with this assessment for two days and saw a few species of snake, pocket mice, kangaroo rats, and tons of lizards! It was very educational to be exposed to the different techniques of weighing the animals, marking the lizards, capture and rerelease.

This side blotch lizard was captured in one of the herp arrays

The Stephen’s Kangaroo Rat Study takes place an hour and half North of the Institute near Temecula, CA. The Applied Plant Ecology Division is working on assessing the grassland vegetation in the area for release of Stephen’s Kangaroo Rats (SKR) that will be released later in the fall. The plots are actually hexagons with various treatments for invasive including herbicide, mowing, sheep grazing, and fire.  Monitoring these plots was actually really fun because we had great weather and got to learn about 5 invasive grass species in one day. Along with assisting in habitat enrichment, control of the invasive grasses should limit the amount of fuels available for wildfires.

I am holding a species of Kangaroo Rat, which looks similar to the SKR targeted in the study.

Posing with our favorite field guide: Native Plants of San Diego County. Thank you James Lightner!

A great part of this placement is that not only do we get to work in gorgeous natural areas but also we are also very close to San Diego. The Marina is a great place for sunsets and sailboats.

Angelique Herman

San Diego Zoological Institute for Conservation Research

Escondido, CA

Well, I’ve officially finished my 4th week of work at the BLM Office in St. George, UT, and it’s been such a whirlwind since the day I began that I’ve had absolutely no BLOG TIME! Bummer. Also, with all the traveling, camping, and Grand Canyon time, I’ve had limited internet access. Such is the life of a field intern, I suppose.

So far I’ve had an extremely diverse range of experiences alongside my co-intern, Carley. Although we have only just began our main project for the summer — habitat surveys for the Mexican spotted owl (or MSO as we lovingly call it) — that has given us the time to learn other, equally important skills! Duh!

My first day on the job (in the field, that is), we worked out on the Virgin River doing fish surveys. Particularly, we were looking for native desert freshwater fish like the Virgin River chub, the flannelmouth sucker, and the extremely elusive woundfin minnow (which, sadly buy not surprisingly, we never saw). Mostly, however, we found netfull after netfull of red shiner, a highly invasive species clearly dominating the part of the River we sampled. They never got much bigger than a few inches long, but were a HUGE nuisance nonetheless.

This was my first real day out in the desert heat (hello, 105 °F), and I made the ignorant mistake of not bringing enough water for nine hours in the sun. Whatever you do, don’t do this. I’d say bring at least four liters for one long field day. Consequently, I went home with what I think must have been mild heat stroke — a migraine, the chills, and a nauseating feeling that just made me want to go straight to bed. So that’s what I did.

The two days that I participated in this work were long, difficult, and exciting. I learned all about working a fish seine and got to see some really unique locations along the Virgin in Nevada. In the Virgin River Gorge (a section of the River snuggled down between two towering cliff walls), we even saw bighorn sheep tracks!

The week after that, I was off to the Grand Canyon for the CLM workshop. Then last week (July 6 – July 10; yes, we worked on a Saturday!), we had the marvelous opportunity to live the way bat biologists live — nocturnally! And the bats were so CUTE! Seriously, though, I’ve always thought bats were sort of weird-looking in photographs. But in real life, they’re totally adorable. I mean, there was massive cooing occurring on my part. Although I didn’t get tho handle the bats ( 🙁 — no rabies shots), I got super up-close looks at them, and I even got to feel a mama bat’s pregnant belly while her biting teeth were held well out of harm’s way (“feel that marble? That’s the pup’s head!”). In addition, I held two birds that were accidentally caught in the pre-bat dusk period: a violet-green swallow and a yellow-bellied sapsucker. We also unintentionally caught a nighthawk — one of the coolest birds I’ve had the chance of seeing.

But, more importantly, while I participated we caught two rare female spotted bats. Super-cute and mild-mannered in hand, these bats have the tendency to capture the hearts of all onlookers. As cheesy as it sounds, it’s true. In the sky, however, they’re far from tender. They’re fierce hunters and make the loudest, most intense clicking sound as they pulse their echolocation in search of large moths. When we heard this unmistakable sound, all headlamps would be turned off and silence fell. We tried to look like strangely-shaped rocks so as not to frighten them away from our awaiting nets. They would fly so close our heads I could actually feel their wingbeats, and sometimes large, squirmy moths would fall right into my lap in an attempt to escape impending death.

The excitement of the Bat Blitz had to come to end. But for now, I await our next adventure!

Laurel Anne Mundy
Arizona Strip, AZ
Bureau of Land Management

The decision to move to Oregon felt huge when I made it. Lakeview, Oregon seemed a world a way from my home in Iowa. As a graduation neared, however, I realized that I was ready for an adventure. As I look back now, I know that I made the right decision.

I live in the government trailers on the grounds of the Interagency Fire Center in Lakeview, Oregon with two Hawaiian fire fighters, a bat biologist, and my crewmate Molly. Combined with the archeologists living in the trailer in front of us and the other BLM-ers living in the trailer behind us, we make quite an eclectic mix. I enjoy coming home to this bustling community. Someone is almost always available to make dinner with or just talk to.

I work and live with Molly Baughman, another intern from Indiana. Molly and I split our internship time between 40/60 between fire ecology and seed collection. So far, however, we have been working almost exclusively on fire ecology portion. We work in beautiful and very remote areas. The BLM Lakeview district covers about 3 million acres so our sites are often far away. We have worked at Beatty Butte for the past four weeks. Early in our internship, we drove the two and a half hours to our sites from the Lakeview BLM office daily. Lately, with our new and improved high desert plant identification skills we have begun camping in the field and working without our supervisor to maximize our time. As a bonus we wake up to the unique beauty and though provoking isolation of sage country. We seldom see anyone else all week when camping.

As we approach our sites we start searching for the fence posts that mark individual plots. Often the initial search for our plots results in minor frustration (although we have improved with practice.) It requires a bit of luck, binoculars, time and some creative (abet cautious) driving. On our first day working without our supervisor, we turned down the wrong road and spent half a day searching in vain for a plot before realizing our mistake. Since our first attempt, we feel more familiar with the topography and have learned the importance of following maps. On that occasion, Molly ingeniously found our way by measuring out miles with a gummy bear — saving us from having to call our supervisor in defeat.

After finding our sites from the road, we hike to them and set up our transects. The transects we construct look like giant measuring-tape forks. We string sixty-meter tapes across the sage at thirty-meter intervals. Then, we walk along these and census plants at three-meter intervals using a quadrate. Through these transects, we have learned a lot about high desert plant identification. It feels really good to look around and recognize everything or almost everything that we see.

So far, it has been a great summer.

Amy Hadow

Lakeview, Oregon

BLM

The first week of working at the BLM in Farmington, New Mexico with the Seeds of Success program was mostly spent doing research on the characteristics of our targeted species so we will be able to identify them in the field. We also got to spend a little time in the field and even made one collection of seeds.

The week after, I made my way to the Grand Canyon for training, which was an amazing experience full of wonderful sights and people!

Over the past week, Emily (the other intern) and I collected seeds from two more species with the aid of our mentor. We’ve also been visiting San Juan College’s herbarium to gather info about where our targeted species are located. Interning at the BLM has so far been a great new experience, and I look forward to what else more I can learn and do while I’m here.

Adjusting to New Mexico has been interesting, seeing as I am from New Hampshire and used to abundances of rain, trees, and other greenery.  I’ve found that the  people and the environment in Aztec (the town next to Farmington where I found a place to live) are great, and my roommate is fabulous, thankfully. Farmington is a bustling city where there are places to meet new people, and Durango, a place of activity and good food, is not a long drive away.

I went for a run the other day down a trail that goes along the fence line of the local strawberry fields.  People were out harvesting the berries, slowly walking down the rows of plants picking as they went.  As I watched, mentally savoring the taste of fresh ripe strawberries, the realization came to me that my job and the berry harvester’s job were quite similar, aside for a few minor differences.  The strawberry fields are neat organized homogeneous rows of plants that are planted at specific times of the year so their phenology runs in time with the climate of the area, at the time we call strawberry season.  The plants we collect seeds from are naturally established scattered throughout the ecosystem according to various seed dispersal methods.  The plants are required to comply with the forces of natural selection, or just darn luck, for the seed to become established, germinate, grow to maturity, flower, and produce seed.   Sometimes you have to do a bit of searching to find the next plant, luckily in the desert you just have to stand in one place and let your eyes do the wandering until they find the correct shape/color of the plant you’re collecting from.  The strawberry collectors get to collect large tasty fruits into their buckets, although I’m sure their work regulations don’t allow snacking on the produce while on the job, it must be delightful to think of all the possible uses the strawberry consumers may indulge in.  We don’t get to snack on the seeds we collect either, but we can think of the future uses of the seed; the SOS Seed Bank, various garden experiments, and restoration projects.  Our seeds aren’t always as easy to collect as the strawberries.  Some seeds are small and need to be picked one at a time, some are bunched together and can be tapped into a bucket, others have pappuses that threaten to blow away the moment you touch them, and some are prickly and require gloves.  Some collections are quick and it’s easy to get 10,000 seeds, others require multiple visits and additional hours to meet the quota.  As with the strawberries, our seeds can be subject to predation, leaving us to collect empty seed cases.

Ambrosia dumosa (burro-bush) seeds

Dendromecon rigida (bush poppy) seeds

Seeds from Encelia farinosa (brittlebush)

Harvesting food and materials has been an element of human survival for all of time.   Our modern society is largely disconnected with the act of harvesting, and when we do take part in the process it is usually in a garden style setting.  Participating in the SOS seed collections draws out the inherent, yet often submerged, connection between human and environment.

Sarah Brewster

Escondido, CA

San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research

Well, its another 100+ degree day here in St. George, but I think the vast majority of us CLMers know what a hot day in the desert is all about.

This past week I had the opportunity to participate in the Inter-agency Bat Blitz. Various biologists from multiple organizations like the US Forest Service, Arizona Game and Fish Department and Northern Arizona University gathered in Jacob Lake, Arizona for a wild week of bat catching. The goals for the bat blitz were to collect DNA material from Euderma maculatum (Spotted Bats) and attach radio transmitters to four female breeding Idionycteris  phyllotis (Allen’s Lappet-Browed Bat). Every day the group would have a 4 p.m. rendezvous, during which we would divide up into teams and set out to prepare our mist-netting sites. Most of the sites actually ended up being man-made watering holes maintained for livestock. Once the sun set, we would open up the nets and wait. In one night we could catch anywhere between 50 and 200 bats! The bats were retrieved from the net, and I got the opportunity to key out a lot of the species (thankfully I was WAY better at keying out bat species than I was at keying out plants). We caught a lot of different varieties from the family Myotis. My favorite bats were those commonly known as Hoary Bats, they are really furry and make this incredibly loud screeching noise when they’re upset. Super cool little guys. Also, I had never even seen bats up close before and I was really amazed to discover how tiny they are! Most of the species were around the length of my finger.
The most exciting moments of mist-netting happened when we heard “audibles”. The two particular species we were trying to collect samples from and attach radio transmitters to both happen to echolocate at frequencies audible to human ears. Both of these species are also particularly sensitive to light and sound. Thus, at the first sound of a chirp, someone would shout “audible”, and everyone’s headlamps would click off. We would all sit perfectly still and wait. You could hear the bats hunting, and feel the air from their wing beats when they whooshed past your head. Most of the time the bats were too smart for us, bats can remember events over long periods of time, and a lot of them were well aware of our presence and wise to our tricks. The last night I was there my group did manage to catch a spotted bat. It was great to finally get a look at the creature I had spent so much time waiting quietly for.
Doing bat work obviously involved being up at night. Our typical work day would start around 4 p.m. and finish around 2 a.m. Being an early morning person, this was a somewhat unpleasent transition. But it was tottally worth it because I got the opportunity to do something new and exciting… and I discovered (not surprisingly) that bats are fascinating creatures, I would be thrilled to get to work with them in the future.

For those of you who haven’t been there, Jacob Lake, AZ is a beautiful place. I was quite disappointed to discover that the “lake” is really more of a sad little pond, but there is an amazing expanse of Ponderosa Pine forest there, and most of the area is around 8,000 feet in elevation, making it a cool refuge from the roasting hot desert sun. Most if not all of the area there is forest service land, so the public can camp anywhere they would like. I would definitely recommend it as an ideal weekend getaway.