The journey begins. I, Emily Capelin, am finishing my third week in Anchorage, Alaska working with the BLM as well as the Alaska Natural Heritage Center through the University of Alaska Anchorage. Our mission is collecting seeds for restoration of lands damaged by fire, mines, and oil and gas pipeline construction. These past three weeks have been spent in preparation for the grand adventures to come. We’ve been in the office applying for collection permits and calling other regional BLM offices about using their research facilities. We’re planning trips all over the state for seed collection. And, best of all, we’ve been traipsing through the wilds of Alaska scouting around in plant communities, looking at progress of seeds and locations of certain plant species whose seeds we want to collect later.

My mentor Mike Duffy, on the left, and botanists from the Plant Materials Center in Alaska. We're on top of The Butte in the Matanuska River Valley, looking for a rare Pasqueflower.

Mike Duffy and a botanist friend looking for plants in the Matanuska Valley. Pioneer Peak looms in the background. We found lots of Chamerion angustifolium, Cerastium, Artemisia frigida, and Oxytropis.

We have made our first seed collection this week, gathering some 9 thousand seeds of Viola adunca, a beautiful deep purple violet. Exciting to have and hold something solid! I’ve been lucky, to spend the long days of the Alaskan summer (right now, we have about 19 hours of daylight!) amongst flowers and vast landscapes. My famed Botanist mentor Mike Duffy and I have been hiking along a glacial river bar looking for a rare species of native Clematis. We’ve walked through immense fields of Lupinus nootkatensis (Nootka Lupine) beneath the high peaks of the Chugach Mountains, and climbed a small mountain in search of Artemisia frigida and an elusive Pasqueflower. And I’ve seen Brown Bears and a river otter! All for the mighty purpose of establishing seed banks that provide anyone with the means of revegatating damaged lands with native seeds. A worthy goal. I am honored and elated to be a part of the project.

Alaska's Wild Rose species, Rosa nutkana

We had the first rains of the “monsoon season” last week! I haven’t seen rain in two months so it was a very pleasant sight! The rain has brought an abundance of reptiles. Hopefully I will get to see a Gila Monster before the summer is over!

My knowledge of Arizona plants is expanding! I recognize several more plants than I did a month ago and I’m even starting to remember their Latin names! The past few weeks we have been scouting for Sporobolus airoides, Sporobolus wrightii, Muhlenbergia porteri, Bouteloua eriopoda, and Bouteloua gracilis. Hopefully with more rain things will start greening up and we will have an awesome collecting season.

We have also been working in the herbarium at the BLM office. The plants specimens are gorgeous! I’m still trying to figure out how to press a cactus without getting a million spines in my fingers! I guess it just takes practice!

The rains are here in the desert which is a welcome sight for someone who is from the Midwest. You can tell when it is going to rain because the creosote bushes begin to smell good. Hopefully with the rain the grasses that are on our target list will begin to grow, and we might actually get to collect seeds. But for now we have been scouting out different areas such as Araviapa Canyon, Turkey Creek, Bonitia Creek, and Sandraw to name a few. Being here is a great opportunity to learn new plant species, and make some new friends. The transition from riparian areas to desert is abrupt to say the least, especially in the canyons. But if you go higher up in elevation it should come as no surprise that the plant communities change. Looking out across the landscape one can see the different patches of plant communities.

All we can do for now is just wait for more rain, because with rain comes seeds. But there are some amazing plant communities and species out here. To name a few: Schott’s yucca, Parry’s Agave, Devils claw and many others. I can’t imagine what it was like for the first people to do plant inventories out here, but I hope that they were just as awe inspired as I am now.

My appreciation for the Great Basin deepens every day. Everything I do, anything form treating weeds to surveying for sensitive plant species, helps me to understand the landscape and how everything fits together. At the same time, the work has allowed me to spend extensive amounts of time in places I might have just driven by otherwise, places that might not have any dramatic features to draw in tourists but are still beautiful in their own right. For example, I wouldn’t recommend the Constantia Fire burn area as a must-see for people visiting the area, but I really enjoyed being out there in the foothills of the Sierras.

Red Rock Canyon, one of our survey sites

Favorite new-to-me plants:

Brown’s peony (Paeonia brownii) with its weird, ground-facing, meaty-looking flowers that sprout green, surprisingly-large, tusk-like pods when in fruit.

Clustered broomrape (Orobanche fasciculata): fully parasitic, non-photosynthetic plants that don’t really even have leaves. The entire plant is either yellow or pink. We dug one up and were able to see where it was growing directly out of a sagebrush root–an unexpectedly small root for how much plant mass was coming up.

The parasitic plant known as clustered broomrape

What a whirlwind these past weeks have been! After a brief week working with my mentor in the BLM , I was off to the Midwest to attend the CLM training workshop at the Chicago Botanic Garden.  Arriving in the Windy City, I was one of fifty interns who traveled from their positions out west to attend the weeklong workshop.

I’d like to end with a quote that began our training:

“Always we hope someone else has the answer. Some other place will be better, it will all turn out. This is it. No one else has the answer. No place will be better, and it has already turned out.” -Lao-tzo

It’s time for new adventures in new places. Next Tuesday is my last day in the office, so I am spending this week wrapping up my curation projects and some conservation assessments here at the Portland BLM/FS office. I’ve been fortunate to have two extensions on my CLM internship, and I’ve had quite the range of projects and experiences. Thanks to Krissa and Marian and my amazing mentor for all your help and support!

Hope everyone is enjoying their fieldwork this season.  I have my fingers crossed that I will be in the field again soon!

My mentor, Ryan O’Dell and I have been busy mapping out potential habitat for threatened San Benito evening primrose Camissonia benitensis (CABE). CABE is listed as a rare serpentine endemic meaning it only grows on serpentine soil. In 2010 three new habitat types were discovered outside of its known habitat (serpentine stream terraces) including serpentine geologic transition zones, serpentine rock outcrops, and shale outcrops. Finding CABE populations on shale rock outcrops was a bit of a surprise to me because its soil chemistry is so different from serpentine soil.  CABE does not do well agaisnt competitors and the adverse soil conditions found in these habitats greatly reduce competition from other plant species.

Camissonia benitensis

Serpentine alluvial stream terrace

Continue reading →

My first paycheck of the CLM Internship just arrived, and I still find myself somewhat in awe of the fact that I’m actually being paid to work outside in such a beautiful area. Three weeks ago I moved to Denver, CO to begin working with the Colorado State Botany Team to monitor rare plants and collect seeds for the SOS program. Unlike many of the other interns, I’m originally from the West (Idaho, to be precise), so the ecosystem here is not completely unfamiliar. Neither are the mountains, though the Colorado 14ers certainly do make me reconsider scale. Going to school in Vermont I became used to deriding the mountains there as hills, but living here is making me wonder whether my beloved Idaho mountains are also better described as hills. I’ve decided that because they’re part of the Rockies they still count as mountains, but this was only the first of my assumptions that I had to rethink after arriving.

Coming into my internship I wasn’t sure what to expect, either from the work or from the BLM as an organization. I suspected that I would be working with the ESA, and was worried because I didn’t know how I felt about protecting plants at the expense of recreation or other land use. Though I knew that the government tends to be a conservative entity, somehow I’d gotten it into my head that I would be playing the role of an environmental organization, defending rare plants at all costs. While plant defense will likely be a part of my job, I’ve been surprised and impressed at how aware everyone here is about all of the issues involved in responsible land management. On my tour of the office the first day, a word I heard over and over again was “balance.” Everyone recognizes that the BLM is an organization that is committed to multi-use land management. Not only do we have to protect the plants, but we also must allow ranchers to graze their cattle and outdoor enthusiasts to drive their ATVs. These goals are not always compatible, and it is when they conflict that we must be able to find the balance between them.

So far, our team has been spending a lot of time gathering data that will allow more informed management decisions to be made. My first week we traveled to the other side of the Continental Divide to monitor Penstemon harringtonii, a wildflower that is only found in the greater Vail Valley region of Colorado. This species has been listed as a sensitive species by the USFS and the BLM, and has been given G3/S3 status. However, very little quantitative data exists regarding the size and density of various populations, and so it has been impossible to say whether the populations are steady, declining, or even increasing. We worked with Carla, an ecologist from a local field office, to set up plots and determine densities. She’s particularly interested in learning more about P. harringtonii because she suspects that there are far more individuals than has previously been estimated. If this is really the case, it may be possible to lower the status of this species to G4/S4 and/or remove it from the BLM sensitive species list, thereby allowing more leeway in future management decisions.

First Field Site

P. Harringtonii

Working towards less protection for a species was certainly not something I expected to be doing during this job, but the next week I found myself in a very similar circumstance. We traveled to the southwestern portion of the state to help a different field office monitor Sclerocactus glaucus, a small endemic cactus listed under the ESA. Again, there was very little quantitative data, and again the local office was hoping to prove that it was doing better than had been claimed. In this case, the known range of the cactus happened to coincide with areas that contained a number of grazing allotments. Environmental groups had seized upon this information to claim that cattle were trampling the cactus and should be excluded. However, we wanted to find out for ourselves whether this was the case. We set up several plots in areas of different grazing intensity and sampled and marked individual cacti within the plots. While this study will require multiple years of data to determine how the populations are doing over time, we saw almost no evidence of trampled cacti. Once again, real quantitative data will give a better idea of how to balance different management objectives on a single piece of land.

Sclerocactus Field Site

S. glaucus

Collared Lizard

I’m looking forward to seeing how my internship continues to grow, and to learning more about how the BLM manages its many millions of acres of land. I am now fairly certain that I won’t be stepping in front of any bulldozers, and am becoming confident that management decisions are made based on data, rather than on political (be they liberal or conservative) agendas. And, now that I’ve accepted that the Idaho mountains are smaller but still noteworthy, I feel free to enjoy the beautiful scenery here to my heart’s content.

Wow, time has flown by. Only a few weeks ago I was still in college, I didn’t have a job, I knew nothing about sagebrush or junipers and I certainly had no idea where Alturas, California was located. I grew up in South Florida where both buildings and people are abundant. I attended college in Maine (Unity College) and fell in love with the state, the forests and the people. After graduating I really didn’t want to leave the beauty that is Maine, but like many others I understood that to get experience you have to be willing to go where the jobs are. This job just happened to be in Northern California.

After a 10 day cross country extravaganza, I finally rolled into Alturas.  A bigger town than I went to college, but far from a metropolis. At the only blinking red light I veered left and found my way to a glorified warehouse, also known as the Alturas BLM field office. Mike Dolan, my mentor, then proceeded to introduce me to everyone in the office. Talk about overwhelming! I think one name stuck with me that day. I moved into a fire barracks about 20 miles south of town in an even smaller town called Likely where cows outnumber humans at least 3-1. My first few days continued that overwhelmed feeling. I’ll be honest, I was terribly homesick for trees and greenery and the Sage Steepe ecosystem did not impress me much. Since it rained/snowed for my first and second week I didn’t have much opportunity to explore. Instead, I spent hours staring at Herbarium vouchers trying to learn the native fauna. After my first month in Alturas my views and attitude towards the area has done a complete 180. While from afar all you can see is acres of sage and juniper, when you actually stop and look down there are tons of tiny flowering plants and patches of diverse grasses and bugs. Alturas is in a valley and to either side are mountains with towering Ponderosa and Jeffrey pine trees. Just south of town is the Modoc Wildlife Refuge which is home to hundreds of birds. Only an hour and a half north there is Lava Beds National Monument where you can see ancient lava flows. Driving two hours to the west there is Lassen National Park – another completely different ecosystem! In my tiny section of California life abounds!

Ancient lava flow at Lava Beds National Monument!

This past week about 50 other interns and I attended the CLM internship conference in Glencoe, IL. Here we participated in mapping and seed collection demonstrations. The setting for all of the lectures and demos was the Chicago Botanic Garden – a truly beautiful location. After listening to the Seeds of Success lecture I feel excited about doing seed collections as well as proud to be part of such a worthwhile program.

Like others have said before me, “I can’t believe I get paid to do this!”

Cayce Salvino

BLM – Alturas

Just one example of the beautiful tiny flowers that are scattered throughout the Sage Steepe Ecosystem.

This is the llama I saw my first day out in the field riding with the BLM Ranger. It was just wandering around in the sage.

4 am and its hot, hot already
sun peeks up over henderson suburbs
sleepy neighbors with daschunds in tow
NPR and coffee on the long drive
north of vegas traffic chaos
to the peace of the desert,
red tinged in early morning light

Pile out of the car, yawning, rubbing sunscreen
lace boots, don hats
treck off, avoid cactus, plow through creosote
find plots, get data
Each task memorized through months of repetition
laughing easy lunch under Joshua Tree
Sweet shady relief

End of day, car in sight
out of water
throats parched and Bromus socks
Lazy return
Flurry of last minute tasks
Organize data
Early bedtime

Nora Talkington

Field partner Leslie Parker poses with a Joshua Tree and one of the many balloon bunches which float their way hundreds of miles from Vegas