Fall has hit the Southwest.  Temperatures have dropped, the bosques are yellow-tinged, and BLM employees have unwillingly pulled out their flannels.  There appears to be a general consensus that this is the best season – and I concur, based solely on the fact that field work is much more pleasant when you aren’t sizzling (metaphorically and literally).

My report for the month will be fairly slim because about half the month was lost to the government shutdown.  I made the most of my undesired vacation by attempting to exercise, nullifying all exercise attempts by making delectable foodstuffs, watching movies (Like depressing? Watch Doctor Zhivago!), and stuffing my brain with reading. The most annoying part of the shutdown was fielding the inevitable questions, “How’s the shutdown going? Any word on when it will end?” My internal responses: “I think the shutdown is doing great because everything is shutdown!” AND “Well, in my personal conversation with John Boehner today he wouldn’t give me any hints”.

But alas! We returned to work and scurried around to check if any of our potential collections were still viable. Most were, and we’ve been making speedy work of finishing up our collection season.  Soon we will be moving onto some interesting projects that include monitoring some previously-planted sand bluestem and cataloging night-blooming cereus cacti.

I’ll end this post with some key hints/tips related to seed collecting:

1. When it is windy outside, bring a top for your bucket. Watching hundreds of feathery, miniscule seeds blow out of your bucket is highly demoralizing.

2. When you find yourself collecting seeds in a huge grassy area out of sight from your co-workers, follow this procedure: sit down, close eyes, pretend you’re Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves. Repeat for maximum atmospheric effect.

3.  Have a strategy for remembering what hundred number of seeds you’ve collected – forgetting what number you’re on when you need 2,000 seeds gets old quickly.

So I really have to begin this blog post about the furlough, which is an unavoidable topic.  The furlough was really a mixed bag for me. However, I used that time to study for the GRE, spend some time with my girlfriend, and had a much needed break from a long hard field season.  I tried to make the most of a bad situation and I feel like my time wasn’t wasted. 

On to happier things. We interns participated in a CNPS training that was really interesting and something I hope to use in my career in the future.  The focus of the training was using a system developed by CNPS to characterize an area by its vegetation quickly.  This allows for quick reconnaissance of an area that will give you a good idea of what can and can’t occur in the area, botanically speaking.  We stayed near Truckee, CA in the Sagehen experimental forest, which was an incredibly beautiful place in the middle of the Serra Nevada Mountains.  The training was very helpful and I am hoping the methodology catches on around the country due to its speed and ease.

Finally, we also held a national public lands day seed collection day at Washoe Lake state park.  It was a lot of fun interacting with the public and teaching them how to collect seed and why we collect seed.  The turnout was smaller than expected, but what it lacked in numbers it made up for with enthusiasm.  We made several collections that day of Ericameria nauseosa and Grindelia squarrosa and then we had a nice lunch with the volunteers.

As the internship begins to come to a close, my last day is at the end of December, I am beginning to look toward my next step.  Looking into grad schools and for a job takes a ton of time and I am keeping my fingers crossed that I won’t be unemployed for too long.  Along with thinking about my next move, I suppose it would be a good time for some reflection of my experience here in Carson City.  Perhaps that will be my topic for the next blog post.  Until then blogosphere, until then.

October has been a strange month for me, as I’m sure it has been for the other CLM interns who found themselves staying home for two weeks on “government snow day.” I enjoyed the time off, which I mainly spent watching zombie movies and wandering around thrift stores, but I am disappointed that the shutdown fell on the last hurrah of field season in the Colorado Rockies. The aspens dropped their leaves, and quite a few of the plants we’d been eying for collections shed their seeds while our backs were turned.

Since returning to work, I’ve only made it to the field once–to help snatch up collections of  Eriogonum umbellatum and Rosa sayi–though the rest of the team managed to collect Parry’s gentian (Gentiana parryi) while I was cashing in some comp time. Most of my time in the office has been spent organizing information and photos in the hopes of ultimately creating an interpretive guide to some of the wildflowers found throughout the state. Besides this, I’ve been analyzing some monitoring data left over from previous seasons.

Since this post is a little lackluster (it’s okay, guys, I can admit it), I had planned to throw in some photos. Unfortunately, I seem unable to Add Media to my post. So I guess this is as good as it gets this month. I’ll try to add some more pizzazz to my next post, especially since it will be my last!

Katherine Wenzell
BLM Colorado State Office
Lakewood, CO

Dear fellow CLMer’s –

I know I should hate ATV’s. And I do, I promise, scout’s honor! But…at the same time…I love riding on them. I can’t help it! I just do!

The other day the Ecologist and I headed out to North Delta for Land Health Assessment’s and we went to this small piece of BLM land snuggled between private with no public access and I had the..

BEST. DAY. EVER.

Or one of them anyway…I find myself saying that about most of my work days here, which is the best feeling in the world…and also the worst as my time here is slowly winding down.

ANYWAY! The manager of the ranch that we had to cross to get to the BLM land gave us a ride to the remote location on, you guessed it, his sweet ATV! Me and his amazing boarder collie Cheyenne became best friends, too. So between the ATV ride, Cheyenne, and the most beautiful fall day ever, I’d have to say it was a pretty perfect day.

And now, in celebration of fall, and also creativity which I feel is essential to all scientist, I will leave you all with a poem by the great E. E. Cummings.

a wind has blown the rain away
by E.E. Cummings

a wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand. I think i too have known
autumn too long

(and what have you to say,
wind wind wind—did you love somebody
and have you the petal of somewhere in your heart
pinched from dumb summer?
O crazy daddy
of death dance cruelly for us and start

the last leaf whirling in the final brain
of air!)Let us as we have seen see
doom’s integration………a wind has blown the rain

away and the leaves and the sky and the
trees stand:
the trees stand. The trees,
suddenly wait against the moon’s face.

FALL! Snow’s in the mountains and while I don’t want this internship to end yet I can’t wait for ski season to start! Hope everyone is loving the change of weather as much as I am!

Brandee Wills
Montrose, CO
Uncompahgre Field Office

Going through the furlough was quite the experience… The first week was okay but then as it dragged on, I became so eager to get back to work. It was wonderful to return to work, go out into the field and see that Redding’s trees had started to go through their fall transformations, covering the land in bright reds and oranges! We had to immediately begin our acorn collections since we missed out on a huge window of opportunity. While we were out collecting, I came across some pretty awesome dead trees covered in holes and filled with acorns; it seems the woodpeckers were busy making their little cubbies while we were away and filled them up with nice fat acorns!

We also visited Clear Creek Gorge which is a nice look out for salmon. They are currently breeding so there are salmon everywhere! The water was pretty shallow and the salmon are so BIG! Occasionally the salmon would flip their tails and splash the water as they prepared to lay their eggs. It was really such an incredible sight to see.

We have seen lots of deer families roaming around, which is always mesmerizing to me. They are just so elegant and graceful. Being from the city and not being around too much wildlife really put me in a bubble in that I never really put much thought into hunting.  But now it’s as if somehow I have barely confirmed that hunting is real 🙁 So, while seeing the deer running around makes me happy, I am equally saddened at the thought that we are in the midst of hunting season. Still, I am comforted by the fact that there are tons of rules and regulations when it comes to hunting.

We recently started invasive weed control. The first plant we tackled was Arundo donax, the giant reed grass.There were two small populations in the Shasta dam area. We prepared all of our equipment; I really don’t have much experience with herbicide, so this was my first time. I was pretty satisfied by the success of our efforts and left with a strong feeling that we did a good job and the Arundo wouldn’t sprout back anytime soon.

We have also continued our work with the students from Happy Valley Elementary. I enjoy being able to show them around the greenhouse and encourage them to get their hands in the dirt and treat our young plants with care. Soon, we will start having them help us plant out some of our seeds for next year’s restoration efforts. There is still a lot of work to be done here in Redding and I am really trying to help out as much as I can before it is time for my internship to end. I truly want to leave feeling accomplished and feeling like I contributed to something amazing!

My second CLM internship is coming to an end. The internship started with a hiring freeze and uncertainty as to if I was to be hired. It ended with a furlough. During my internship I mostly learned about the timber industry and weed management. I was disappointed with the lack of botany surveys. The office I worked in has contractors complete the botany surveys. I did my best to teach myself the native flora, but most of my work was writing reports, creating a weed management plan for a habitat reserve, and managing weeds throughout the district. It was an awesome experience and I learned a ton. Another highlight was taking a class on Rare and Sensitive Lichens and Bryophytes at the Siskiyou Field Institute. It would not have been possible without help from CLM.

Last weekend I went to the Mushroom Festival at Mt. Pisgah near Eugene, OR. I volunteered at the lichen booth with some other botanists in the area. It was really exciting to see hundreds of specimens, the leading experts in mycology and hundreds of fungi enthusiasts.

I’m not sure what is coming next for me in the botany field. I hope to stick around the area of Eugene/Cottage Grove, OR. I think I’ll spend the winter volunteering and studying lichens, bryophytes and fungi. I’ll leave the vascular plants until next spring. I wonder if CLM has a limit on the number of internships I can do 🙂

Thank you CLM for all the work and education opportunities. Thanks to Krissa and Wes for always being available when I had questions. CLM is truly wonderful!

Best,

Caroline

Only a few more weeks left at the Eagle Lake Field Office and many things have started to change. Many of the trees have dropped their leaves and the weather has started to get colder. Most recently the mountains have been coated with a white sheet of snow. What a beautiful sight to see. I don’t get to see that in Indiana. The fieldwork has started to slow down. We sent off our last bags of seed to Bend Seed Extractory this week. As we reviewed all our seed collection data from the last five months I couldn’t help but feel accomplished. We collected lots of seed which will go to seed the Rush Fire. That’s pretty awesome!

Since seed collecting is over Landon, the Hydrologist in our office, asked if we could help him with one of his projects. So we’ve been going out looking for potential springs in the northern section of our field office. He had looked at aerial photos for evidence of green vegetation and produced a map of dots to be surveyed. All these points and potential springs will be surveyed so they can be entered into the National Hydrography Dataset. Since springs in the desert at this time of year are mostly dry we haven’t had much to report back. But we have seen some beautiful places and when we do find water it’s an exciting event. While we drive around we’ve seen lots of wildlife; mule deer, deer, pronghorn, badger, jackrabbits, burros, and many types of birds. It’s always so awesome to see them in the wide open spaces.

As this internship comes to an end new experiences and projects are still to be had. We’ll see what the next few weeks will bring.

Until next time.

Fall has firmly established itself here in Bishop—temperatures have plummeted at night, the White Mountains are finally living up to their name, and the aspens and cottonwoods down in the Valley seem to be in a competition for most dramatic display of fall color. The falling temperatures and snowfall have effectively ended our seed collecting season and have brought an end to most of the vegetation monitoring projects we had been running throughout the summer and early fall, and as a result much of my time lately has been split between GIS projects in the office and using radio telemetry to track greater sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus).

Sage grouse monitoring is a year-round project that can take many forms depending on the time of year. In the spring, sage grouse congregate in leks (where males perform elaborate courtship displays to attract females)—providing an important opportunity for the field office to count the gathered birds and estimate the size of the local population. Capturing individuals and fitting them with radio collars allows us to track the birds throughout the year and study their movement patterns and what types of habitat they use depending on their seasonal needs. Tracking collared females to their nests gives us a sense of not only the location of the nests but also provides us with an opportunity to survey the local vegetation and try to piece together what makes for an ideal nest site (e.g. lots of brush cover and no nearby trees or power lines). As the year goes on, the birds continue to move around as the needs of their chicks and eventually falling temperatures dictate where they need to go to find food. As we move farther into fall, more birds will be captured and collared to establish a new cohort to track throughout the coming year.

Tracking sage grouse has proven more challenging than I expected. The basics of radio telemetry aren’t particularly complicated, but out in the field things get more complicated: rough terrain can make the signal seem to appear or disappear depending on your position relative to the grouse’s, and even small changes in how deep into a bush the bird is can make the signal vary. There are some days where the phrase “wild goose grouse chase” seems particularly appropriate—but that only makes getting in close enough to actually see the grouse all the more satisfying.

Greater sage grouse are especially relevant right now, because as of this past Monday the US Fish and Wildlife Service officially declared the “Bi-State” population (found throughout southeastern California and over the border into Nevada) federally threatened under the Endangered Species Act. This is going to mean a lot of changes moving forward for our field office: the Bishop field office has played a large role in managing this population for a while, but with the federal designation there are other agencies and groups that will have a larger role in the future. It also means that there will be changes in land use regulations for areas throughout the region, which is always a difficult adjustment but will likely be especially complicated following so closely on the heels of the listing of three amphibian species in the region. Watching these listings unfold has been a really good lesson in the importance of communicating effectively with the public: if we as land managers and scientists cannot adequately explain why certain decisions have been made and what factors contributed to those decisions, let alone how those decisions will play out locally, conservation efforts on public lands will always be an uphill battle—which only hurts everyone in the long run.

The last 7 months have been quit the learning experience for me. I have made life long friendships and gained a plethora of knowledge. I am joining the Idaho State Dept. of Ag team on Monday for a full time permanent position doing Livestock Investigations. I will also be evaluating environmental compliance with CAFO’s (Confined animal feeding operations) . I am looking forward to my new adventure. Thank you for the opportunity of the CLM internship!

I’m back from our federal furlough and everyone is frantically trying to catch up on missed work. Since I came back, I’ve been building willow exclosures, mapping water sources, and monitoring riparian areas post-grazing season. Last night we got about four inches of snow so more people are in the office than I’ve ever seen at one time.

The big news this month is that I am busy applying for graduate programs. This CLM internship has given me the perfect opportunity to narrow down my interests and finally settle on a field of study. Yay, wildlife biology! Although the government furlough was not ideal for anyone, the shutdown came at a relatively good time for me. I was able to use my time off to study for the GRE, research graduate programs, and contact prospective graduate professors. There is always much more to do on my applications, and the next part will be to just wait and see!