It’s been a while since my last post, but there has been no shortage of exciting work out in northwestern California. Instead of try to cover everything I’ll focus on a recent adventure of note. Last week I hiked the Lost Coast Trail with the fisheries biologist, his primary focus installing annual temperature gauges in creeks running down from their headwaters in the coastal King Range to the Pacific, and my task, map and treat invasive weed infestations. Mostly this resulted in as much manual removal of iceplant, foxglove, and a few others from the steep sandy cliffs along the coast. It was an amazing opportunity to monitor an area otherwise inaccessible except by foot. Though only a 24 mile hike split into four days, we were lugging heavy loads and hiking mostly on soft sand while dealing with impassable segments during high tides, and coping with the frustration of not being able to reach some of the crafty invasives thriving on inaccessible sandstone faces.

It was nice to have an opportunity to get to know a section of BLM land that few members of the office regularly monitor, and my hiking partner and I enjoyed the relaxed nature of spending long days in the field without the pressure to drive back to the office a few hours away each evening. The scenery was unmatched with steep mountains rising directly from the ocean to upwards of 4000 feet in less than three miles. This was a trip I will not soon forget, with memorable sunsets and plenty of valuable exploration. The only proper way to conduct landscape management is not see the ecology firsthand.

With the sun scorching the plants, seeds are  ready for collecting!

I haven’t had much time in the lab lately because we are constantly driving out to our field sites to collect seeds from our target plants. At times we get disappointed when we arrive at our site because the seeds are almost ready, meaning we have to leave the site empty-handed, but we always plan to go back to the site a week or so later hoping the seeds will be ready by then. Usually the seeds are and we can collect on our second trip out. Although on our second trip out we may run into other problems, such as no more seeds being left on the plant because of high winds or grazing from animals.

For example, at out McCain Valley site, we had two Lupinus species we were very eager to collect. When we went out one week hoping the pods would be ready to collect, they weren’t ready. So we estimated they’d be ready in about two weeks. Well, when the beginning of the second week came around, we decided to head out and check. When we arrived we were sadly disappointed, apparently Lupine’s are cream of the crop! Who would have thought? 😀 Of course the tasty pods had been munched on and we were unable to collect the seeds to make a complete seed lot. Aside from a few seeds that were still left in some pods, we decided to leave those for nature and marked Lupinus concinnus and Lupinus excubitus off our list. Laurie will keep an eye out for these two species next year when she monitors McCain Valley.

Lupinus excubitus - McCain Valley

Landscape for Lupinus excubitus - McCain Valley

The past couple weeks have been dominated by learning the art of radio telemetry and tracking sage grouse through the hills. I have been helping a graduate student with her research on their movements and habitat use patterns. The grouse is not a federally listed endangered species here and a lot of effort is going into better understanding and hopefully building their populations so it stays that way.

They are funny birds; I love to see their snaky little heads and necks bobbing just above the level of the sage brush before you startle them. Tracking them with the telemetry equipment is like a treasure hunt or a child’s game of hot and cold. As the beeping signal gets stronger and louder you’re are ‘getting warmer’. When you do finally find the bird and it flushes, it is ultra rewarding. They fly up in a great rush and fuss of feathers, often leaving a small rain of droppings as a parting gift. The telemetry can be very tricky as the signal bounces of hills and funnels through drainages. Often we thought, “Oh, the bird is just over this ridge!” only to find it was hanging out (or loafing in grouse-speak) two valleys over.

Another part of the research is doing vegetation transects where we find birds, estimating plant cover mostly. This is less exciting but it’s still great to be outdoors and in the field. I often find myself wishing I was in a kid’s public television show called Cyberchase. In this show (designed to teach math and problem solving), these kids go into a Cyberland that is essentially a computer. When they are faced challenge to solve, they can just use these little remotes to project say a perfect square on the landscape or equally divide a piece of wood or make all the plants of a certain species glow green. Doesn’t this sound like it would be handy for field work? No dragging around tapes or pvc pipe Daubenmire squares. Alas, my fieldwork is in Utah, not Cyberland.

Other than sage grouse, this past week I got to take a look at some wild horses removed from a piece of private land. Our office wild horse guy gave some startling stats about the costs of managing the wild horses herds in Utah. To keep the horses and the rangelands healthy, thousands of horses have to be removed yearly. Used to be a large proportion were adopted, but with the economy down adoptions are way down as well and the BLM has to pick up the tab for maintaining the left over horses. It’s a puzzle. One interesting solution is a pairing with a prison here where the inmates help with the care and breaking of the horses. I had heard of horse therapy for troubled youth and people with disabilities but prisoners was a new and interesting idea.

That’s bout it round here, should be tracking more grouse next week. Maybe will pin down the one elusive female with a brood whose been hiding out in  a remote wash…

Greetings from the Chicago Botanic Garden!

Although I’m interning at the California Plant Materials Center in Lockeford, California (CAMPC), I have spent the past week at the Garden for a training conference along with many of the other CLM interns.  The conference has been intense but enjoyable, with sessions on Western flora, monitoring techniques, and training for the Seeds of Success (SOS) program.  The week has been an opportunity to not only learn and practice some of the skills necessary for our jobs but also to meet and network with the other interns and ask questions of the instructors.

The conference has helped to emphasize the importance of the work that my fellow intern and I will be doing over the next few months.  We will be collecting seeds for the SOS program and have already done two scouting trips to Red Hills in Tuolumne County as well as Walker Ridge in Lake County.  We make up part of a large team of collectors spread out mostly across the Western United States tasked with collecting native plant material than is stored and can ultimately be made available and used for restoration or rehabilitation purposes.  Seed collection is only the first step in this process, and I am lucky to be stationed at the CAMPC, which is involved in developing and growing native plant populations on their facility.  This work represents some of the other steps that must be taken before seeds collected through SOS can actually be utilized.  I’ve only been working for a few weeks, so I’m looking forward to learning more about the real-life complexities of this process and more about the work that goes on at the Plant Materials Center.

Hi all!

Just finished up my third month here in the Bakersfield Field Office with the Bureau of Land Management, and boy is it getting hot!!  Silly humans, making cities in the desert.. anyway, this last month has been a little trying, as we are having to be patient and wait for the few accessions of seeds we’ve targeted become ripe.  It has been an especially dry year here and so my co-worker and I have only gotten about 15 collections in these last few months.  Better than nothing for sure, but in a good year, we would have come away with a lot more.  Oh well, ya do whatcha can.  Most of what we’ve been doing though, has been Seeds of Success work.  We also out out on RHA’s (rangeland health assessments) and travel to sites for maintenance tasks like fence repair and invasive species removal, but a lot of our our summer has been traveling between sites with our fingers crossed that we’ve come at just the perfect time to collecte seed.  Recently, we were back up in the San Joaquin River Gorge and managed to collect four different species on our overnight trip – Brodiaea elegans (Harvest Brodiaea), Castilleja attenuata (attenuate Indian paintbrush), Collinsia heterophylla (purple Chinese houses) and Phacelia egena (rock Phacelia or Kaweah River Phacelia).

I also went to Lamont Meadows recently, on the Back Country Byway, where I saw my very first Western diamondback rattlesnake.  I also saw some great, showy plants which have been lacking down in the dry, sunny valley.  I saw some western columbine (Aquilegia formosa), a sweet penstemon (I believe it’s Penstemon grinnellii, not sure of the ssp.), the lovely indian paintbrush (Castilleja sp.) and a beautiful native thistle (Cirsium occidentale, did not key to ssp.).  We were at 5600 feet, which availed itself to   flowers still in bloom for me to ogle over!

Castilleja sp.

Aquilegia formosa

Western diamondback rattle snake

Penstemon grinnellii

Cirsium occidentale

Digging up the invasive bull thistle, Cirsium vulgare

Yep, we got a flat! 🙂

I’ve yet to experience all the reaches of our field office, as I haven’t been up into the Sierra foothills or over to the coast yet, but our mentor already had a lot on his plate before we came along, so it’s understandable that he doesn’t have all the time in the world to show us around our area.  There’s a small chance though that I’ll get over the coast, to Point Sal and up to Case Mountain in the Sierras before I leave, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed!  The weather has been showing its muscle as it was in the low 100’s for three or four days straight, recently.  I am really scared of this hot weather! lol  I just fill up my camel back and bring some extra bottles of water and hope for the best!  We are in the middle of a high 80’s stint right now though, so I am just stoked about that!  I love seeing how my temperature baseline changes depending on where I live.. a couple months ago it was only like 75 out and I had goosebumps! lol

I hope everyone is having a great summer and is staying cool and hydrated!  Best wishes to everyone for as much education and adventure as you can handle!  🙂

Until next time,

Rachel Snyder

BLM, Bakersfield, CA

I saw a bobcat for the first time in the Mojave two days ago while doing field work . I wrote this a short time afterward.

THE BOBCAT – by Aaron Sedgwick

Rising from the sand slinks the carnivorous grendel,
Jewel of the Mojave. Diamond eyes and cat-sized.
Shadows run from her gaze, Silent steps on the salt flats.
Maneuvering the wreckage of a thousand burned out buggies,
Glass bottle shards, Shotgun shells.
Fixed on the resting jackrabbit,
Tunnel vision stalking, buzzards hawking for the kill to come.
She… p o u n c e s
Bounding and bouncing jackrabbit shatters the calm.
Dust devil cage binds the pair together,
Freeing them when the howling stops.
Smiling and lapping the last drop from her chin,
She returns to silence.

————————–

I made three seed collections over the last two days! They were all from previously scouted populations that I had scouted for way back in April. It’s exciting to successfully utilize previously scouted information from the same field season that I’ve personally collected.

One difficulty with the abnormally dry conditions in the Mojave has been that population data and vouchers from previous wetter years do not reflect the current conditions and distribution of species in the field.  Frequently, many of the populations that we are documenting are not even flowering , but the population data may be useful either next year or later in the summer when monsoon season begins. This means that every seed collection is sensational and precious this year. I’ve often thought that the plants that are producing seed this year could have particular sets of traits that are favored during dry years, making their genetics valuable for restoration. They could possibly be better adapted to the climate change projections for southern California, which predict a drier and hotter Mojave.

This last weekend I had the opportunity to go to the Montana Native Plant Society Annual Meeting in Missoula, MT. The drive was long, but it was worth it. I was able to meet a lot of great botanists, who did all that they could to help me learn some new plants (and since I am originally from Iowa, the number of plants that I didn’t know out numbered the ones I did). I was even able to meet the author of the newly published Manual of Montana Flora, which will be our new go-to field guide. On Saturday, I went on a fieldtrip to the Garnet Ghost Town, which involved botany stops along the way to look at what plants were present, and then a tour of the ghost town. Overall, the group saw 131 different plant species within just a few yards of the road. My favorite plant that we saw had to be the bear grass (although the lady slipper is a close second).

As a part of the CLM Internship program, there is a week long workshop we can attend as a part of our training. This year, we were at the Chicago Botanic Garden and it was spectacular! The workshop kept us busy all day, so many informative sessions covering a wide range of important topics to our jobs. We had classes focusing on plant identification, conservation genetics, monitoring techniques, wildlife conservation, the different federal agencies, and more! It was a beautiful setting, in eco-friendly buildings on a lush campus. It was very rewarding to meet Krissa and Marian, the people running our program, and a good number of the other interns from all over the country.

I have been able to finally begin some seed collecting in the Ridgecrest Field Office area. It’s been a very dry year, so the only plants producing seed in large enough quantities to collect enough seeds for the Seeds of Success program, are some of the larger annual shrubs. I’ve been working on collections for Salazaria mexicana (paper bag bush), Cleome isomeris (bladderpod), and will soon be starting on Larrea tridentata (creosote bush). It’s been interesting to see first hand how what seem like minor differences in climate regimes can make huge differences in the reproductive capabilities of a species for a season. One collection I made of bladderpods is significantly more impressive and valuable than the first collection I made, largely due to their location differences.

I recently had the opportunity to go into the field with my mentor, a wildlife biologist, to assist in the surveying of abandoned mines for bat and other wildlife habitat. Our area experienced a large mining boom during the late 1800s to 1900s, resulting in a lot of exploration. Now that the area is more populated, thus more recreational users and monitoring of the vegetation and wildlife, there is greater concern over the status of these abandoned mining features. We assessed an area with many known abandoned mining shafts, addits, trenches, and other exploratory features to determine which needed to be permanently closed, and if so, what methods would be best suited for the closing.

And here’s a picture of some of us interns at the Bean in downtown Chicago!

During the past month out here at the Alturas BLM field office I have had the opportunity to travel quite a bit. My field partner Jaycee and I headed up to Lava Beds National Monument in early June for a work week. We stayed at the research station there because it is much closer to some BLM land near the Oregon border, and we were able to save several hours of driving each day. We were also able to participate with some Park Service projects. This included attending a plant phenology and climate change class. Some folks out of UC Santa Barbara have set up a plant phenology monitoring network for California and they want the National Park Service to get on board. This mainly involves training citizen scientists to go out and make observations about plants throughout the year. The date of major phonological stages such as bud break, flowering, and fruit maturation are recorded on a website. This data is taken from a wide geographic range, the goal being to determine if these phenological stages are occurring sooner due to changing climate. We were also able help out with some fire effects monitoring with NPS employees. We ran transects in an area where they had done a prescribed burn nine years previously. In a five by thirty meter area we found thirty two species of plants, which seems like pretty good evidence that fire is necessary for biodiversity. After that we climbed Mount Dome, a very steep cinder cone, in search of a rare species of rice grass. We thought we found it, but later learned we were mistaken, proving that the desire to find what we are looking for often clouds our better judgment. Or maybe we were distracted by the view and falcons circling us.

The next week was the workshop at the Chicago Botanic Garden. This was a whirlwind of long days of learning about myriad topics related to what we are doing. It was great to get a better picture of what the Conservation and Land Management program is all about, as well as to meet interns who are working all around the country. I guess I’m not the only one sticking out like a sore thumb in some remote Western cowboy town that nobody has ever heard of.

Lately we started collecting our first seed. We successfully collected seeds of two species of grass. We had also previously identified a phlox and a lily as good targets due to their abundance, but the phlox had already set seed and the lily seemed to have been scorched off the face of the planet since the weather heated up. This goes to show that seed collection requires vigilant observation, or else the seeding window can be missed. This was, to be honest, somewhat of a relief. Spring was nothing but excitement as we tromped around, making note of all the pretty flowers that would be cool to collect later. It didn’t even occur to us how immense a task collecting 10,000 phlox seeds would be, given that each phlox flower only produces one seed, a proper collection only takes 20% of the available seed of a population, and phlox can be painfully spiny.

Speaking of phlox, we also went to the Modoc Gulch to survey for a rare species, Phlox muscoides. We looked both in areas where juniper cuts are going to take place, and in areas where it was previously found and pretty much didn’t find it in either. It was good that we didn’t find any of this phlox in the juniper cut areas, as this means it won’t be disturbed. As for the sites where it is already known to occur, it was frustrating to drive several hours to and from these sites and not even find it. However, today I was able to do a little detective work which helped me feel significantly less useless. I filled out data forms for what we had found, or not found, for the California Natural Diversity Database (run by California Department of Fish and Game). I found the phlox entry that we had looked for, and learned that the last time it was documented was probably at least fifteen years ago. In that light it is not surprising at all that we didn’t find it, as the juniper and mountain mahogany trees have no doubt grown and shaded out many plants in that amount of time. Other factors could be at play here, such as overgrazing by wild horses (there is ample evidence of them at Modoc Gulch). I realized that it is monitoring like this that is necessary to determine changes in biodiversity, as well as the efficacy of actions that the BLM takes, such as juniper and wild horse removal. How will the ecosystem change after they are removed? Are we unnecessarily altering a natural ebb and flow of plant communities, or are we improving biodiversity?

Joe Broberg

Alturas BLM Field Office

They said Phoenix would be hot; I didn’t believe them.  They said the snakes are poisonous, the scorpion’s sting burns like you wouldn’t believe and the cholla cacti spines will actually jump off the plant and stick your leg like some moisture-seeking missile as you walk by.  What they said was true; Arizona is a very different place from my native Wisconsin where the Holstein cows rein supreme, where the pastures are lush due to the dark, fertile mollisols created by hundreds of years of dominance by native tall- and short-grass prairies and where the number of plants with spines pales in comparison to the number of friendly leafy ones.

What they neglected to mention, however, whether due to a blunting of appreciation caused by day after scorching day spent on the rangelands or otherwise, where the wondrous vistas afforded by the vast mesas surrounded by sentinel-like mountain ranges whose looming presence is suggestive of bodyguards, the brilliant canvas of colors that the sun throws towards the heavens in a last grasp for glory before he is extinguished for the night which contrast with the leathery black silhouettes of the peaks and canyons, and the sheer authority and erudition that the noble saguaro cacti command through the valleys and across the plains.

My two weeks working at the Bureau of Land Management in Phoenix have been short but very impressionable so far and I can’t wait to see what is waiting just over the horizon.