My internship is taking place with the BLM in Vernal, UT.  The main thing that my coworker (another CLM intern) and I will accomplish is rare plant monitoring and seed collections for seeds of success.  Coming from Michigan, the plants, wildlife, and climate are a whole new experience for me.  Our mentor is essentially doing 3 jobs, so we don’t get a lot of time to go out in the field and learn from him; instead we try and key out plants we find every day or bring back plants that stump us and ask our mentor.  The list of plants I can point out in the field is getting pretty long!  The shrubs still stump me…they all look so similar.  I definitely don’t have an eye for those yet.  My keying skills and my botanical vocabulary is improving though.

I’ve been here 5 weeks now, the majority of which have been spent locating populations of 3 different species, Sclerocactus wetlandicus, Schoenocrambe argillacea, and Schoenocrambe suffrutescens.  We’re also slowly trying to locate populations of other species for seed collections as we monitor the rare plants.  The other thing we’ve done was collection for genetics testing.  We spent 2 days collecting buds from “different” cactus species so that genetics testing could be done to see if they really are separate species.

While the work we’ve done so far hasn’t had much variety, we’ve managed to have quite a few adventures.  On Tuesday we literally ran into our first rattlesnake of the season.  We were walking through some sagebrush when we almost stepped on it; unfortunately we saw it before we heard it.  It was striking at us, but thankfully we walked away without getting bitten.  It wasn’t the best way to start our morning.  Then on Wednesday we got a flat tire in a really remote location and couldn’t get the winch on the truck to lower the spare….which led to us having to be rescued.

Those were 2 unfortunate experiences, but I’ve had some really good ones too!  While we were taking our lunch break on the side of a cliff (while surveying for clay reed mustard) we got to watch ranchers herd cattle.  We also got to watch a thunderstorm roll in and we found an elk antler, a coyote skull, and another antler.  Since everything is really starting to flower now, it’s a gorgeous time to be outside.  It is absolutely beautiful out here (aside from all the well pads) and I can’t get over how far you can see!

My CLM internship has brought me into the wild, to the last frontier…Alaska! I am working for the National Park Service at Wrangell-St. Elias near Copper Center, AK. I feel very grateful to have the opportunity to experience such a historic and unique place. Wrangell-St. Elias is the largest National Park in the U.S., covering over 13 million acres! In conjunction with 3 other parks (Glacier Bay in Alaska, Tatshenshini-Alsek British Columbia Canada, and Kluane Yukon Canada) this area is the largest internationally protected ecosystem on the planet covering over 24.3 million continuous acres!! With 25% of the park covered with ice, Wrangell-St.Elias has the greatest concentration of glaciers in North America and contains the largest non-polar ice field in the world! The vastness of this place is so hard to comprehend. The Copper River runs right through this park, which is the spawning corridor for the famous Sockeye and Chinook salmon. This park also contains a National Historic Landmark, Kennecott copper mine. In the 1900s Kennecott Corp. mined copper ore that contained 97% copper and generated over $250,000 worth of copper throughout the time it operated until 1938 when the mine was closed. A railroad had been built specifically to get copper out of the mountainous region, a huge and very difficult undertaking given the harshness of winters here and the challenge of building around glaciers.

My job here at Wrangell-St. Elias is to protect the pristine plant life that exists here. I am on the Exotic Plant Management team and we are responsible for conducting plant surveys, mapping invasive species, collecting native seeds for re-vegetation projects, and also taking volunteer groups out into the park for re-plantings. A large part of my job is also education and outreach to local communities about the threats of invasive species and how they can help in their own backyard. In fact, most invasive plants arrive in new locations from people planting them in their yard, not knowing that they are exotic, or non-native to that habitat.  The implications of invasive species affecting the planet are HUGE, especially with the occurrence of climate change. There is a new aquatic invasive that has reached Alaskan waters, Elodea canadesis (Canadian waterweed) and if untreated could drastically impact salmon populations, a huge industry Alaska depends on. I am very much looking forward to working in a place where invasive species are realistically controllable. Two summers ago I conducted invasive plant surveys in Wisconsin, my home state, and was almost discouraged by the extent of invasive species infestations already there. The cost of removing some of these plants is immense and can take over 15-20 years to be successful. Hopefully here in Alaska, we can prevent invasive plants from invading before it’s too late.

I titled this blog posting “Into the Wild” because moving here has really been a lifestyle change (and I’m currently reading that book by Jack Kerouac). The ground is still frozen here and our housing has no running water yet. Having to haul in water jugs a couple times a week for our water supply really makes me think about and appreciate those who lived off the land by the river and had to use it for their water supply. We have no wi-fi, no cable tv, and my cell phone doesn’t get reception in the remote area I am living in within the park. I am happy though, living a simple life in the woods is exactly what I wanted to experience. I have more time to read, write, do puzzles, and just think about life more with less busyness, distractions, daily advertisements and loud city noises.

The field season has not started here yet, unfortunately. It just snowed the past two days and there is more snow in the forecast for this weekend! So far, I have just been mounting specimens for the park’s herbarium and planning for the coming field season. I am hopeful that spring will come and sunny days are ahead!

Cheers,

Morgan, Wrangell-St. Elias Exotic Plant Management Team, NPS

Early this April, I received word that my internship would soon conclude.  There was simply not any available funding to continue my position.  Although I was disappointed to leave my internship prematurely, I can certainly look back on the experience and say that I was blessed with a myriad of opportunities during my time as an intern.

One of the most valuable, but unexpected gifts I received through my internship was the practice of quiet.  While at work, I usually found myself quietly working on my own to accomplish the tasks of herbarium operation.  These hours I spent “with myself” were so valuable in helping me practice being content with my own company through the course of a day.  After beginning my new job helping manage a retail greenhouse (where I interact with many customers and co-workers throughout the day) I realized just how valuable that quiet time had been.  Even though I thoroughly enjoy working with people, I was surprised when I realized how much I valued that stable solitude.

I was also given the opportunity to get to know a wide range of positively wonderful people!  My co-workers were marvelous, and also incredibly knowledgeable and good-natured.  My internship has also certainly been an excellent opportunity for networking within the Bureau of Land Management, and has allowed me to work with a variety of people in my field.

During the course of my internship, I had the chance to participate in a variety of projects.  Most of these projects involved managing lichen specimen data using our access database.  Since these data management projects involved so much data and and required quite a bit of time, I did not have the chance to see them to their completion before I left.  However, I did get to see significant progression over time.  I also mounted many herbarium vouchers, and made a sizable dent in the specimens that had been waiting for years to be mounted. One project I was able to see to completion was the organization and labeling of our small herbarium library, which now contains a variety of botany related literature.

Many thanks to everyone for the chance to work with the CLM internship program!  With my internship now complete, I am excited about the possibilities of my new job, and I can’t wait to see where things lead!

My internship was a botany internship with the BLM WY in Lander. The goal was to conduct Seeds of Success collections and to create an herbarium collection for the office so they would have reference material. In addition to completing those tasks, I was also able to provide a huge amount of map data work for the office. This office had not ever had a botanist, and their data was unmaintained and challenging to use. I was able to not only collect a large amount of data last summer, but I was also able to organize the offices current data, and then some. With the help of the GIS specialist, I created two geodatabases that are easily usable and can incorporate all future data collection, both in-house and 3rd party. The big concern was that there were surveys that resulted in negative data that were never incorporated, and as a result, many areas were being surveyed multiple times. So they needed a way to show all areas of known locations AND any areas that resulted in negative data so that resources were not being wasted in duplicate surveys. I was able to provide this for them, and I believe that they are very grateful.

The field work that I did last season was also very rewarding. Being a native of the northest megalopolis, it was refreshing to see the vast open spaces that WY has to offer. And the serenity fed my soul.

I will miss WY and the people that I have come to know in the office here. This experience has not only allowed me to see beautiful country and make new friends, but it has also assisted me in making decisions about my future and career goals. My life and my person are better for it, and I encourage anyone to participate in this program.

It’s been quite a spring so far. Sage-grouse lek counting season ends next week, along with mornings that require waking up at 4am. Golden eagle nest monitoring season has begun, although unfortunately the nest I was originally assigned to monitor turned out to be inactive. Luckily, the Bighorn Basin has the greatest concentration of golden eagles in the country, so there are plenty others that are available for watching. I’ve been out and about mending fence, recording a few new raptor nests, seeking out nests of unknown species, scouting for seed collection sites, digging up specimens of the few blooming forbs around that I plan to collect from, recording powerlines using GPS, helping with the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Adoption event, and planning and teaching a lesson on raptor ecology for the local middle school’s Natural History Days (NHD).

Participating in Natural History Days, in addition to the Wild Horse and Burro Adoption, was a new task for me this year. My first day teaching, with the help of the friendly BLM Geologist and fellow raptor volunteer at the museum, was a great success. Now, on to my next teaching day on Tuesday…solo…

The lesson centers around raptors, or birds of prey, and features 2 live birds from the Greater Yellowstone Raptor Experience program at the the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. The first day we had a red-tailed hawk and a peregrine falcon, and next time I will have the great-horned owl and the peregrine falcon, because the hawk has prior engagements on that day. Many species-species and species-environment interactions are discussed in order to convey a message of the interconnectedness of life on the planet, as well as the importance of biodiversity and wide-reaching impacts of humans on wildlife and the environment. The lesson ends with a game of tag, in which some kids play the role of mice while others play the role of predators like rattlesnakes, red-tailed hawks, and great-horned owls. From this they can experience the difficulty of a prey species surviving the pursuit of predators in order to acquire food and feed their young, and that of a predator trying to feed its young while itself being pursued by apex predators like the owl.

Tag is probably almost as fun to watch as it is to play. I was actually able to play a little when one of my “mice” got tired and I had to take her place. As the number of mice dwindles from being tagged or “killed,” the predators start getting awfully hungry and competing more for the remaining mice. When the “car” (played by the Geologist) runs along the highway and “kills” predators like the hawk while it is on a kill, or a rattlesnake while it is sunning. The abundance of mice making it past the remaining predators results in the mouse food supply running low due to their overpopulation. In this way the students can better understand the checks and balances that are necessary to maintaining a relative balance in nature, and how it gets affected when even one type of predator or prey species is removed.

It was a pretty fun time had by all, I would say, including me. And although I’m somewhat nervous about my solo act, I’m looking forward to doing it again.

You might think amphibian surveys would take you to cool, damp, dark places. With the Oregon Spotted Frog, not so! During our first few weeks as I sat in the office, having taken on the OSF as Species Lead, I read the following as ideal survey conditions: warm, sunny days with little or no wind. Well that sounds pretty ideal indeed! While we waited for our supervisor to return from a training, we were set on some office work and whatever field trips staff undertook. When our supervisor returned, the first thing we hear is that it’s a hot, hot year and the frogs are spawning whole weeks before they’d ever spawned before (yikes!). Thus launched one crazy month of survey after survey.

Like many rare species, the OSF is quite shy and hard to find. Over the years, as surveys yielded fewer and fewer numbers of adults (my last few days of data reorganization have started to make this quite clear to me), the Klamath Falls FWS office changed survey tactics to focus more on egg mass surveys, which are far less mobile and cryptic then their originators. We had one special day this season where we saw a few adults and one subadult Oregon Spotted Frog (it was one of the warmest, sunniest days). OSF spawn when water reaches warmer temperatures in the shallows, usually around May through June/July, and the egg masses develop over 2-3 weeks. The trick is to catch the window when you can find the highest density of egg masses and get to the sites to survey, but each site window varies depending on local water temperature conditions, altitude, location, etc. As it was we caught the tail end of spawning at most sights, seeing little OSF tadpoles hatch out and occasionally get eaten by leeches. The presence of hundreds of chorus frog eggs is also a sign that we are too late.

We have been balancing local surveys around Upper Klamath Lake of known territory, with surveys of historic territory in the Modoc National Forest down in California. This was quite exciting as we have had the chance to look for OSFs where they have not been seen in the last 100 years or so, and had we caught any evidence of their existence it would have made some ripples. These surveys turned up negative in the end, but my fellow intern and I got to spend several nights camping in the Warner Mountain Wilderness, the past 3 weeks hiking into remote lakes and creeks and generally absorbing the beauty that surrounded us, including the occasional coyote spotting. Last week however we got caught in a few storms, and neither the frogs nor us were experiencing prime operating conditions!

Well, that just about wraps up OSF surveys for the year, next week will be working with several valued, yet endangered, fish species in the Klamath Basin. I can’t wait to see what comes next!

I sit here typing this at the end of a day of hiking around looking for rare plants and weeds in the Carson City area, so I’m quite hungry and tired, but glad to have been outdoors for the day.  Since last blogging, the team has done a lot of new things.  We participated in two outreach events for Earth Day, got some ATV training, went to a pollinator class to learn about native pollinator management, and have done some fire transect monitoring.  A couple of us also participated in a grueling weed survey in one of our range allotments.  This area consisted of nothing but steep mountain sides, and we hiked it for about eight hours and found not a single weed in the allotment.  Good news, of course, but what a day that was!

I’m getting a lot of practice identifying plants in the area, but there’s still a lot to learn.  The field season is picking up, so we have many outdoor days to look forward to and hopefully many adventures ahead.  Now that spring is here, the desert is starting to heat up, but we have yet to experience the worst it has to offer.  Being from a hot, dry climate myself, I’m kind of used to this type of weather, but my teammates are definitely not.  I was honestly more worried about the snow in winter, so I guess we all have new challenges to deal with.

Good luck, Team Manatee!

I have been having so much fun these past couple of weeks driving out to different allotments and identifying as many plant species as I can with my CBG partner Emily! I have to admit that driving on less than well made roads can be scary at times, like when the road is more or less an incline with multiple huge chunks of rocks in the way, BUT it is so much fun and rewarding when you get through it. This upcoming week will involve a couple meetings involving NEPA and range con management, so it will be interesting to learn all the aspects relating to those subjects. Until the next time, here are some pictures I’ve collected on my phone while out and about!

Funny looking saguaro!

Little ECHEN surrounded by “teddy-bears”

One of the most beautiful views I’ve encountered

Burro photo bomb! Can you see him?

The infamous GILA MONSTER caught mid-blink!

Here in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, we’ve been experiencing some weird weather–sun. This is, for Oregon, an abundance of sun and a serious lack of rain. Eugene is over 12 inches behind in its usual rainfall.

This means a few changes in the monitoring routine. With the warm, dry weather, everything is blooming early. My monitoring lead and I will be wrapping up Bradshaw’s Lomatium (Lomatium bradshawii) monitoring in a couple of days, while this time last year we were just beginning it. The endangered Fender’s Blue Butterflies are also out earlier this year, and their flight season is moving fast! I helped do the first survey earlier this week and we were able to confirm that Fender’s were indeed out at one of our sites; Fender’s Blue Butterflies are nearly identical to Silvery Blue Butterflies, a common butterfly, so capture and release (with the aid of an awesome tool known as a butterfly net) is one of the only surefire ways to identify them. We’re expecting the flight season to peak soon, so there are definitely a few more butterfly surveys in my future.

I’ve had some good luck with viewing wildlife this year. I was lucky enough to see a coyote fairly closely a couple of weeks ago. It ran within 100 feet of the macroplot we were monitoring as if it didn’t have a care in the world, and it was a real treat to see. Coyotes have a way of bounding and hopping while they run that was very unexpected.

The other wildlife sighting that I was excited about was mining bees! My first thought when I saw these little pollen-covered bees crawling into a hole in the ground was “Bees? That aren’t in a hive?” I had never heard of them before. While monitoring lomatium at one of our sites, we stumbled upon a fair-sized community (I’ve read that they’re solitary bees and  instead of living in a colony will burrow their own holes, but will dig the holes near other mining bees). It was very interesting watching them work.

So much sun is unusual for a Willamette Valley spring!

A mining bee at the entrance of its home