There’s not much to report on for the last month. Avery and I are waiting on sage to be ready for our SOS collection goal, and the oil and gas field monitoring for reclamation is over.

Where we collected Krascheninnikovia lanata, winterfat, for SOS

We spent one day inventorying our field office herbarium here in Rawlins, Wyoming and another relabeling the cabinet specimen tags and updating herbarium data on the computer. I saw quite a few plant families I’d never heard of while we worked on these tasks. Santalaceae? Hippurdiaceae? Neato.

A couple weekends ago I finally headed north and saw Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. The Grand Tetons, wow, now THAT’S my cup of tea. Being in the trees was refreshing and I did a nature-filled 16 mile hike with a dear friend I hadn’t seen in months. It was wonderful.

Sunset at Grand Teton National Park

It’s been great having so much sunshine so late into the year. What with having three day weekends (and sunny ones at that) I’ve had a decent amount of time to work on and promote my solar powered art pieces. I’ve made five sales in the last month and a half and now have over thirty of my works in eight states! Now that the weather’s cooling down I’m looking forward to spending even more of my free time indoors being crafty and cooking fall-time foods.

I’ve been learning quite a bit about how things work around here and very much appreciate that. I’m excited to see what comes next (^:

Fifteen weeks down, seven to go!

9-23-13

Hello! And greetings from beautiful Montrose, CO. It’s a crisp, fall afternoon here and I’ve spent the day in the office working on various projects as we wait for the adobe hills to dry out from the approximately 2 inches of rain they received yesterday, the official first day of fall. Luckily, my last two days of summer couldn’t have been better – two days of bliss floating down the Gunnison River with a bestie from college.

I’d also just like to take a moment to point out that I absolutely love everyone’s posts. I’m sorry I don’t comment more (i.e. at all) but I really do read the blog and I love finding out about what everyone is doing and looking at everyone’s pictures.

Now I’d like to talk about the wildlife life count for the summer. I’ve seen:

– a little baby kestral (a.k.a. a fledgling – not really a baby)
– a mama black bear and her three little baby cubs (so cute!)
– a bobcat that had just caught a rodent of some sort
– and numerous deer, elk, and pronghorns

A heard of Lady Elk checking my mentor and I out in Burn Canyon.

Handsome ram snacking on corn in Escalante Canyon.

Little Bull Snake Buddy

While most of my work revolves around rare plant surveys, I’ve also gotten to do a fair amount of work relating to wildlife. For instance, I recently got to head up a gnarly road on a UTV to get back to a small creek up on the Grand Mesa. There we did electrofishing with the idea of doing genetic testing on what we believe is a population of Cutthroats. I’ve also gotten to go out with Jedd, the Hydrologist, to do some macroinvertebrate inventory which has been very pleasent – just beautiful days out playing around in the river.

Possible Cutthroat – waiting on the genetic testing!

My mentor Ken being crafty and rigging a way to weigh fish!

And of course I’ve been doing plant stuff! The CLMer’s from Denver have come out twice now to help out with Colorado Hookless cactus monitoring and Clay-lovin’ Wild Buckwheat monitoring. I really enjoyed working with Carol (CO BLM State Botanist) and her CLM crew – you guys are awesome!

CLM CO Crew! Nathan, Darnisha, Katie, and me after completing a long week of cactus monitoring.

Carol also recently helped Ken and I out with ID’ing some pretty cool plants that we were struggling with (thanks Carol!!).

Crazy plant I found in the adobe’s – Proboscidea louisianica. In the Martyniaceae family a.k.a. the Unicorn Plant family!

Anyway, now we’re working on Land Health Assessment’s (woohoo – more transects!) and I’m getting busy on all the data entry from my Sage Grouse Habitat Assessment Framework from way back in May. Well, I’m signing off!

Brandee Wills
Uncompahgre Field Office – BLM
Montrose, CO

We have been extremely busy with monitoring trips from the alpine tundra (snow can still be seen in a few places) to the desert (by far we are the tallest living things around). Being from GA, there are not very many places you can hike above 14,000ft. Monitoring Eutrema penlandii in the alpine tundra and seeing the little pika was extremely exciting. They can be heard running around the rocky slopes gathering grass, making little haystacks, and tucking them away under large rocks preparing for the harsh winter. During our trip to Meeker, CO, we had the exciting opportunity to see the wild horses on BLM lands spending time in the much needed shade around the pinyon-juniper community.  We also met a few new and returning seasonal employees, research students, and people from many different organizations and agencies.

While the majority of spring has long gone in the foothills of Colorado we took a trip into the mountains above 11,000ft and to our surprise behold spring is still occurring in some parts of this amazing state – just a few hours away from the State Office. There were gentians and gentians galore…these are some of my favorite plants.

The BLM has some beautiful areas that I never knew existed and I feel quite fortunate to have seen so many places that I would have otherwise never known existed. Being a CLM intern is an amazing experience to have. Between collecting seed or recording plant herbivory, I am still amazed by how truly beautiful the West really is!

For your pleasure, here are a couple of photos from some of the places we have monitored or scouted for seed thus far this season. Enjoy!

The CO State Office SOS Team identifying plants near Mosquito Pass.

Along the river we found plenty of potential plant species to collect.

Our plan is to visit the site near Mosquito Pass in a few weeks to see if the Pyrola rotundifolia population is ready for collection.

Pedicularis groendlandica in flower (near Mosquito Pass).

Our goal this field season has been to collect from BLM lands mostly and widen our range of plants specific to certain ecoregions/life zones. We have some amazing collections and the season isn’t even over yet! I’m looking forward to finding more plant species that I’ve always wanted to collect.

Chamerion angustifolium shown. The bees are too busy to notice me, so I take this opportunity to take a couple of photos.

Gentianodes (Gentiana) algida “Arctic Gentian”

Frasera speciosa was a really fun SOS collection.

(photo of myself) Hello my little Sclerocactus glaucus friend, I spent the past winter studying about you. This is the largest cactus that we found while monitoring around the Escalante-Dominguez Canyon area. S. glaucus was very close to being pineapple size. And of course, I decided the next step was to take a family photo (say “cheese…”).

Phacelia formosula (North Park phacelia) is an endangered, annual found in Jackson County. Its endemic to the state of Colorado. Rosette shown.

Happy Seed Collecting,

Darnisha Coverson

BLM Colorado State Office, Lakewood

Three and a half months down, one and a half months to go. We’ve finished collecting most of our species and things are starting to wind down a little. Luckily more opportunities have started to open up. In fact, this morning I’m leaving for a week long camping trip down in the Escalante River for some invasive species removal and plant population monitoring. We’ve done a good deal of population monitoring recently and we’re planning on doing some range land monitoring when we get back. I’m looking forward to learning about that. Another potential opportunity we’ll have is cougar monitoring with one of the office’s wildlife biologists, he’s been tracking one with a collar for a while and examining the kills. We also hope we can get out with the paleontology crew again, but we’re still working on that.
Last week was probably the last Hummingbird banding session we’ll have. It’s been a great season, we’ve caught Black-chinned, Rufous, Broad-tailed, Calliope, and one Anna’s Hummingbird! The Anna’s has never been caught in Escalante before and on top of that, we’ve caught more Calliope than they’ve caught in the past. It’s been a great year for banding.
I’ve been doing a good deal of camping this last month, Zion twice, Arches, and Canyonlands. It’s been great being out here and being able to take advantage of all the great places around me. I don’t know if I’ll be doing anymore major site seeing while I’m here, but there’s still a lot of great local places to check out. It’s also nice that the job puts us out in the field where we end up seeing so much in the first place.

A few days ago, autumn snuck up behind me and caught me by surprise. We were up in the Bodie Hills on a particularly blustery afternoon, reconstructing a previously-established aspen monitoring plot, and I smelled it. It was an electrifying moment—surrounded by rustling aspens just beginning turn and reveling in the unfamiliar urge to put on a jacket, I smelled that wonderful crisp, leafy smell that signifies fall in all of its glory to some deeper part of my brain. It was wonderful. This summer was busy and intensely alive, but I have never been one to dream of living in a place where the summer never ends. Give me gloriously colorful falls, deep and snowy winters, and those springs in which the first flowers to emerge feel like declarations of victory after a long fight with the cold over endless summers. Bishop was starting to worry me when it hit 93 degrees before noon last week, but it looks like changes are coming.

It is fitting that fall found me in the Bodie Hills. Autumn ambushes aside, the Bodie Hills are often filled with surprises: hills that appear to be nothing but gray-brown brush from a distance reveal pockets of wildflowers and fields of lupine when approached, and vistas of the Sierras and Mono Lake appear unexpectedly as you wind your way along the bumpy roads. Nestled between the northernmost peaks of the White Mountains to the east and the dramatic eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada to the west, they are best known as the site of the abandoned mining town of Bodie, the oldest unrestored ghost town in the country. For our purposes, it is a sage grouse haven and home to numerous aspen groves that reveal the damper soils in the region.

Ah, the aspen groves. Now that we have wrapped up our SOS collections for the summer and surveyed most of the sage grouse nests, fire monitoring and aspen surveys have begun to dominate our weeks. The aspen monitoring, a deceptively simple project involving re-surveying permanent plots to track aspen regeneration after different management strategies to encourage aspen growth (mowing, thinning of other tree species, and in some cases burning), has in fact resembled a giant scavenger hunt. Finding the plots themselves has proved the challenge; a few have GPS points associated with the permanent posts, but most are either identified by a grove or simply by a vague description in paper records. Needless to say it has been an adventure, with frustrating GIS sessions more than compensated for the satisfaction of finding T-posts in a grove with no previous GPS information whatsoever. Lesson learned: always create good metadata records as you go, your successor will thank you.

Fall has arrived, our tasks are shifting—did I say our? The biggest change around here, alas, is the departure of my fellow intern, Bridger, who has been a great coworker, a patient teacher when it comes to filling the gaps in my botany knowledge, and the best hiking buddy I could have asked for. I’ll miss having you around, especially on those long drives—audiobooks just don’t cut it. But so it goes. Time stops for no one, and the changes will continue through the rest of my stay here. Some will be welcome, others will require adjustments—but I hope that more of them will resemble my first formal encounter with autumn in the Eastern Sierra. Standing on that blustery hillside, staring out across the mountains and surrounded by the sounds and smells of fall, it was a moment of clarity and quiet exhilaration that I won’t soon forget.

Fall comes to the Bodie Hills

Cedar City is just starting to take on that homely feeling, as the internship winds down to the last few weeks.  5-6 months is about the amount of time it takes, I suppose, for one to really adjust to a new locale.

Our time the past few weeks has been consumed primarily by one project; Utah prairie dog wildlife clearances for cattle guard construction and trough maintenance. This undertaking posed a variety of challenges which required critical thinking, providing us valuable experience developing our field skills and technical report writing abilities.

I moved to Cedar City about 10 days prior to the start of my internship, and by the suggestion of my mentor, used some of that down to attend a Utah prairie dog survey certification course, instructed by a joint effort between the USFS and Utah DWR.  Despite attending this training course, the cattle guard/trough clearances was my first official UPD survey, requiring sharpening my understanding of protocol, of which the details had become hazy over the five months since training.

Our supervisor for the project is a senior biologist who has headed the UPD program within the field office for many years. As such, she made clear from the onset her high expectations for our field work and report. Though the guard construction and trough maintenance had been known about for quite a while within the FO, it fell under the radar and addressed only once the September seasonal deadline for UPD surveys drew near.  This unfortunately produced a narrow timetable for Maria and myself to conduct field work and report writing.

Aside from a minor mapping error, our survey went well, finding two active UPD holes in one of nineteen proposed project locations.  After collecting our data, it was time to write the report. Though we have completed a couple write-ups this summer, they did not come close to requiring the depth and preciseness under a crunched timeline, as needed of these clearances.  This being the case, Maria and I were slightly distressed to find our first draft returned with heavy track changes, despite the encouragement of our project supervisor who applauded our work thus far.  Because some of project areas overlapped with historically mapped UPD habitat, much of the difficulty in the report lied in referencing specific stipulations for required conservation measures.   Another aspect of the report we struggled with was creating maps to properly illustrate where we surveyed in the project action area. Part of the problem lied in a miss-communication between us and our supervisor in expectations regarding suitable habitat vs. area surveyed. In addition, Maria and I are both beginners of using GIS technology to create and alter maps, myself especially. We eventually managed to produce acceptable draft reports for the project within the deadline, and thus construction is slated to begin this week. Given our limited experience and high expectations, it feels good to produce a sufficient product.

Other duties completed the past couple weeks include assisting DWR with seine netting to assess fisheries populations in the Virgin River, and repairing fencing around sensitive riparian exclosures with the field office range technicians.  Both were rewarding, physically demanding, experiences. This coming week we are slated to assist a field office biologist with pygmy rabbit monitoring, a state sensitive species.

Through September, our team at the Colorado State Office has worked to wrap up our rare plant monitoring with a few last trips and has continued to collect seeds, with as many collections as possible on BLM lands. We traveled to Garfield County to monitor Penstemon debilis, a low-growing forb that only occurs on the steep shale slopes of the Roan Plateau. This was one of our trickier macroplot sites and we were working on what can best be described as “Satan’s ball pit” (in which the brightly colored plastic balls are replaced with loose rocks on a 45° angle). The view from the top of the ball pit, however, was really spectacular (for as long as you could stand still before sliding down the slope) and made the tough work worth it in the end.

We elected for some edaphic contrast and spent the following week on adobe clay, monitoring Eriogonum pelinophilum, or clay-loving buckwheat. We had the lottery-odds luck to be in Montrose the week is rained nearly every day, causing the clay to glue itself to our boots, making us all three inches taller and considerably slower than usual. We may also have lost a few friends at the hotel as we casually tracked in a few acres’ worth of muck.

After these trips (which I believe to be the last of our monitoring for the season), we’ve spent most of our time collecting lots of seed from BLM land near Fraser, Leadville, and Fairplay, CO. Snow has recently materialized at our alpine and subalpine sites, which the Okie in me finds completely mystifying. While collecting Pyrola asarifolia near Mosquito Pass, I bent over to poke a pile of snow hiding under some willows (definitely not a mirage) and giggled like the Pillsbury Doughboy.

Last Friday we attended the Colorado Rare Plant Symposium hosted by the Colorado Native Plant Society. This was a great opportunity to learn about more of Colorado’s rare plants, as well as to hear about the listed plants I’ve helped monitor in a larger context. Plus, we got cake and a free mug. So, yeah, things are going pretty well.

The view from our Penstemon debilis monitoring site on the Roan Plateau

Snow sighting at Mosquito Pass

Pyrola asarifolia

Pedicularis groenlandica, or Elephants Head

Katherine Wenzell

BLM Colorado State Office

Lakewood, CO