The last three weeks here in southwest Utah, my fellow CLM intern and I have been busy doing sage grouse habitat assessments. We have bounced around BLM land, set up basic transects and evaluated specific areas to determine what areas in our field office might be good habitat for the elusive sage grouse. Despite covering a lot of acreage, I have yet to see a sage grouse. In a region full of sagebrush and known breeding grounds – known as leks – I hoped to catch a glimpse of one of these uncommon birds.

The greater sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) is a large bird, weighing up to seven pounds and reaching 30 inches long. They have a gray-brown speckled body and a black belly patch, which helps distinguish them from other grouse species that can be found in sagebrush. The most common images of sage grouse are the puffed up males, displaying yellow air sacks in their white breasts during breeding displays in the spring.

A male sage grouse in full mating display. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service http://www.fws.gov/mountain-prairie/species/birds/sagegrouse/

Sage grouse are, as the name suggests, are sagebrush obligates. In the winter, sagebrush is all this grouse eats. It offers important cover from the snow and cold. In warmer months, the grouse nibbles on insects, forbs, and sagebrush. The protein-rich bugs, seeds and herbaceous plants found among healthy sagebrush habitat are critical to juvenile grouse.

The reason why I haven’t spotted a sage grouse yet is because these birds’ numbers are down considerably due to habitat loss and fragmentation. In the areas we have surveyed, the sagebrush habitat is split up by roads, fences, and towns. The bird is a candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act, a move that would prevent activities such as cattle grazing or energy exploration in areas where the grouse occurs. Boosting sage grouse numbers and protecting its habitat would prevent conflict among stakeholders who still wish to utilize the land, plus it would result in healthier rangelands. Other organisms that depend on sagebrush ecosystems, like mule deer, pygmy rabbits, pronghorn, and sage sparrows would benefit from the protection of sage grouse.

Moving the sage grouse to the Endangered Species Act is a controversial subject. The BLM oversees acres that are for multiple uses; monitoring different species, grazing, recreation, and energy production. Finding a balance between these different land uses and protecting the sage grouse is a challenge, and is bound to spark debate.

As a wildlife intern, I feel strongly about conservation measures. However it is important to remember all the stakeholders involved in this conversation. I do hope that one day while my partner and I are taking inventory of the grasses at a transect we’ll spot one of these elusive birds. Sage grouse are an important part of the American west, and hopefully will be here for many more generations.

I’ve just wrapped up my sixth week as a CLM intern with the BLM Field Office in Rawlins, Wyoming. For the last few weeks the focus has been on seeds: scouting for, checking up on, collecting, cleaning up, and shipping. My fellow intern Avery and I have made eight collections so far and have found another eight immature populations we’re keeping our eyes on. Many of our target species are long gone already, having finished their fruiting cycles and wilted away in the especially dry season. We started late in this regard, but luckily our goal of 20-30 collections still seems highly attainable. Sagebrush may very well save the day.

Collected seeds of Crepis modocensis

I seem to be learning the flora pretty well here and have been taken by nerdy surprise over and over at some of the new-to-me genera we’ve run into. I’ve sort of become the plant and paperwork half of the job so am still eager to get some more GPS experience under my belt. There’s still a lot of time left for that, so it’ll work out.

Avery and I work long days and are rewarded with long weekends. I’ve been trying to keep things interesting by attempting to be creative with sparkly stuff at the barracks and going on mini road trips to see the sites. I’ve spent some time adventuring here in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and this weekend I’m headed to Idaho to see a familiar face and hopefully devour some straight up scrumptious food.

Got a little irresponsible with my Cressida wagon… but found a great spot

My favorite things about the area are the bunnies who live in and eat my yard, the huge detailed and fluffy clouds, and the warmth. Especially the bunnies though. A couple of weeks ago I saw a huge white-tailed jackrabbit (totally a ninja bunny) and some desert horned lizards. I see more wildlife here than I have in any other place. It’s really neat.

This week we did a little work with a Mycological-Inventory Technician named Cat who has been roaming different ecoregions in the area for two summers collecting fungi and (gasp!) lichens data. (I happen to be a bit of a lichen fanatic, so it was a blast to spend time on our hands and knees hunting for them.) Apparently little is known about where fungi and lichenized fungi occur here, so her grant-sponsored work is pretty exciting and admirable.

Crustose lichen love

Our internship future remains dedicated to SOS, though we’ve been asked if we’d like to do some work with bats and reclamation-based monitoring. Our mentor and a few other BLM employees are intent on giving us experience in as many areas as they have to offer, so hopefully we’ll get many glimpses of all sorts of what goes on with the BLM.

Six weeks down, sixteen to go!

Going from one of the muggier parts of the country to one of the driest has been one of the more dramatic transitions that I’ve experienced since starting my internship here at the Bishop BLM—not that I’ve had much time to process it. It’s hard to believe that I’ve already been here for three weeks…or is it hard to believe that it’s only been three weeks? Coming in at the height of field season has made for a hectic—and exciting—first month on the job, and I’ve been having a blast.

As someone who has spent most of her life within ten hours of the East Coast, shrub diversity was never something I paid much attention to (not with so many interesting trees overshadowing their diminutive counterparts). Here in the scrublands, however, shrubs rule supreme, and I have spent a lot of time these past few weeks learning to distinguish between bitterbrush and sagebrush, wax currants (Ribes cereum) and desert gooseberry (Ribes velutinum), horsebrushes and rabbitbrushes (not to mention rabbitbrushes and rabbitbrushes). Especially interesting is spiny hopsage (Grayia spinosa), a medium-sized shrub that is found throughout Eastern California. The showiest parts of the plant are not its flowers, but rather the seed-bearing bracts—small, colorful structures that look like a cross between a petal and a leaf. In the spring, the bracts are bright pink; as they dry, they turn yellow and crispy. And as the first plant that I collected seeds from for SOS, hopsage is definitely one of my favorite plants to run across in the field.

The most challenging shrub identification task we have to tackle on a regular basis is teasing apart the different sagebrushes. Distinguishing between low sagebrush (Artemisia arbuscula) and smaller big sagebrush individuals (Artemisia tridentata) can be tricky, but it gets especially complicated when you try to separate out the three subspecies of big sagebrush: big basin sagebrush, Wyoming big sagebrush, and mountain big sagebrush. And did I mention that they hybridize? But it turns out that these distinctions matter, and not just to someone interested in taxonomy. These subspecies are chemically distinct, and it makes a difference to the nesting sage grouse that use these shrubs as both shelter for their nests and a critical food source during nesting season. This is one of the coolest parts of my job—getting to work on a variety of projects, most of which depend on each other in some way and really get at the interactions between animal species of interest and the plant communities that they depend on.

Until next time!

It’s hard to believe 5 months have already passed by.  If you had asked me one year ago where I would be now, I probably would not have said somewhere skirting the Sierra Nevada, with Lake Tahoe for a weekend playground. 

Working for the BLM has been a lesson in patience, planning and back-up planning.  Having been here for several months, I feel like I am finally getting my feet under me.  I don’t think I have ever appreciated the value of over preparation, until this position.  The mantra: plan on plans changing.  A trip to the field means plan for anything: GPS units failing, radios dying, people getting lost, extreme heat followed by extreme cold, or you may get reassigned to a new project entirely.  This type of uncertainty requires flexibility.  Being flexible means being versatile and with the vast amounts of land our district office oversees being able to change plans quickly means accomplishing more.  For instance, several weeks ago we drove to an HAF, sage grouse habitat site that was roughly 3 hours away.  After arriving at the site and spending a few hours looking for the pre-established transect plot we had found nothing.  At that point the day could have felt like a failure. Luckily we were aware of a rare plant population in the area that required a distribution survey.  Our team was able to quickly transition from one task to another without wasting our trip to such a remote site.  This situation also underscores the value of being familiar with the land uses and interests of the office you work in.  Often times the surveys we conduct apply to multiple disciplines in our office and knowing this allows you to plan well for appropriate data collection and management.

My work out here in Alaska has been unforgettable to say the least! I just returned from a week long pack rafting trip on Tebay Lakes. The 3 lakes are only accessible by floatplane, which we got to fly in on…we were surveying the lake for an aquatic invasive Elodea canadensis (Canadian Waterweed). It is suspected that this weed is transported by float planes, and we were surveying this particular lake because it gets a lot of float plane traffic from Cordova (a place where there is known infestations of Elodea in its lakes). The first documented encounter with this invasive aquatic plant took place in 2010 in Fairbanks and this is the first aquatic freshwater invasive plant species that has been confirmed in Alaska. Here is a section of an article I helped to write that was published in the local newspaper:

” As with most invasive plant species, Elodea was brought over for decoration. Its bright green leaves, hearty stem, and long roots make it an attractive specimen for aquariums. U.S. Forest Service ecologist, Trish Wurtz said, “It’s almost guaranteed,” that someone dumped it into the Chena slough from an aquarium sometime in the past 10 years. Wurtz observed, “A bunch of red clay balls” (commonly found in aquaria) in the silt underneath a bridge in the slough.

Elodea reproduces asexually from plant parts. In the fall, leafy stalks detach from a parent plant, float away, root, and start new plants. The smallest fragment of Elodea can survive the frozen waters of Alaskan winters, wait patiently until it thaws, and float downstream until it finds a suitable place for it to grow.  Elodea prefers slow moving water with thick sediment. Once it has settled into a spot, Elodea grows rapidly where it accumulates into a tangled mass.

What does this mean for Alaskans? Like many invasive species, Elodea knows no boundaries. Once established in an area, it can quickly take over. Elodea can easily cling to rudders and floats, as well as boat propellers, only to be deposited at the next water body. Elodea can reduce water flow and water quality, out-compete native aquatic plants, lower property values, make waters unusable for recreation and degrade fish spawning habitats. On a grander scale, Elodea can make a huge impact on two large Alaskan industries: sport fishing and commercial salmon harvesting.  According to estimates by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Elodea could make a dent of $350,000 loss per year for both these industries combined.”

After surveying the lakes, we found no Elodea but took samples of a few aquatic plants to get identified.  Alaska has really proven itself to be a rugged place, as I got to experience bush-whacking up creeks, cooking fresh trout over the fire and camping all along the way, bringing only what I needed and could fit in my two dry bags that were strapped onto my pack raft… Incredible experience…annnnd THIS is my job!

Until next time,

Morgan, Exotic Plant Management Team, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park

Monitoring on the Trout Creek Mountains
The Trout Creek Mountains are located in the southeastern section of the Burns BLM District. This area was well known for its plant diversity, beautiful landscape, and large populations of sage grouse. Last year, there was a massive fire known as the Holloway Fire. This fire burnt an enormous amount of land. Some of the areas within the Trout Creek Mountains recovered, but many areas needed to be drill seeded to help the land get re-established with native plants. This would hopefully prevent future cheat grass (Bromus tectorum) establishment.

Our job was to monitor a large amount of plots located everywhere on the Trout Creek Mountains. Our priority was to monitor the treated sites that have been drilled seeded. Most of the Trout Creek Mountains had a large amount of rain and the higher elevations could easily have over 20 species of plant in a monitoring site. Unfortunately, the lower elevations that were drilled seeded had trouble getting established due to the rough climate. I was amazed about the color of this region. You could literally see the colors of the rainbow when looking at all the species of forbs in the landscape.

White: Common Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) and Prickly Sandwort (Arenaria aculeata)
Pink: Oregon Checker Mallow (Sidalcea oregana)
Red and Orange: Wyoming Indian Paintbrush (Castilleja linariifolia)

Yellow: Western Groundsel (Senecio integerrimus), Modoc Hawksbeard (Crepis modocensis), and Desert Yellow Daisy (Erigeron linearis)
Green: Green Gentian (Frasera speciosa)  ((My favorite ^_^))
Blue: Tall Meadow Larkspur (Delphinium burkei)
Indigo: Rocky Mountain Iris (Iris missouriensis)
Violet: Tailcup Lupine and Silvery Lupine (Lupinus caudatus/ Lupinus argenteus )

A field of Lupine with waddling Sage Grouse!

Despite the beauty of the landscape around us, we had to brace ourselves for the elements. Temperatures could get over 90-100 degrees easily, the horseflies were out in full swarm, and the topography was very steep. When I had to ride the four wheeler/ rhino around, we would be on a 45 degree angle on a cliff to get to our next destination. Also, you have to bring plenty of water and protection. We had bandannas to protect us from the dust that got in our eyes and mouth during the drive. If we did not have eye protection, we would have blood shot eyes due to the dry/dusty conditions. Beyond the elements, this has been an amazing opportunity! We got to see new plants, meet new people, and learn different techniques!

In the midst of the rough conditions, we got to stay at a government place known as the Hilton. This place is like a giant trailer that could sleep fifteen people. They have a coral in the back ,with mules and a nice bit of property with porphyritic rock volcanic rock indicating the violent geologic past this area had.

Sage Grouse All Over the Place
One of the creatures that blew us out of the water were the Sage Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus)! We never seen them before now. In some of the areas, within the Trout Creek Mountains, there was a population of thirty or more. Every day, we would see these birds flying or waddling to their heart’s content. One morning I was driving to our next destination and thirty sage grouse flew into the air! I have never seen so many before!! One time, I saw many of them waddling along the roadside amongst the lupine and I took a lot of good pictures. They reminded me of quails with their waddling and ninja like hiding skills. Sage Grouse do remind me of the Chestnut Bellied Sandgrouse (Pterocles exustus) from Hawaii that were introduced, but the Sage Grouse were larger. One could easily find them amongst mature stands of Mountain Big Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata ssp. vaseyana).  We were fortunate to see these birds, unfortunately they are not common in the rest of our area.

Misadventures

Female Clones?
One day after work we were visited by two girls who were working for the natural resources division at the Oregon State University. They had a similar job to us, but they had to catalog all of the plants in the area, so they could map them later on. The funny part was that they were like our clones…but they were female! Same personality same hair color, and similar heights. We compared notes and talked about the different plants we had seen on the Trout Creek Mountains.

Scouting
One of my side jobs for monitoring was to scout out a location. Some sites were hidden or did not have road access to them. Sometimes I would walk over a mile and up a butte to find a plot. This was great exercise! Some plots I scouted out were gone or ceased to exist. The directions or the photos for some of the sites did not help us at all. One of the “photographs” was a drawn picture of the ground…which did not help out at all. A tip I learned was to look under the cow pies for the plot markers. Some scouting locations were surrounded by barb wire fencing, which I would limbo under. Haha! All in a day’s work! 😉

Horned Lizards
The Horned Lizards (Phrynosoma douglassi or Phrynosoma platyrhinos ) were one of my favorite animals of the Trout Creek Mountains! They were camouflaged and could flatten their body to avoid predators. I would catch them and they would just sit on my arm, while I went to monitor the next plot. They did not bite and were very fascinating to look at. They would give you a face that would either display “Hehehe… I am going to get you” or a “I am a rock and am non-existent.” When they flatten their body they would have saw like scales along their sides, which made them look like a horned Frisbee that could do some serious damage.

Horned Lizards!!

This was our first week monitoring at the Trout Creek Mountains. Next week will be just as exciting containing brilliantly colored forbs, ninja-like sage grouse, and beautiful topography! I can’t wait until then! ^_^

Have a great day!

Justin Chappelle
Burns/ Hines BLM Intern
Geographer, Bird watcher and Botanist

Fun Fact:  Having a milkshake after a hard day of work would help you become 20% cooler in ten seconds flat….just saying…

The first month of my time in Arcata, CA has been a real trip. After a half week of safety training in the office, I shipped out to Chicago for the CLM workshop. The workshop offered lots of intensive learning opportunities, the most pertinent of which was on the Seed of Success Program. Since I was relatively new to the internship, I was previously unfamiliar with the program. There was much discussion about the program’s history – dating back to the Royal Botanical Garden’s initial request for seeds. Now seeds are being kept in national seed banks and are reproduced for use in restoration projects- right on!

After a week of pampering in Chicago, I returned to the beautiful redwood country where I work. I dove right into getting to know the lands our field office manages, with the guidance of my botanist mentor, Jennifer Wheeler. I was soon on my own to guide, supervise and work with groups of California Conservation Corps members. We spent time pulling the invasive French Broom, in areas where it was threatening crucial native plants/habitats. Working with these kids is a great experience, most of them are my age, which allows us to connect really well. It is also refreshing to do some real physical labor.

When my mentor took off for two weeks, I was left with a “to do” list. This was perfect for me, I was able to write my own schedule, while also figuring out how to do all the things on the list… the best way to learn. I became familiar with the Trimble JUNO GPS unit and how to run the National Invasive Species Monitoring System (NISMS) so I could record locations of and treatments applied to various invasive plant species. I was also lucky enough to work with other members of the resource staff in our office, including the forest ecologist and the fisheries biologist. We worked in the famous Headwaters Forest Reserve, flagging thinning units, and in the beautiful King Range, sampling invertebrates. I was also fortunate to work with the CCC again pulling invasive European Beach grass and Yellow Lupine in the coastal sand dunes. What a treat to get to work at the beach! So far soo good.

Hi again!

This week we joined tech crews who will be working in the Eagle Lake, Surprise and Alturas field offices for an intensive week of training for a new, statewide land health assessment field protocol called AIM. AIM was developed primarily by the Great Basin Institute and Jornada with partners including the US government (BLM in our case), Nevada Conservation Corps, and International Conservation Volunteer Exchange. The goal of the new protocol is to provide a standardized set of data that is interdisciplinary and scalable. In other words, we collect data on vegetation and soil in such a way that the data from the hundreds of plots across Nevada, California, and Utah (to list a few) can be combined into a single analysis or broken down into understanding how best to manage the land on a small-scale, such as in each field office.This type of standardized methology is especially helpful to the BLM in providing scientifically sound data and a system that can be repeated by different offices. 

We had long field days learning everthing from the detailed protocol, soil morphology and taxonomy, UTV driving and plant identification so that we can break into our prospective groups to carry out AIM at our own randomly selected plot locations. I learned so much in such a short amount of time, and was able to meet field scientists from different offices and organizations, including the GBI crews that will be working on AIM and ES&R (Emergency Stabilization and Restoration after fire). This is my first full week on the job, and although it was long (averaged 11 hour days), I never got tired of being out in the field practicing useful, interesting skills and protocols.

As a reward, my roomate/fellow CLM intern and I will be floating down the river this weekend! Mmm.  

Until next time,

Deb

Our recent fieldwork posed interesting questions about climate change and its effects on the growing infestation of Melilotus albus (white sweetclover) and Vicia cracca (bird vetch) to the north of the Yukon River in Alaska. It was once thought that white sweetclover would not be capable of spreading as far north as the Arctic Circle, but recent infestation throughout the Dalton Highway Corridor Management Area (BLM) suggest that the plant is capable of adapting to the extreme conditions.

After a record late spring with temperatures well below zero until late April, the infestation appears to have been reduced significantly in comparison to observations in past years. Reviewing the literature lead me to make the following hypotheses:

• The temperatures in both winter 2012-2013 and spring 2013 may have had an effect on spring phenology (Yu et al. 2010)
• Dormancy may have been broken and seeds made “sensitive” to germination and as a result of environmental conditions such as fluctuating temperatures (Baskin and Baskin 2008); winter emergence has been observed as light is not required for germination (cite)
• Cloudy, wet weather in summer 2012 may have decreased pollinator activity (Bare 1979)
• It may not be a “sweetclover year” or a “boom year” (Van Riper and Larson 2009)
• Large fluctuations in sweetclover cover complicate interpretation of seral change along a chronosequence difficult (Gucker 2009)
• Vicia cracca along river crossings may have been reduced by consistent manual removal efforts

Our plan to conduct a formal inventory of both infestations may be delayed due to the fact that the assessment is unlikely to produce a representative data set. An informal assessment is underway and we are using the data to implement plans for manual, mechanical and chemical treatments.

This raises many interesting research questions about the need for intensive management techniques such as chemicals. If this is just an off-year, that is one thing, but if the extreme climate is capable of influencing a significant die-back, perhaps it is not worth the risk that chemicals pose to the surrounding ecosystem. Another interesting question is whether or not either plant is capable of interfering with native vegetation outside of the corridor.

Furthermore, there is a strong social component to this control effort. The emotional reaction towards invasive weeds is strong in Alaska. Pristine wilderness in the arctic is vulnerable to such perturbations in that it is sensitive to exposure to change. Therefore, local conservationists are persistent in their efforts to contribute to the manual removal of these plants along waterways to prevent the spread into adjacent wilderness areas. It is hard to say without further research whether the high level of concern and community commitment is “worthwhile”, meaning 1) whether or not it is effective and 2) whether or not the risk warrants the effort.

I am intrigued by this opportunity to delve into the research necessary to develop a comprehensive social-ecological management plan under such high levels of uncertainty. The data we collect will help to inform decision-making in the coming years and will hopefully lead to effective and efficient management strategies.