Alaska fieldwork is the best fieldwork: Invasive plant survey trip on the Pinnell Mountain Trail.

Loyal readers: as I sit here on the 25^th anniversary of my birth, reflecting on my summer as a Conservation and Land Management Intern for this, my final CLM Blog entry, I am consumed by a single and pervasive thought: this was the greatest summer of my entire life!!!

Innumerable fruits of my CLM experience; how shall I count thee? I gained tremendous insights into the nature of governmental conservation careers. I gleaned an intimate knowledge of the Taiga Biome, a region nearly entirely unknown to me a year ago.  I ascertained a much greater proficiency in many facets of botany, thanks to my mentor’s wealth of knowledge of the Alaskan flora. For all of these things, I am grateful. However, the single most wonderful outcome of my CLM Internship surely must be… graduate school! Thanks largely to experience and connections garnished through this program, this fall I will be beginning a MS in Biology, with a focus on entomology and systematics, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Alaska fieldwork is the best fieldwork part 2: Posing in front of an abandoned cabin on an invasive plant survey float trip of the Fortymile River.

After years of unrequited applications and inquiries, I finally feel that the career path I have envisioned for so long has been realized, and I will never forget the CLM Program’s key role in making it happen.

Signing off, for the last time, from the BLM District Office in Fairbanks, AK.

Thanks for being awesome, everyone.

Keep your stick on the ice.

Keep on keepin’ on.

Au revoir!

-Logan

Southern Utah is inhabited by several distinctive species, some of which are endemic to the southwest United States.  My co-intern Jake and I have done a lot of work focused on birds – raptors, sage-grouse and common birds found in riparian and sagebrush habitats. We took a break from various bird surveys to help out Cedar City’s Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) with a special rodent species, the Utah prairie dog (Cynomys parvidens).

Utah prairie dogs are endemic to southern Utah, and they are currently categorized as threatened on the endangered species list. Prairie dogs are a keystone species. The extensive burrows they create aerate soils and help moisture penetrate the soil, which is extremely important in this part of the world. Prairie dogs suffered serious persecution after settlers made their way to Utah, prompting federal protection from the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1972.

Utah prairie dogs have made a comeback in southern Utah, however, they have moved into populated areas. That is where the DWR comes in. Cedar City’s golf course and cemetery are full of Utah prairie dogs. And I don’t blame the dogs – there’s plenty of grass and water in these two areas, compared to the drought-stricken rangeland. Prairie dogs can also be found on private lots, digging up back yards and gardens. This does not fly with the general public, and the DWR has stepped up to humanely trap and translocate prairie dogs under the Iron County Habitat Conservation Plan.

Trapping prairie dogs is much harder than it sounds. For one, they are exceptionally smart rodents. They know what’s up after they see one or two individuals get caught. Despite the lure of a thick lump of fresh peanut butter and oats, a lot of prairie dogs stay away from the open traps. Instead, they might reach inside to grab the bait. One of the wildlife technicians I worked with said she witnessed a prairie dog dig underneath a trap to access the peanut butter. Some individuals though, just can’t resist the treat. After four days of trapping on the golf course, we averaged six prairie dogs a day. More would be caught at the cemetery, local baseball fields, and even the small Cedar City airport.

Cedar City’s golf course is full of Utah prairie dogs! This was just a small group. 

We assisted in processing the prairie dogs, which included weighing, determining sex, and piercing their ears with little silver ear tags for future identification. The prairie dogs are then transported to one of three recovery areas on federal land. While these areas might not be as green as a golf course, there is grass and water, and the DWR provides extra feed for the dogs that have been recently moved and are still accustomed to food-rich, man-made habitats.

The Awapa Range, a recovery area where we dropped off several prairie dogs. In the background you can make out some Utah prairie dog burrows.  

Spending time observing and handling these creatures was a real treat, and hopefully my fellow intern and I will get a chance to help the DWR again in the coming weeks. While Utah prairie dogs are not a popular animal in these parts, it is good to see the public and state and federal groups work together to help this species and land owners. It demonstrates on a small, local scale that conservation and economic growth can coexist.

This past weekend while trekking high in the Sierra Nevada, beneath massive slabs of granite turned to the sky, I couldn’t help but reflect on the past five months of my CLM internship.  It seems the grand vistas from high in the clear mountain air always give me a fresh view on life and its circumstances.  It always astonishes me how fast time goes past- how seasons turn and seasons change.  I suppose the theme of my time spent in northeastern California working as a wildlife intern in the Alturas Field Office – BLM could be “surprise.”  Things don’t always work out the way you foresee them unfolding, and even if the road takes some unexpected turns, it is in our best interest to integrate and learn from those experiences.

Looking back, I came into this internship with a single intention in mind.  And that was to immerse myself in a federal land management agency in order to better understand the internal workings and processes which lead to large scale land management decisions within the public domain.  I came into this internship having had the experience of working for a non-profit conservation organization.  I understood how these comparatively small institutions pour their heart and resources into issues which they feel are meaningful and worthwhile.  Coming in, I had experience working within an academic research paradigm.  I understood how universities and their affiliates design and implement research projects to better understand ecological processes.  It seemed that within my experiences there was a gap, and this gap was a lack of understanding of how governmental agencies at the federal and state level interact with one another to develop and implement land management decisions and practices.

Through the hectic field season it was at times difficult to keep this intention in sight and in mind.  It can be difficult to understand the implications of the work you’re completing in the field and how it fits within the larger framework of policy and land management.  It is a good practice to make these sorts of connections.  Looking back, I can say that I accomplished my single intention.  I learned a lot about how these agencies operate and interact with one another, I gained a new vocabulary, and I gained a fairly wide variety of experience in the interactions I had with the botanist, wildlife biologist, fire detail, and other specialists within the office.  Most of all I learned a lot about myself.  I gained clarity into what I need in order to successfully complete my professional duties. I learned a lot about the sort of work environment and community I desire to have around me.  And I learned how to better communicate these needs.  Not to mention, I got to experience a new part of the world and immerse myself in a new community.  All-in-all, an action packed and informative summer.

Until next time- from Northern California,

Phil Krening

Wildlife Intern

Alturas, CA – BLM

pkrening@gmail.com

Mt. Shasta from the Trinity NF (copyright Phillip Krening 2013) http://headwaters.sqsp.com

So far everything out here in Lockeford has been wonderful! I am really falling in love with the area and I really am enjoying what I do out here! I never would have thought about agricultural jobs before but that is such a big part of what the PMC does, and its fascinating and fun and a lot of hard work but I Love it! I’m now thinking about grad school for agronomy and I would love to stay here in the central valley to do it 🙂 hopefully that works out, because I have always been passionate about food and where it comes from and connecting people back to their food and this seems like a perfect way to fuse that interest with a career. I’m so thankful that I got this position!

The last several weeks here have been all about…you guessed it! CORN! We are part of a national soil health study and here in Lockeford we chose to grow sweet corn as a commodity crop to follow different blends of cover crops. It’s been really interesting and we have some cool data that has turned up already, but we will know even more in a few years as the study is repeated over the next 3 years. Its a big push to get people and farmers to start considering the soil in all of their actions because it is so critical to healthy ecosystems and a thriving agricultural industry! I am really hoping this can be an aid to farmers across the country. Until then we have aided a lot of the less fortunate in the surrounding community with all the corn we grew. We have spent hours and hours in the field picking the corn by hand since we don’t have a harvester. All that hard work went to help remove the grain and send it to several local food banks and nonprofit organizations who were in need and willing to use the corn. It was beautiful corn though, grow totally pesticide and herbicide free so it was healthy as well! In the end we donated over 2500lbs of corn and unfortunately we had more but didn’t have the man power to pick it all. Next year we are hoping to get people lined up a bit earlier to help harvest so we can get all of the corn harvested and sent out to people who need it most. I’m really happy all that hard work went to such good causes and I feel really fortunate to be a part of it.
Besides corn we have been planning out our fields and planting strategy for the fall planting coming up which will be super busy, so wish me luck! And the week after next I am going to Yosemite to collect seeds! I’m super stoked! It will be amazing!!!
Until the next time!

These past few weeks have been filled with lots of fish and plants (specifically milkvetch)! I did some of my first fish night work which involved surveying a stream in northern California with a flashlight searching for Modoc suckers. This turned out to be a pretty difficult task as the fish species that we were looking at were about as big as my thumb! Let’s just say I had to get pretty intimate with the fish to be able to identify them. Luckily, down the line my coworkers and I really got a feel for identifying the suckers based on their overall figure and how they moved in the water. I never really thought that I would really enjoy night work as I have always been a morning person but I have discovered that it is so much fun to be out during the night! You get to see and explore another whole new world and atmosphere when you’re out a night. It seems to keep you on your toes more and for me fills me with a bit of excitement and adrenaline. And another benefit is you can sleep in however late you want and have the daytime to get things done and it’s especially nice to avoid the heat in these hot summer months.

We are currently wrapping up our milkvetch surveys at our last field site. The five year monitoring plan is due this year to give an update on the status of Applegate’s milkvetch and determine whether it should still be listed as a threatened or endangered species. We’ve all been searching so hard for milkvetch this past week that sometimes when we close our eyes we can still see it! One of my coworkers even ended up dreaming about it!

Other than that, we have spent some more time in the Gearhart Mountain Wilderness monitoring the bull trout that we have PIT tagged. We have been walking up the streams with a mobile antenna to detect the PIT tags so that we can assess how far the bull trout travel up and down the stream. It’s always really nice to be working in the Gearhart as we get to camp in a beautiful place with some great hiking and birding opportunities. This past week we hiked up to a lookout in the wilderness where we had amazing views and found an adorable brown bat roosting at the lookout! It has been such a great time this summer with such great coworkers and amazing places to work!

Until next time.

My coworkers and I at the lookout!

Hello from Idaho! This is my last blog for the year and I’m sad to be done. I am so grateful for this opportunity and I hope that I can be a part of this program again next year. I have learned so much from this internship and I know that the skills I have learned throughout this experience will help me in my future careers. I have learned so much more about the types of jobs in natural resources and conservation and have learned many new things about the importance of conservation. Everyday was an adventure and I always had new experiences that helped me better understand what sort of occupation I would like to pursue as well as gain the knowledge I will need in order to be successful later in life. I am very grateful for my crew members and my mentor. From the very beginning, they showed me the ropes and introduced me to all of the skills and procedures necessary to perform our monitoring effectively. They were very good teachers and friends and I would not be as far ahead in this internship if it was not for them. Thanks again for everything CLM program, I hope to back again next year.

                Time is flying by and this month was mostly spent inventorying the different types of vegetation and fire-related mapping that already exists.  There is a lot of data and information out there from a number of different organizations and groups of organizations that work together.  Knowing what already exists is important to take advantage and use what is available and also to not duplicate any work that has already been done.  For example, it’s helpful that long-term fire perimeter data already exists for many areas.  Each tool has its own methodology so I’ve also been looking at the advantages/disadvantages of the different methods of classification.  To better understand these methods, I have been working my way through some of the courses that are available through the National Interagency Fuels, Fire, and Vegetation Technology Transfer.  Feeling a bit behind at the moment but hoping to get some key components in place so I can start the actual analysis.   

Selasphorus platycercus (Broad-tailed Hummingbird)

Escalante, Utah continues to impress. My personal botany field journal is growing too fast for me to keep up with (a good thing), especially with having to study birds and bats and anything else we end up working with. It’s good my friends and girlfriend aren’t here to distract me, there’s no way I could get so much work done (off hours) if they were here.

Additional bonus: Our boss told my coworker and me that the two of us can work with anyone else in the BLM/Forest Service as long as we initiate it (and as long as we’re keeping up with our collections). And we’ve taken full advantage of that. We’ve been banding hummingbirds and catching bats in mist-nets weekly. On top of that we’ve been invited by local paleontologist, Alan Titus, to come long on a dig with him for a couple days this week (always nice to go camping for the job). It’s extra exciting because he’s recently been in the news for having a new species of dinosaur named after him, Nasutoceratops titusi (I’m legitimately star struck). Another great opportunity has been volunteering with the Forest Service, this includes more hummingbird banding, Goshawk surveys, and HIKING IN A FOREST! Reminds me of home (NY), great stuff. At the end of September my coworker and I get to camp out for 7 days straight on a Russian Olive removal project.

This internship has been far more extensive that I thought it could have been. I’m excited at all the opportunities we don’t even know about yet. Almost exactly 3 months left, pretty excited to find out what’s in store.

I’m actually nearing the end of my internship now and I can’t believe how fast time has gone.  In all honesty, I will be relieved to leave the desert but I will definitely miss all the cool rock formations, the smell of sagebrush, and the nice roads for road cycling.  This week has been a particularly rough week of hiking.  We were first working in Baker City doing vegetative monitoring in an ACEC at Hunt Mountain and later in the week, we surveyed for Pyrrocoma radiata, an aster.  Both jobs required walking along some serious slopes (probably up to 60 – 70%).  I now know that just because something looks inaccessible doesn’t mean that it is.

Despite the rough hiking, working at Hunt Mountain near Baker City has been my favorite part of the whole summer.  Our first trip there involved conducting white bark pine blister rust surveys with several different forest service employees.  I was incredibly happy to be working with trees again and found the lesson on tree diseases to be really interesting.  The level at which each individual tree was infected varied greatly and sometimes making the diagnosis was much more difficult than you would expect.  The trees living on these slopes were already under a great deal of stress from the climate that they had to endure on a regular basis, so few looked extremely healthy to begin with.  However, some showed symptoms (rough bark, animal chew, spores, tar, and swelling) much more than others.

The spores need moisture in the air to lead a successful infection.  Wet, cool conditions are perfect.  So the warming, drying trend of climate change might actually be good for slowing blister rust spread?  Wrong.  According to the forest service employees, Baker City and the surrounding area might be a rare place that actually experiences greater precipitation with climate change.  Bad news for the white bark pines.  I am very interested in this phenomenon and am considering studying it through a PhD program, which I hope to begin next year.

A quick update on SOS: we have made 11 collections so far and we are coming very close to the end of the seed season.  We only have one more population that we expect to collect from.  Despite having had a few disappointments (species we thought we’d be able to collect that didn’t pan out), we think that we have done pretty well.  Higher elevation areas have turned out to be the saving grace for this year’s drought.

Anyway, I think the next time I post, it will be for my final reflection!

We ran into this female and young bighorned sheep along the side of the road.

A view from along some really steep slopes we were working on near Rye Valley, OR.

The spectacular view from Hunt Mountain.

 

There’s nothing like living on the NorCal coast. It’s foggy just about every morning, but it all burns off by noon and it turns out to be a beautiful day. The Arcata field office also manages an amazingly diverse set of lands. Drive just an hour North East of the office and you’re in beautiful Lacks Creek, where the BLM is currently working on restoring prairies by clearing and pile burning encroaching douglas fir trees. In place of the trees, the BLM is planting native perennial grass plugs, from species such as Festuca californica. These prairies provide crucial habitat for elk, deer, and many rodents, which in turn are important sources of food for native raptor species.

I’ve spent days monitoring rangeland and even more days pulling invasive weeds. We generally focus on the brooms (all from Europe), which have the potential to completely invade grasslands and turn them into monocultures of broom. I buddied up with the Mattole Restoration Council and worked with them on treating invasive weeds in the King Range. There’s nothing like pulling weeds with sweeping views of the California coastline.

Johnny Jack Ridge in the King Range: One of the places where I have collected seed for SOS.

Sudden Oak Death (SOD) is a hot topic here in the Arcata Field Office. The fungus Phytopthera ramorum has been found on BLM lands in our office, and its spread is threatening to enter the Hoopa Indian Reservation. This is especially problematic for them as the disease kills nearly all of the infected Tan Oaks. Tanoak is a huge producer of acorns, which have huge cultural and nutritional value to the Hoopa Tribe. No effective treatments have been found to stop the spread of SOD, but there is serious pressure on the BLM from the Hoopa Tribe to slow the spread of the disease. While the foresters in our office are taking the lead on this project, it has been interesting to see how it is playing out. Given the challenging terrain and the limited success of other methods used to stop the spread of SOD, the BLM has elected to go with more of a forest health improvement approach. This method has been encouraged by one of the lead researchers on the topic at University of California at Davis. This thinning of tanoaks and bay laurels in forests that are generally overstocked with tanoak will take place later this year and into next year. I look forward to hearing what happens.

As a land manager, one of the best things you can do is get out on the land and see what’s there. This is exactly what I have done. I continue to visit new sites and properties, exploring for the presence of weeds, looking for rare plants/species of interest, and generally just seeing what’s going on. One of my new favorite spots is on Red Mountain, which is unique due to its serpentine soils, which host a whole suite of species that are endemic to that soil type, some endemic to Red Mountain.

Eriogonum kellogii, endemic to Red Mountain, state listed as endangered, and recognized federally as a species of concern.

On one of our trips up there we forgot the key to the gate, so we walked in from another direction that we wouldn’t normally go. On this different route, we found an old grow camp (1-2 years old), which was important to note; something we would not have seen had we remembered the key. This emphasizes the importance of getting out on the land, you never know what you might find.

View to the Northwest from the top of Red Mountain.