Thus far September has been a lovely month to be in the desert. Some intense monsoons have brought a lot of moisture to the area. The result has been magnificent: lush ocotillo, a variety of flowers in bloom, and beautiful skies. It has been a very pleasant time to be out in the field.

Barrel cactus in bloom

Green sunfish removal has been the focus over the last month. A contract crew from Phoenix has made two week long visits to Bonita creek. We are slowly catching less and less non-native fish! The native populations of Gila Chub and Sonora Sucker seem to be doing really well. A couple minor flood events have occurred in Bonita creek, one which blew out several of our nets. Several days of frantic searching for the lost nets ensued, but fortunately we were able to locate all of the missing units. The contract crews are done for the year, but our BLM crew will continue our non-native removal efforts throughout the winter.

We have also visited a couple new monitoring sites over the last month. One day we took a long bumpy road out to Spring Canyon. It is mostly a dry canyon, but a short portion has annual water and is home to a population of Longfin dace, a native endangered fish species. We were able to monitor adults and juveniles in the population and also spotted some Lowland leopard frogs. Success!

Lowland leopard frog

Longfin dace

When in the office I have been working on summary data for non-native removal and from monitoring data from different sites. We have also been preparing for the grand opening of the greenhouse at the Discovery Park Campus. I have prepared information cards for all of the plants we will be growing out for restoration projects. At the grand opening there will also be a native pollinator plant give-away. I made care-cards for all of these plants so people have information on how to take care of their new plants. This has been a nice way to refresh myself on all the different plants we will be growing.

I have also had the opportunity to volunteer with game and fish doing desert tortoise monitoring. I traveled to Phoenix and spent the day hiking around Sugarloaf mountain in search of hidden desert tortoises. Not only did the crew track the 15 juveniles in their juvenile movement study, but 3 additional tortoises were spotted, as well as a Western Diamondback rattlesnake and a Tiger rattlesnake. I also made it out to another Sky Island Alliance volunteer weekend working at the Cobra Ranch, a Nature Conservancy property. We planted native grass seedlings at their native grass hay farm. It was a wonderful cloudy day to be playing in the dirt.

New native grasses planted at the native grass hay farm

Tiger Rattlesnake

Desert Tortoise

On the search for tortoises

Another great month 🙂

-Rosalee

Monsoon season is nearing the end and it has left washed out BLM roads, massively eroded areas, torn up roads and sticky traps for our trucks, but most importantly desperately needed water! Although the torrential rains washed away some seeds it has brought new life to the wildflowers. We are keeping hope alive and patiently waiting for them to start seeding then we will be right there to catch them. With roughly 2 months left we have our work cut out for us but cooler temperatures will make collecting more pleasant.

We had a chance to explore the New Mexico badlands near Angel Peak this week. Standing and looking out towards the horizon, being able to see for hundreds of miles and blue skies, it was almost ethereal. I could have stayed out there for hours. I have learned the desert is not my favorite biome but what it lacks in lush vegetation and cool temperatures, it makes up for in expansive undeveloped territories, covert colorful wildflowers, and brilliant huge rainbows! I want to soak up as much of this area as I can while I still can.

We packed all our gear into USFWS’s largest truck – a Dodge Ram. We had two electrofishing backpacks, waders, nets, 16 gallons of water, and four girls’ worth of camping gear and food. Needless to say packing the truck was a bit of an art. So off we went, the project biologist leading the way in a sedan and the Ram following close behind. The trip was about 2.5 hours, only one hour of which was on paved roads. From there it was an hour and a half driving on dirt roads to a campsite and nearby survey areas. We were conducting presence/absence surveys for endangered suckers (Lost River, Klamath Large Scale, Shortnose) in along streams in the Clear Lake portion of the Modoc National Forest in California. Our supervisor showed us the survey sections on the map with a general idea of site priority, showed us where we should deploy our two sondes (named Curly and Moe), then turned around and drove back to Klamath Falls, Oregon. And so we camped the night amongst coyotes howling and owls hooting overhead and started surveying the next day.

The first section we managed to electroshock successfully and most of the fish were Dace and the beautiful and brightly colored Green Sunfish. We pretty quickly realized pretty much all of our patched and re-patched waders had holes in them. But we caught a few juvenile suckers. For each pool that contained suckers, we mapped and took depth measurements – which, in the absence of a meter stick, involved myself wading across the sometimes deep pools and yelling out where the water came up to (2” above knee! Crotch deep! Brr I’m wet now). Then we reached much larger, deeper pools which were much more difficult to shock effectively. The fish would feel the shock and swim away before we could stun and/or catch them. Many pools were too deep for our (leaky) waders and we gave up part-way. Then we reached a wide, waist deep pool and by shocking along the edges the girls caught a large fish which was – Eureka! A sucker! We hadn’t expected to catch such big guys out here and it was super exciting.

The next few days of surveys yielded many Scaulpin, bullfrogs, and more difficult survey conditions. Our last survey site contained large, deep pools with descent size fish that we suspected were suckers, so we employed as many tactics as we could think of to catch them – we tried herding them to one side of the pond and then shocking, we tried leaving the probe in the water and waiting till they were close and then shocking – but this tactic was not particularly successful; they swam as soon as you pushed the trigger. In the end we managed to catch a few through a combination of herding, sneak attacking, free netting and pure luck. We did catch some more big suckers and the biologists at USFWS were pretty thrilled – their presence was unknown as far up the streams as we caught them. We were not so excited about backpack electroshocking in leaky waders.

With 90+ collections, so far, we have surpassed our original goal by more than 50%. We are now able to slow the collections a bit and shift our focus to packing and shipping seed, and finalizing the supporting documentation for each collection.

1. Each collection requires photographs of plant, seed and habitat. From the many pictures taken, we must now choose the best. Thanks to Jonathan, who has been keeping up with this aspect of the project from the beginning.
2. From the multiple pressed vouchers that we have made all season, the very finest are being selected to be be sent to the Smithsonian. The remaining quality specimens will be reserved for local and regional herbaria. Labels for each voucher must also be created. It is interesting to look back on all the plants that we have known this year.
3. While vital habitat data was collected at the location of each plant population, field data forms now need to be fleshed-out and finalized. This includes updating information such as driving directions to each site. Thank goodness for Google Maps! Also, GIS layers are of great assistance, in filling the ecoregion and geology fields for each seed collection.
4. We are also using GIS to create detailed maps for each site.

Although the new seed collections seem to be slowing a bit, there are still several species that have yet to ripen, and 100 or more collections for the season still seems realistic. Here are a few of the later-season plants and scenes that we have encountered:

Ageratina occidentalis

Chamerion angustifolium

Our primary work vehicle gets us to the plants

These little ones didn’t seem so cute while they were jumping up on me as I attempted to collect seed

Helianthus bolanderi cooperating for the group photo

Helianthus bolanderi

Saussurea americana

Epilobium brachycarpum

Hyatt Lake

Frangula californica with pollinator

Lupinus luteolus

The myco-heterotrophic Pterospora andromedea

Trichostema lanceolatum

Betula glandulosa

Ericameria greenei

The appropriately named Rock Creek, Jackson Co., Ore.

I can hardly believe it is already half way through September! That means I am half done with my internship here in Lockeford. Its super sad to think about because I am really enjoying my time here. We have a very small staff at the PMC and so we work really closely together every day. I especially work with one other person, Shirley and so we have quickly become friends as well as coworkers. We share an office as well so we end up spending a lot of time together. So needless to say when my time here comes to an end I shall be very sad to leave this place. I also was super fortunate to find a great place to live while I’m here! I’m renting a room in a big house just 2 miles down the road from the PMC and it is super convenient! Plus I have a great landlord who loves me and said I should stay forever! LOL Its all good for me though and now I’m trying to stay in California for School or another job once I finish up my internship. I’m really happy here, and despite the long distance I am from home and my family I really have loved the experience and want to make a life out here.
As far as work goes we are trying to prep for the busy fall planting season. The fields need to be water and sprayed and plowed and prepped, while in the green house we are planting seeds to grow into plugs for spring planting, and we are working on several acquisitions we were able to make so I’m also doing some business dealings. I have really gained a great idea of how diverse a work place the Plant Materials Center can be, and appreciate the work NRCS and the USDA is doing. We also have several seed mixes that need to be made for our fall cover-crops. I am writing up a special Study Plan to propose and design an experimental study on a new technology for boosting the germination rate of some native seeds that currently are a big problem because they have such low germination rates. I’m really excited about it because I get to stretch my scientific legs as it were a little bit more then I have been lately. But I am now quite the expert at weed control (i.e. pulling, shoveling, and hoeing weeds). I enjoy all the sweaty work though. Its nice to work hard out in the California sunshine. I also did just finish a Plant Guide for the USDA PLANTS database, so if you want to know more about California Fuchsia (Epilobium canum) stay tuned and you will soon see my guide published by the USDA!! I also became a little bit more of an authority and was able to identify some of the herbarium specimens they had at UC Davis to subspecies when I went out there a couple weeks ago.

Otherwise right now its been mostly prepping fields, doing some tractor work, removing weeds and deciding what can be done before the main planting season goes into full swing.

Here my coworker Shirley was using one of our John Deer Tractors to roller crimp the Sudan Grass we used as a summer cover crop along with Cow Peas in our organic field. The grass was a lot of work to get established because of all the times we had to move the lateral lines to water it, but it was amazing to watch it reach 8 feet or more tall in about a month.

In about a month we have to put in the second year of our soil health plots as well, and before that there are a lot of soil health indicators we need to measure and get some initial 2nd year data prior to planting. Its gonna be a lot of work but should be interesting. We were doing a lot of soil coring the last week so we can see what fields are where for nutrient and moisture levels and decide if any soil amendments need to be added or any changes done otherwise.

Using this really large soil corer to pull out soil samples to get analyzed for nutrients. I know you all are especially amazed because of my awesome farmers tan there LOL rolled up the sleeves so we could even it out a bit.

We are also planning on recovering a few areas from Himalayan Blackberry that has taken over, which will be horrible painful work but needs to be done. Besides that there are a ton of other weed issues, but we are doing out best to get that under control and once all our fields have cover crops on them the weeds should be vastly diminished as they are outcompeted by the weeds. I also watched this amazing video by the NRCS called Under Cover Farmers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWXCLVCJWTU) which has some really interesting information on the benefits of keeping soil covered and treating it like a living organism rather then just as what you plant in. It inspired me to use some of the techniques in my own garden! And I think as we apply more and more of them here we will see some amazing improvements in out soil health across the soils there are on the property.

Thats all for now! Talk to you all again soon!

Jesse

These last few weeks I’ve been finishing up my field work with season wrap up work. I went to all the Ranger stations within Wrangell-St.Elias National Park and retrieved the moth traps we put up in the beginning of the season to trap invasive moths, collected our pollinator transects and phenology logs. Throughout the season I’ve gotten a chance to go out in the field with several different people in other divisions of the park and broaden my field experience. I went out with the archeologist and did plant and cultural compliance surveys and also with the park planner to do trail monitoring survey work. Many of the trails within the park are primarily used for subsistence hunting and are accessed by 4-wheelers. The ground cover on the trail we were monitoring consists of moss and mud. When 4-wheelers rip up the top layer, permafrost melts and creates huge mud holes and the land subsides. Along this 16 mile trail, 20 transects were set up to monitor the braided diversions off of the main trail people are taking their 4-wheelers. Once we approached a transect, we measured the length of how wide the trail had gotten from the braids and divided that length by 20 intervals. At each interval we recorded the depth of subsidence and weather the pin hits litter, bare ground or vegetation. Wrangell-St. Elias and Alaska Parks in general are different National Parks than those found in the lower 48 because there are several private property parcels within the parks. Legislation provides private property access to owners within the Park boundary and we found that the use of this trail from hunters and visitors staying with the private property owner is creating major damage of the trail. It has been an awesome summer learning from various divisions within the Park, it has given me a new perspective of how the park’s resources are managed. I am truly grateful to expand my resume to include these new field experiences!

Braided diversions off the Tanada Lake Trail

Today marks the last day of my CLM internship in Vale, Oregon.  It’s pretty amazing how time as flown by.  It seems like it was July just yesterday.  However, it’s obvious that the seasons are starting to change.  September has brought rain and thunderstorms.  I never thought I would see torrential downpour in this part of the country but it still happened last week.  We had been scheduled to do a camping overnight trip in Leslie Gulch, surveying for Senecio ertterae.  It’s a good thing that we didn’t go because when we arrived for a day trip the next day, the evidence of flash floods were everywhere and we were blocked by washed out roads. Living in eastern Oregon has been almost like living in a different country for me.  Ranching is the predominant way of life.  Lightening-caused fires are a constant summer time threat.  Smoke from the fires leads to days of poor air quality.  Water erosion is not a gradual process: the landscape is so barren that one large water event can move huge amounts of dirt.  Birds are everywhere: quail, chuckars, kestrals, ring-necked pheasants, and killdeer.  I also find myself with an acute awareness that if I were stranded out on these landscapes, I would not survive for very long.  It’s humbling to be reminded that despite all of our constructs of modern civilization, nature is still in charge.

The sagebrush has been interesting to experience but it won’t be a moment too soon for me to go back to living among trees.  The people who grew up here say that they get clastrophobic in forests; they don’t feel comfortable if they can’t see the landscape for tens of miles around.  I think I’m the opposite; I almost feel uncomfortable without the cover.

One of the things I think about a lot is how much potential there is for renewable energy on public land out here.  While it doesn’t look like we have much, there is a huge wealth of wind, sun, and geothermal.  There are relatively few people who would be bothered by having renewable energy projects nearby.  There are large amounts of land that have already been overrun by cheat grass and/or other invasives and can really not get that much worse in terms of disturbance.  Despite all this, according to my mentor, there is one single wind farm of about five windmills on all of BLM land in Oregon.  We went to see the project and look at the relatively small level of disturbance it posed on the flora in the area where it was placed.  The BLM is already heavily involved with mining and ranching.  I really hope that in the future, there is a push for renewables on public land because they are already there, just waiting to be tapped.

My next adventure will be a 10 1/2 month Americorp position with the Center for Natural Lands Management in Olympia, Washington.  I will be doing prairie restoration science.  I think that the botany skills I’ve gained during this summer helped me to get this position.  I’m excited about this opportunity and happy to get back to a wetter environment (though, check back with me in a couple months…. I might be complaining about rain).  If any current or future CLM interns happen to be in that area, look me up!  I’ll always have a couch for crashing.  Anyway, cheers!  It’s been great seeing how things have progressed this summer.  I wish everyone luck with whatever their future endeavors are.

All dressed up in fire gear (rather unnecessarily) to look at the after effects of a fire and whether reseeding would be necessary.

Hi!

The field season is barely winding down here at the Eagle Lake Field Office (which I am perfectly content with). Carrie and I have been collecting more Mountain Mahogany and Great Basin Wildrye seeds to plant in the areas damaged by the massive Rush Fire (Aug. ’12), and we’ve managed to monitor another handful of Special Status Plant populations, too. After collecting Mountain Mahogany on a mountain called Fredonyer, we drove up to the top (7789 ft) and climbed into the fire Lookout. We met the lookouts, Bob and his wife, who stay up there in the single-roomed cabin-on-stilts 4 days each week in the summer months–which they’ve been doing for 31 years! It was awesome being able to see our field office from a bird’s eye view, and I was able to point out areas where Carrie and I have done field work, such as the Horse Lake area. Best of all, Bob helped to point out more Mountain Mahogany stands all over the mountain for seed collection.

Horse Lake, a dry lake, or playa, surrounded by mountains.

One of my favorite features of the basalt mountains out here is the myriad of lichens that grow on the ancient rocks:

It almost looks like the rocks have been spray-painted!

We also did some surveying of areas that were burned during the fire last summer. Some areas that had been drill-seeded and planted with seedlings aren’t doing as well as hoped, but then there spots like this aerial seeding site in the Skeddadle Mountains where sagebrush and grasses are sprouting beautifully. We visited an aspen stand high up in the Skeddadles, and were amazed to see the aspens not only re-sprouting from the charred ground, but spreading, leading us to believe the stand may be larger than it was before the fire!

You can see a sagebrush seedling popping out from behind the rock among the burnt antelope-brush trunks and ashy soil.

As the internship reaches its middle point, I’m anxious to spend as much time in the field as possible, gaining more familiarity with the beautiful landscape in which I’ve been placed and more experience with monitoring, plant ID, and understanding the BLM’s unique task of managing public lands.

Until next time,

Deb

For a moment there I thought the monsoon season was over. August here in southwest Utah was defined by bright, hot days and evening thunderstorms that produced more lightening than rain. Now it is September, the beginning of fall, but it certainly does not feel like fall. It feels like spring. Every day there are steady rainstorms, occasionally heavy rain that will fill normally dry washes. Being from the east coast, I am enjoying this refreshing rain. It has cooled off the hot desert and revived the dry, fire-prone sagebrush habitats.

We have started to do some browse assessments, examining key species along a transect to determine how much vegetation is available for animals like mule deer, elk, wild horses and cattle. This involves measuring the leaders on the key species, which is often Wyoming sagebrush. With all this recent rain, all the vegetation has experienced a lot of new growth, like the sagebrush below.

Grasses that were brown and desiccated a few weeks ago are now bright green and alive. Valleys are full of yellow and purple flowers. Lupine, globemallow, sunflowers and thistles are reappearing. The entire region looks more vibrant and alive than it did in May, when I first began work with the Cedar City, BLM office.

September is going to be a month full of work and wrapping up reports as my internship is coming to a close in a few weeks. For those experiencing a lot of rain, be safe out there. Flash floods are a real threat you got to be aware of. I know a lot of interns are also preparing to finish up in different offices, so be sure to enjoy your final weeks!

Office Space

The field season has ended for ES&R monitoring. Our next mission would be to input data and write ES&R reports! Dan and I were on top of data entry from Day 1 and we almost completed the task except for a couple of sites. In order to complete the data entry, we had to separate ourselves from the rest of the office, because we did not want them to go insane with our Latin speak and number crunching. They were fine with our activity, but we wanted to be polite, because we sounded like two robots. (Plus, we did this at the library in a private room and a dude yelled at us for being annoying…<_<)

For example:
Myself: Dan! What did you get for Site 5531-008 in terms of Phlox longifolia.
Dan: Site 5531-008…PHLO2……Density Plot 1: 5, DP 2: 8, DP 3: 7…you got the jest…. 4: 8, 5: 9, 6:2…
Myself: Thank you, Dan. Could you tell me the Ground Cover Percentage?                     Dan: Bare ground 94%, Litter 5%, and Rock is 1%.

We performed our data entry in the BLM Hall of Legends (aka the conference room) located in the central section of the BLM building. The data entry for each site would take us between 20-40 minutes determining on the diversity and condition of the site we have monitored. This was very tedious, but very fun! We had the pictures of the site and compared them with the results. You would be amazed how many different kinds of plants would grow back after a fire. We did notice cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), but many other native plants recovered in the seeding areas. We were finally done with the data entry….now it is time for the ES&R Reports!!

+8 Points Experience for Speaking Latin                                                                            +10 Points Experience for Basic Mathematics

——————————————————————————————————————–The ES&R reports were interesting to type. We included precipitation graphs, plant diversity graphs for each site, a large amount of maps, methodology, results, pictures for each of the sites, and recommendations / conclusions. The reports ranged from 15-50 pages. Each of the range cons we wrote the report with added their observations, funding reports, seed mixes, and previous experiences with each of the sites. We submitted our rough drafts and received good feedback. We are now at the very end and gained an enormous amount of experience with report development and data entry.

+15 points Experience for Data Entry                                                                                 +20 Points Experience for ES&R Report Writing

———————————————————————————————————–

New Opportunities Abound

Our awesome mentor, Casey, visited us during our report writing and gave us an update for future projects! He wanted us to get as much experience from the internship as possible and developed interesting projects for us to work on. One of the projects was to work on the JUNO/ Trimble system. Since we had plenty of GIS experience, he wanted us to create layers, geodatabases, and maps for the whole office to use in the future. Casey wanted us to get plenty of experience using ArcPad, so we could develop a presentation for the office on how to use many of the features. Our mission was to test the tools, list the pros and cons of the system, and develop shortcuts to make the system easy to manage in the field.

Casey encouraged us to develop our own projects as well using ArcGIS and remote system applications. One of the main projects we could work on was the aroga moth project. By using remote sensing tools and algorithms on ArcGIS, we could use four banded satellite imagery and NDVI to detect plant health and find where the aroga moth populations were in the Burns District.

I talked with my mentor and other BLM biologists in the office about future field excursions and opportunities. I really wanted to get SOS training experience just to see what it is like (….since everyone else seems to be doing that. 😉 ). For a small period of time, I would be collecting sagebrush and forb seeds! I am pretty excited about that field opportunity! Another major opportunity that was offered was Mule Deer monitoring. This mission would be to identify what the mule deer forage on. This would expose myself to new plant communities and new field monitoring techniques. I am super ultra excited for the next part of my internship!! \(^_^\)

Misadventures
Vale and Lakeview: Follow the Treasure Map

If you have been following my blog (which I am sure a couple of people have…Hi Family!!!), you would know that I love to rock hound for rare and unusual rocks. My mentor dropped by our cubicle and gave me two treasure maps…no joke! The map had an X written with a sharpie, topography, and township and range. One site was located in the depths of the Vale District and the other was in the Lakeview District where I got a flat tire.

The Vale District was located to the east of the Burns District. The landscape was filled with hills and sagebrush for miles around. The roads were not the best, unamused rattlesnakes were everywhere, and it took me over three hours to get into the site. The site was located in a canyon on BLM land, which contained agates and thundereggs galore. I parked my car and traveled a mile or two into the canyon. I was shocked to see the whole stream bed was filled with agates and thundereggs! They were everywhere! I carried a large thunderegg and many small agates back to the car. I did clean off the medusahead (Taeniatherum caput-medusae) seeds…man, that grass was everywhere! I carried this fifty pound thunderegg around two miles back to the car. I was exhausted! Luckily, I brought an enormous amount of water and a Subway Club™. When I was hiking back I noticed an airplane in the air flying by….then a helicopter…..and two more planes. I quickly made it back to the Ford Escape and packed everything, because there was a fire nearby. When I exited the allotment, I saw the smoke coming from the Warm Springs area. I got to the highway to see all of the aircrafts fly around the fire. Even though the fire was probably ten miles away, the experience was pretty crazy. I managed to collect a large thunderegg and many agates.

Success!

————————————————————————————————————–
I returned to the Lakeview District to look for Mountain Blue Picture Jasper on Hart Mountain. Previously, I went into the area to search for sunstones and ended up getting a flat tire. This time I was prepared! I drove to the X on the map to another canyon. I managed to find clear feldspar, some small agates, and a nice chunk of Mountain Blue Picture Jasper. The area was picked over, but I managed to grab a couple of nice specimens. At the end of the rock trail there was a very nice waterfall. I was nervous about unamused rattlesnakes being in the area, but I did not encounter any.

This was where you can find Blue Mountain Picture Jasper!

White Headed Woodpeckers, Goshawks, and Sage Grouse!

I love bird watching in the Burns District. One of the birds that eluded me for a long time was the white headed woodpecker. I was given directions to one of my boss’s properties which contained an abundant population. He managed the open woodland, which made the landscape ideal for white headed woodpecker populations. I drove deep into the Malheur Forest to a cattleguard where two horses were waiting for me. They did not move when I drove up to them. I honked at them, but they stood there looking at me. One even sneezed on my car, so I drove around them to my destination. (I found out later  that the horses hear a car and think it is their owner. When the owner honks his horn, that means it is time for treats…no wondering they did not want to move..they wanted a treat….<_<)

They wanted toll money…

I finally got to see the white headed woodpecker. They were everywhere!!! I was very excited to see a large number of them, despite the reports of their threatened status. They were not afraid of me and I managed to get close and take many pictures! To attract them, I had to pour water into the dog bowl. Many of the males were flying around and pecked at the metal roof, displaying their territory.

White Headed Woodpecker!!

On my way back home, I managed to see three juvenile northern goshawks waiting in the trees. They were probably hunting the white headed woodpecker. I slowly made my way through the loamy soil to the cattleguard and saw those two darn horses run up the hill trying to head me off. I quickly floored it and made it to the cattleguard before the horses got to me. Near the border of the sagebrush and forest ecotone, I saw many sage grouse walking across the road. Since it was dark, it was hard to see all of them. They were foraging on cheatgrass before moving onto the Wyoming big sagebrush nearby. This bird watching trip was amazing and I managed to see a new bird species! All I have to see now was 135 bird species before I have seen every bird species in North America. (Not including accidentals. Mostly I have to see the pelagic and Mexican border species.)

Exploring the Wild Blue Yonder

Since my fellow intern will be leaving for the Peace Corp very soon, I decided to take a small break and use my work comp time. For the next week I will be on vacation traveling along the California and Oregon coastline. The temperate rainforests, bogs, shorelines, and redwood forests would expose me to a variety of different new plant communities and birds species, which I am very excited about. For my next post, I will include some pictures under the misadventure section.

See you in a couple of weeks!!!

(/O_O)/……..To Be Continued…….\(O_O\)

Justin Chappelle                                                                                                                 CLM Intern working for the Burns/Hines BLM
P.S. This CLM Post has been sponsored by Tote the Note “Get Your Totes Today!”

And now…..your Moment of Zen…