My summer here in Arizona has been amazing, and will continue although the rains have finally come.  While we have not been able to collect any seeds yet, it seems promising in the next couple of weeks.

No words or pictures can do justice to the places that I have seen. The plants out here are amazing now that they are starting to bloom. My plant list has almost doubled in the past couple of weeks, and the habitat range around the state is truly remarkable.  I’m so lucky and fortunate to have gotten this internship, and the opportunity to learn so much more. The desert storms are fun to watch, just watch out for lightning. 🙂

The end of the 2010 seed year is finally within reach here at the Bend Seed Extractory, and it’s bringing a mixture of excitement and relief.  2010 was the biggest seed year on record at the BSE, more than doubling the previous record in 2009.  It’s been a daunting task and seeing the remaining seed lots dwindle down to a manageable number is a welcome sight indeed.  Everyone here keeps looking at the latest figures and trying to figure when we’ll be done for good.  This is especially true because the deliveries for the 2011 seed year are starting to pour in at a pretty good clip and we’d all like to get 2010 out of the way and start focusing on the new arrivals.

I can’t believe that I’ve been here over a year and my time as a CLM intern is almost up.  The internship has squeaked open some doors for me that could prove very rewarding if everything works out.  Not the least of these is possible future employment with the Forest Service here in Bend, which would be awesome!

This brings up an important point:  Bend is hands down the most fun place I’ve been yet.  From the beautiful surroundings, to the people, to the lifestyle, climbing, biking, hiking, lakes, rivers, mountains, desert, forests and on and on and on…   I’m in the best shape of my life and it’s all because there’s so much fun stuff to do around here.  This is THE LIFE, and I hope I can figure out a way to stick around here for a while!

My apologies to everyone east of the Rockies suffering through droughts and heat waves, because apparently every drop of moisture in the country is being funneled directly into western Colorado. I’m supposedly in the desert, yet hardly a day has gone by that we haven’t seen rain in the last month. We even got caught in a hailstorm last week, which decided not to set in until we were good and far from the truck.

In between dodging hailstones, I’ve been spending the last month working on rangeland health assessment in and around Unaweep Canyon, near the town of Gateway by the Colorado-Utah border. Life has changed quite a bit since I’ve started working down here, since we’re now camped out in trailers four days a week for the next two months. It’s a really, really cool place, especially for geology geeks, because the canyon cuts down into Precambrian rock. It’s also highly unique because there’s a divide that causes water to flow out of opposite ends. This is by far the coolest place that I have worked in so far. The last two weeks we’ve worked our way out of the canyon bottom and gotten up on top of the surrounding mesas, which have offered some really incredible views. They’re also, shall I say, exciting places to work during a thunderstorm.

See you all next month, if I haven’t been struck by lightning!

Internal conflict resolution has been my new focus at work. It’s frustrating, and I would much rather not be dealing with it, but in a way I think it’s an important thing for me to work on.

When I came out here it was with the goal of exploring as much as possible. I took that to heart, both at work and outside of work. At work, we were performing a diversity of activities in the field, ranging from vegetation surveys of sage grouse habitat to nighttime Mexican spotted owl surveys. My brother had even sent me an Australian-style oilskin cowboy hat, saying that it was the only thing missing from the photos of me out here.

Outside of work I was trying hard to experience the landscape intimately. I was approaching mountain biking with the notion that I could go as far as I wanted so that I could see everything the Cedar City area had to offer. If I saw a trail, I’d go until I lost it, then turn around. Running was the same; I always looked at trail running as the most efficient way for me to connect to a new area. I found trails and disregarded time limits, exhausting myself on mountains as I climbed thousands of feet in heat or, in one case, rain and hail! It was fantastic.

Then the conflict arose. I started getting pain in a familiar place, where I’d hurt myself before, and it was painful just getting up in the morning. I found myself stiff and struggling to work in the field, finally raising the white flag and resigning myself to dreaded office work. Desperate to make myself useful, I powered through the mountain of data that had accumulated while we were having fun out in the field and even tying up loose ends from previous years’ data. This didn’t take as long as I thought, so I started to turn to my mentor for extra tasks, and she in turn sought work for me among other colleagues in the office. I got a 3-day assignment to survey the cattle on allotments toward the Nevada border (via 4×4, of course…walking was still painful). When I finished that, I gained the mission of engraving BLM property (this was harder to organize than I thought, and it’s ongoing…I occasionally find a rusty shovel, piece of rebar, or permanent marker that people jokingly leave on my desk).

I’ve been dealing with this setback and my physical antsy-ness by trying to get as much as possible from the situation and prepare myself for when I get back in the field. I’ve been poring over every piece of literature on sage grouse, their habitat, and their restoration. When I finished with that, I read about wilderness ethics, different methods for monitoring terrestrial birds, wildlife management techniques, and other miscellaneous literature (like the wilderness ranger handbook, which must be really old judging by the advice it gives). While it’s hard to hear from my co-workers about the day’s trials and tribulations in the field, I find comfort in my familiarity with the background info that, I hope, will only make me more effective when I finally get back outdoors. This is one of those things that I just need to learn to deal with, and the difficulty of it makes it that much better for me. And, of course, I get by with a little help from my friends!

Is it August already? Time is flying by before my eyes in that almost two months have already whizzed by out of my five month internship in Denver, Colorado and I feel like I’ve still only just begun. Our tasks have now altered from performing monitoring or seed collecting in blocks of a week, to being more intermixed together throughout a week. This variety doesn’t help slow down time, but makes this job very enjoyable and fun.

After seed scouting six sites for six days over a four week period (the two middle weeks vacant of Seeds of Success), we finally found a site with enough individuals and sufficient amount of fruits with plenty of seeds to reach at least our 10,000 seed quota from only 20% of the population and waited just the right amount of time for the fruits to ripen for healthy seeds, but not too late that they would all be dispersed and gone. Our first collection of this season was from Scutellaria brittonii, a skullcap group within the mint family, which was not an easy task, especially for mine and Sama’s first seed collection extravaganza!

Harvesting the fruit of Scutellaria Brittonii

This mint is only about 3 to 6 inches tall, grows in small scattered clumps on talus slopes of mountain sides in open pockets, and without their little lavender skull-looking flowers, they are very easy to miss. We did a lot of scrambling across steep slopes looking and harvesting Britton’s Skullcap fruits just off the path, or sometimes a ways down or up from the path. Another issue was that not all the fruits ripen at the same time. So, because of their spread-out distribution and many of the fruits not being ripe, it took us more than one day to collect an ample amount of seed for this program. Our first day, many of the fruits were not ripe enough, and a small fraction of the seeds were ready to be collected. Our second trip was quite the opposite with most of the fruits already gone and their tiny brown seeds dispersed. Our third try was to top off our collection to guarantee that we collected enough.

Seeds of Britton's Skullcap

Besides collecting seeds, we also have to collect data about the plant and the site we are collecting from. This includes the date(s) of this species’ collection, the eco-region, location, land formation, habitat, associated plants, estimated area of the collection, the population, and the number of plants sampled, average number of fruits per individual, and average seeds per fruit, slope, aspect, soil texture, soil color (from a chart), etc. After the collection is made and the data collected, the data is typed and printed onto a form and packaged with the seeds, and then shipped off to Bends, Oregon to be cleaned, analyzed, and determined if there are enough viable seeds for research and storage.

Fruit of Clematis hirsutissima

Thankfully, our second collection was on Clematis hirsutissima, a buttercup species that only took one day to collect, then shipped off the next day. Our third is currently in progress, collecting fleshy fruits of Rhus trilobata, Skunkbush Sumac, that will take at least one to two more trips to get more than 10,000 seeds. Each bush, when fruiting, has between 50 to 1,000 fruits, but each fruit only has one seed, which is why it will take us a while. Our first attempt barely gave us 5,000 seeds, but not all are viable and ripe, so we are planning on two more trips to guarantee our “Success” since not every year is so bountiful with this shrub. This fruit is also fun to collect because the fruits are very sticky, so we wear latex gloves to keep our hands clean, but also because it is in the same family as poison ivy and has been known to cause skin irritation for some people.

Saw a Hairstreak butterfly species while seed scouting one day 🙂

This is Jeffrey Flory from the Colorado State Office, signing off of the CLM blog.

I still am in awe of where I am, and how my summer has come to be with my internship. I find myself in vast meadows of lupine, and then crouching beside a chocolate lily, or climbing rocky mountainsides in search of Crepis elegans (elegant hawksbeard–gotta love the name), wading on edges of alpine lakes identifying Carex species, and then identifying the entire plant community of a black spruce forest.

And most recently I found myself out in the far reaches of Alaska’s North Slope! I had the incredible opportunity of being a research assistant for two weeks on a project in the BLM’s National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A) monitoring the effects of oil exploration on the tundra. Such a beautiful and strange world up there! The Coastal Plain (aka North Slope) consists of hundreds of lakes and intricately meandering streams across a completely flat landscape, about 1/3 water from melting permafrost and 2/3 land.

Coastal Plain, land of lakes

On the North Slope, I lived in the remote BLM field camp of Inigok, 30 miles south of the Beaufort Sea of the Arctic Ocean. The camp was accessible by air only and lay 100s of miles from any other major “civilization.” Our camp consisted of canvas cook tent, pantry tent, and a “lounge” with wireless. My camp-mates were a crew of 12 or so biologists and other researchers from all over the country doing projects on fish, botany, caribou, and climate change in the arctic.

BLM field camp Inigok, North Slope

For our research, we flew around in a helicopter collecting a variety of data from 88 sites across the tundra. The project was in its 13th year monitoring the effects of seismic exploration for oil and ice roads on tundra flora. We looked at impact to tussocks (Eriophorum vaginatum), riparian areas, and other tundra communities. We visually noted rate of plant recovery from ground and air, trying to see how long recovery is for flora after being driven over in multiple ton vehicles in the winter. Depending on what substrate or ecosystem was effected, full plant recovery has been anywhere from 2 years to still not recovered today. Such a beautiful, fragile ecosystem up there, I feel lucky to have participated in the quest for understanding Arctic ecosystems!

My work team: our helicopter pilot on the left, then botanist/wildlife biologist Dave, and me on the right

Polygonum bistorta

Pyrola

Tussock cottongrass--Eriophorum vaginatum

Alaska state flower, the forget-me-not

Such an adventure! I’ve learned so much up here. I can name all the tundra plants by common name and Latin. I ate a puff ball mushroom fresh off the tundra, saw a few grizzly bears running from our helicopter and saw a rare herd of musk ox. I got to see a herd of five thousand caribou swimming across a lake, and touched the permafrost–the hard and frozen ice under all this land. And I learned to play cribbage!

I feel privileged to have been able to work at so many great locations for this internship. One of my favorites is Sand Mountain, a 600-foot high, 2 mile long sand dune in west-central Nevada that is a glaring anomaly in what is otherwise typical basin and range landscape. ATVs are the most time-effective way to travel around in dunes, and we have used them in our efforts to plant buckwheat for a rare butterfly, survey for rare plants, and collect native seed. Wildlife we have seen includes horny toads, which partially bury themselves in the sand to avoid being seen, scorpions that glow under a black light, and a kangaroo rat that was so curious and habituated that it came into our camp and dug a little burrow directly under a co-intern’s rear end. This same critter later ran up another intern’s pant leg later on, followed by a stay under my legs.

We camped on the east side of the dune area during our most recent visit, and in the adjacent valley, the military does electronic warfare, which is a type of training, so we would see flashes of light and flame in the distance, adding another odd dimension to an already unusual area.

Next week, we will be heading to a completely different landscape, that of the tufa towers of Mono Lake. In addition to collecting seed near the lake, we will be visiting Bodie State Historical Park to gain new perspectives on resource management issues, and we will be helping with botanical education at a youth camp. I’m really looking forward to it!

Well I’ve been here for approximately 4 months now, and I’m really starting to love the West. This internship is giving me a good feel for the native plants out here, as well as the non-native. The past few weeks we have been doing a lot of seed collection for the Seeds of Success program. This is sometimes harder than it seems, because you need to be in the right place at the right time to collect the seeds. Also, I have been herbiciding the invasive whitetop, Lepidium draba, for the past few weeks. Whitetop is definitely a problem species out here because of its ease of growing in poor conditions as well as speed of growth. We initially went in to cut down the white top to the roots, which hurts the plants. After a few weeks we go back and spray with the herbicide to hit it again, in hopes of eradication. The next few weeks we will be doing some intense fire-rehab monitoring so I hope to learn a lot in this time.

Amber Kowal

Two additional populations of blowout penstemon were found in central Wyoming, by a few hardworking and dedicated CBG interns.  Yep, I happen to be one of those interns.

For me, it all started on a cold, wet July morning in Rawlins, WY.  I was to meet two other people at the old “town” of Ferris.  Down a winding two-track road I drove, with some bluegrass on the radio and the Ferris Mountains guiding my way.  I finally met up with my group after a few miles and got out of the government rig to talk about our strategy for surveying the surrounding sand dunes for occupied blowout penstemon habitat.  After some discussion it was decided that I would trek around with Emma, a CBG intern based out of Laramie, WY.  Emma has spent much time looking at aerial photos of Aeolian (wind-derived) sand deposits in the state, with the goal of mapping all potential habitat for blowout penstemon in the state.

After stuffing some rain gear, food and water into our packs, Emma and I headed towards the sand dunes that are scattered across the valley south of the Ferris Mountains.  With the storm clouds building above us we made a pact to head back to the trucks if the rain became a nuisance.  I had been out with Emma before scouting for blowout penstemon and had no luck, so I was unprepared to almost step directly on a plant less than 1 mile from where I left my truck.  It was at this time that rain drops began to fall.  After a high-five, we got out our pencils and paper, threw on our rain gear, and started to systematically survey the sand dune.  Within 10 minutes we were soaked, and had only found a few additional plants.  We discussed our pact about quitting once the rain became a nuisance, which it had become, but decided to keep on scouting for additional plants.  After a few hours, we were smeared with sand, our fingers were turning blue, BUT we had found over 80 blowout penstemon plants that have never been documented before in the area.  As we made our way back, the clouds began to break and by the time we arrived back to our trucks the sun was fully out.   We ate a late lunch, with our bare feet basking in the sun and our boots and socks strewn across the hood of the trucks to dry out.  It was a good day.

Beyond surveying, still working on updating the statewide programmatic biological assessment for blowout penstemon in WY and preparing for a meeting with the USFWS next week….

Surveying for blowout penstemon in the sand dunes of central Wyoming.

"Town" of Ferris, WY.