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.

Greetings from Wyoming!

These days life really is a highway. Life is then usually a dirt road, followed by an obscure 2-track and occasionally a dead end, but more frequently a network of paths that aren’t even on the map. Seed collecting has been taking me and the Seeds of Success interns hither and yon all over the eastern part of the state. I’m still amazed at how diverse the landscapes are. From the shortgrass prairies to the sagebrush steppe, from the alpine forests down the foothills, into riparian corridors and back up the bluffs, we get to see a lot of country.

We also get to see a lot of weather, and the summer storms have been amazing to watch (although they do not always bring very much moisture…). Alas, it was during one of those storms that Wyoming decided I was due for a new windshield. On the bright side, a healthy respect for this environment and the plants that adapt to it is not amiss.

Summer’s flying by!

Cheers, Abby D.

Hello again,

Another month has fled by here at the Surprise Valley. The month of July started out by attending a week long great workshop with the Great Basin Institute, Eagle Lake and Alturas Field Offices staff going over the Assessment, Inventory and Monitoring (AIM) Strategy- ( Emergency Stabilization and Rehabilitation (ESR) monitoring protocol) the workshop was presented to us by researchers of the ARS Jornada Experimental Station. The protocol covered the whole process of establishing and running a monitoring plot. Several techniques include site characterization; in which the general area is described, soil profile description, plant species list, line intercept point, gap measurements, quadrat density and belt transects. It was a great opportunity to meet people in our field of work and of course acquire more useful knowledge to work towards managing natural resources.

The rest of the month we have been working on the ESR monitoring on an area disturbed by a wildfire last year. The whole process did not look that hard or time consuming during the workshop compared to how it really works on the actual site. We are still getting the hand of it but it is going smoother as we get more experience on it. Also on the days we are not monitoring I get some time to work on the seed collection which is going good, we have collected a good amount of species and still waiting for others to seed out. On one of the collections we partner up with the FFA club students from the local high school and collected Purshia tridentata (antelope bitterbrush) seed which will be started on their greenhouses and later on the seedlings will be planted on areas recovering from fire. I still get to help out the wildlife staff with which I had the chance to do some surveys on big horn sheep, help out in sage grouse habitat improvement projects and earlier this week I got the chance to help out the Modoc Wildlife Refuge do some duck banding which was a fun learning experience.

Until next time,

Hector Elias
2013 CLM Intern
BLM Surprise Field Office

So this is apparently a fairly long growing season for the Buffalo Field Office. We expected to be done running transects by late July. Our stack of completed allotments continues to grow, and more exciting opportunities keep showing up. Even more amazing… after all this time in the field, we keep finding species we haven’t come across before. We’ve literally been all over these plains, seen numerous ecosites, and are still keying new plants. There’s even a grass (commonly called Buffalo Grass) we’ve seen in one allotment growing abundantly that we’ve yet to see again. Pretty Awesome.

Earlier, I had the chance to camp out for about 4 days and assist in an interdisciplinary assessment of a local wildlife study area. The first part involved boring a number of trees for age, checking them for insect damage, and overlooking the canyon below (for science, of course). I learned so much about the effects of fire and insects from our fuels specialists and her counterpart from a nearby office. They are so knowledgeable  professional, and instructive. Really impressive people. Next, it was quite the hike down to the bottom of the canyon where there were water assessments, invasive plant assessments, raptor nest scouting, and bat collections going on. My first time seeing a bat   up close, and let me tell you, It Was Awesome! My girlfriend, who works with bats, would always tell me how cute they are. I naturally shrugged it off until I had my chance. They’ve got some amazing adaptations. From the structure of their arms to their squished noses to their incredible ears. We caught a rarity once. It’s called the Townsend Bat. Look it up, and see those ears and nose for yourself.

One of my fellow interns Kelly and I were given the task of corralling a group of children for a morning lesson on plants. We were given the freedom to create our own lesson plan, so (with the aid of the awesome booklets Kelly made) we were able to describe many uses for plants and how pollinators work in a particular ecosystem. Apparently edible plants are the best way to get a youngster’s attention, but maybe not hold it. They were so anxious to eat every berry they could find. Thankfully they ran up to us and asked if they were “eat-able” first.

Not so much job related, but I was graced with a visit from my significant other between her bat studies. I had prearranged plans during that time so I was here for about half of it. Thankfully, she had Kelly as appointed ambassador of Buffalo to show her the rodeo and other excitement. I feel fortunate to have had the time to show her around the amazing town that is Buffalo. We were able to see Devil’s Tower during Sturgis bike week. The monument is stunning. The theory on its formation is mind blowing. The statement in the visitor center on the aim towards silence while hundreds of bikes roar around was humorous.

Onward to more fun in the sun with the friends and coworkers I have here in Wyoming. Stay tuned for more action.

I am currently writing to you all while I am happily on sipping on some pineapple coconut water in the cool weather of San Diego. Although it’s nice to have a mini vacation from the now “cool” climate in Phoenix (thank goodness for the monsoon season…), I will be more than happy to return to participating in another Desert Tortoise survey and helping conduct sensitive status species (SSS) plant searches forAgave murpheyi. Most recently, I was able to attend a presentation on mountain lions hosted by the Arizona Game and Fish Department. I was excited to learn that my mentor had taken part of the research study when it was first formed and had asked numerous questions involving the how’s, why’s, and where’s of the research.

I will be sad to say that we conducted our last Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo survey last week and I never did see one, however, my bird identification skills have definitely increased since the beginning of this internship! And now I only have 3 more weeks left…so that means I have to try and fill up my days with as much knowledge and skills as I possibly can since the end is so soon!! 🙁 I can’t wait to update you all with what I have in store for my remaining weeks as CLM intern!

Hello fellow interns! I hope you’re having a wonderful time in your respective locations. Time is certainly flying by here in Buffalo, WY. My internship is already at its halfway point, which means a job search is probably in my near future. As much as I love my job here, I know it won’t last forever (sigh). My fellow interns and I have made lots of progress in both Seeds of Success and range monitoring duties. One of the things I love about working at the BLM is the amount of flexibility we have. People can coordinate interdisciplinary projects without too much headache, and it really helps to get things done when essential staff are gone. The SOS interns have been a huge help in our range monitoring duties, and us range interns have been able to assist SOS with some collections as well. However, field season is winding down (as I’m sure you all know) and there are opportunities to get involved with other projects. Just yesterday we were able to help with a project to clear out an area overgrown with pine trees by stacking the felled trees to prepare them for burning. Hopefully we will get to spend more time in the mountains for work, but we shall see. It’s nice taking these big work trucks into the wilderness, for they can reach places that my little Toyota Camry cannot.

Our work in the field is typically lots of fun. An interesting thing I’ve learned is the amount of variability in landowner attitudes towards government entities. Many ranchers and landowners are friendly and understanding when they deal with government employees. I enjoy these people, because they make our job much easier. Some people are relatively indifferent, or grudginly cooperative. A select few are downright rude, and even openly hostile. The latter can certainly ruin your day, as some fellow interns have discovered. All in all, a day in the field is typically a day well spent. Sometimes field work can get a little monotonous, but I’ve found it’s easy to spice things up by serenading your co-workers with some ’80s pop hits. Roxette always seems to make the day go by faster! It’s also a plus if you have awesome people to work with. I just happened to get lucky and be stuck with a bunch of fellow Alanis Morissette fans. How cool is that! Anyway, if you made it this far, thanks for reading and enjoy your weekend!