After my three day drive from Virginia, I finally made it to Vale, Oregon!  The environment is much drier than what I’m used to, but the lack of humidity is wonderful!  My focus is GIS, so I have not been out in the field yet.  May 19th was my first day, so I’ve mostly spent the past week training, learning more about the BLM, and asking lots of questions.  Currently, my training is focused on using and troubleshooting ArcPad and GPS units since I’ll be spending a lot of time helping everyone with their GPS units this summer. I’ve also been able to make a few maps for others in the building!  I look forward to learning more about the GPS units and becoming more comfortable helping others with their GPS and GIS questions and I hope to get out in the field soon!

Until next time!

Vale District BLM

Hello everyone,

Just finished up my first week doing vegetation monitoring and camping! Working at the Jarbidge Field Office has been really fun and I’ve learned a lot so far-especially about how an agency like the BLM functions and the typical workdays of techs. Most of my day consists of being out in the sagebrush, gathering data on the habitat vegetation composition and whether it is adequate for sage grouse.

I work in a crew that collects plant canopy measurements using point intercept transects. We also do stem counts on forbs that constitute an important part sage grouse habitat. The forbs are starting to flower more now too.

A lot of my time is spent driving to the field sites in our truck, but I’ve become really familiar with the more rural and agricultural areas (possibly where they grow potatoes?) on the city outskirts.

This week I’ve been up in the mountains of the “Diamond A” allotment of BLM land. The mountains are still snow-capped, and although with the cold, rain and snow you can tell that the area is a very harsh living environment; it has a rugged beauty that makes it breath taking to work in. While out in the field I saw my first badger ever and a golden eagle. I also met some of the ranchers driving cattle through the pastures on their horses (looking every bit like cowboys from old westerns, haha), which was really cool. It was pretty rainy and cold, so we had to return into town earlier than planned, but the weather this coming week is supposed to be much better.

Twin Falls continues to be a nice and quiet city to live in and I’ve had the opportunity to travel a bit more around the area, including the Magic Reservoir, Sun Valley and Balanced Rock, the latter of which is literally an Idaho-shaped rock balanced on a cliff on the road next to one of the field sites.

Next week I will be heading back out into the “Diamond A” for another week of camping and habitat assessment. Can’t wait!!

Maria Paula

Twin Falls Jarbidge Field Office

There is enough work to be done here right now to keep 10 full time employees busy for 60 hours a week. Instead, we have 4. Time management is crucial. It is also a necessity to be dependable and accountable. We have to be able to count on each other to do what we agree will be done. As understaffed as we are, functioning as a team is the only way we can accomplish anything.

I have been out for several days on another assignment, but because we have a good team, and because we have communicated effectively in advance, we continue to get work done. Most recently, our work has focused on weeds management. This has been a bad year for Lepidium species at the Preserve (primarily L. latifolium and L. draba). We use a combination of weed management techniques to combat these infestations including grazing, mowing, and herbicide applications. Rising temperatures and increasing fire dangers create additional constraints as to how and when we can accomplish our treatments.

Overall, we are seeing excellent results in the areas we treat. The only downside is the amount of time we have to invest in these issues to see these results. I hope I will get to participate in some seed collections this season; herbicide applications are not my favorite task. Hope you all are enjoying your spring-

Cheers!

After a month and a half of being here in Central Oregon I feel more settled but still excited about the challenge to cover a large land area to find suitable plant populations for seed collection.

Our Lomatium species are going to be ready to collect after some steady temperature in the seventies for a couple of weeks. The plants’ phenology were slowed down by wind, rain, and cold weather but not our cheery & fun crew spirit. Most of our collections are in beautiful rocky areas near pine trees nestled in the bottom of watersheds. Even so, work in Eastern Oregon is not all a field of daisies. A population of buttercup (Ranunculus glabberimmus) was heavily foraged, so we can’t sustainably collect from that site. I hope we’ll be able to find another population before they are crinkly brown and almost invisible.
Other projects I’ve been working on are making sure our sensitive Calochortus species has fencing around it so that cows cannot graze. It’s a good challenge in using ArcMap and GPS that will be handy for future projects, including Seeds of Success. We’ve also been working with other seasonals on monitoring sage grouse habitat. Unfortunately a lot of sites do not seem suitable for sage grouse, but the mood keeps positive as we work on mimicking the calls they give.

Last week we went out in the field with a wildlife biologist to see his vision for playa restoration. Many playas have been dug out to create watering holes, which have been trampled by cattle. The future vision is to put in wells and to even out the soil in the watering holes. Hopefully we’ll get to seed collect this summer for some of these sites. The least impacted playas have a good diversity of forbs and grasses that would be wonderful to collect from.

Overall I couldn’t have asked for a better place to work and a better focus in botanical work.

Allium, Onion Flower

Balsamorhiza sagittata

View from Forest Hill

Best,
Debbie
BLM Prineville

I started my first week in Colorado on May 13th. It was a hectic week before work, as I had to finish up my final semester at school and drive across country from NY to Colorado in 2 days. Two thirteen hour days of driving got me to Denver a few days before work. I was greeted with an odd May snowstorm which delayed my start date a day due to road closings in the mountains. As I was settled into the bunkhouse in Kremmling, CO I got to know my coworkers. The first week was great. We drove around the BLM land and I started to learn some of the Invasive plant species I will be eradicating this summer. The area is beautiful-surrounded by mountains.

The first day of field work consisted of spraying Thistle (Carduus spp.), and Cheat Grass (Bromus tectorum)  with the herbicide boom sprayer off of our UTV/ATV. In patches that had previously been sprayed and killed, we laid native seeds down and raked in the patches.

The next day we went to Yarmony Mountain and sprayed Mullein, and Thistle that had taken over an old burn site. The whole burn area was covered in invasives.

The next day we went to an old grazing pasture that the BLM had been spraying for years to see how it was doing. It had very few invasives and we sprayed the little that we did find. Today we went up Wolford mountain and surveyed for invasive species. We covered quite a bit of land in our 10 hour day.

The wildlife is great out here. I have already seen Prairie Dogs, a Jack-Rabbit, Big-Horned Sheep, Mule Deer, a herd of Elk, and many Falcons. Looking forward to more adventures in the mountains of Colorado.

Week five is now over. I can’t believe it’s already been that long. Thursday and Friday of week four Susan and I went down to the McDermitt area to monitor two sensitive plant species there: Artemisia papposa (Fuzzy sagebrush) and Collomia renacta (Barren Valley Collomia). We were able to locate one of two populations of Artemisia papposa, and had some trouble with the Collomia renacta. The Collomia is newer and we were unsure if the species we were seeing was in fact the renacta. Overall, it was good to get some eyes out in the area and see what’s going on. We got an estimated count at each site, and took note of their habitat and general condition.

Artemisia papposa

Morning sky in McDermitt

Earlier that week I got to take an ArcPad class through the BLM, which taught us how to use the Trimble GPS. I feel extremely confident in my ability to use the Trimble for a variety of tasks now, and am looking forward to using my new skills in the field. I’m glad I was able to take part in the class.

This week we went back to a collection site of Viola trinervata, and collected another 800 seed heads or so. That will put us over the 10,000 seed minimum for the Seeds of Success program, but Susan will return to the site one more time next week so that we collect all throughout the seeding period. The more seed, the better! It was my first collection this year, and it was very successful.

Viola trinervata field site

We also just finished with the Seeds of Success training course. It was in Boise, ID this year, so we made the hour and a half journey each morning for three days. This made for long days, but was worth it. We learned more about the program, the protocol, proper seed care, seed biology, and plant taxonomy. It was organized well, and I feel better able to collect native seed according to the protocol now. Wednesday we were in the field and did an actual collection together, which put everything we learned on Tuesday into context. There was such a wealth of information there, among all the mentors and instructors, I’m thankful they opened the course up to interns this year. Thursday, as an extra part of the training, we went to the Oregon State University Malheur Experiment Station right here in Vale, OR, to see what can be done with the seed we help collect. It was great to see the kind of research that is being done in an effort to increase the use of native seed on the landscape, and for restoration purposes.

Experimental field of native species

I feel more at home here now. I’ve become familiar with the town, and the neighboring towns, and have more of a routine at work now too. Despite this fact, I definitely miss my friends and family back in Illinois, and am looking forward to heading back in June for the Chicago Botanic Garden training week.

Now that it’s really starting to warm up here I’m off exploring more of Eastern Oregon. This weekend I’m off to Leslie Gulch! I’m looking forward to seeing, and attempting to paint, the beautiful geology down there. It’ll be the first time I’ve camped out alone, so it should be interesting.

Here are some more photos I’ve taken for fun:

Cute caterpillar we saw while seed collecting

Flowers while looking for sage grouse

Penstemon sp.

Hope you’ve enjoyed!

Colleen

Vale District BLM

In the few weeks since my last post, my fellow interns and I at the USGS office here in Henderson have been busy working all across the Mojave Desert in Arizona, California, Utah, and Nevada. Our most recent project is the annual monitoring of perennial plants at the site of the 2011 Hidden Fire in Arizona. This field site is on BLM land in a region called the “Arizona Strip” – a strip of land in Arizona between the border and the Colorado River. This particular site has burned multiple times, converting the Joshua Tree woodland into an area densely covered by invasive annual grasses (Bromus madritensis in particular) that leaves the native annual and perennial species struggling to recover. We were there to monitor the effects of different restoration treatments, such as seeding with and without rodent protection, herbiciding, and seeding density, on the cover and frequency of perennial plant species.

Working in a new part of the Mojave gave us a chance to learn some new plant species and more about this relatively fragile ecosystem. The majestic backdrop of Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument made for some beautiful sunsets and moonrises, and we were able to spot some exciting wildlife. We saw a few horned lizards, a lark nest with three eggs, black widow spiders, and a gopher snake. We head back out next week to finish up the plant monitoring before the busy month of May comes to a close.

The moon rises over a bluff near our field site in the foreground, where few perennial species remain after the fire in 2011.

A black widow catches an unfortunate grasshopper in its web.

The black widow returns to its hole after subduing its prey.

Until next time!

Las Vegas Field Office, USGS

Hello everybody a little late but it’s sure here. My first blog entry for my second CLM internship. This time I got a botany position with the botanist at Vernal, Utah BLM Field Office. My first weeks here went by really fast and it was all fun.  First day, of course some paperwork, a few trainings and certifications and get all the gear ready for the rest of the week.  We would be rafting/floating in the White River, a river originating in Colorado from snow meltdown. The project in the river consists of removing non-native shrub and tree species, in this case Tamarix ramosisima and Elaugnus angustifulia, salt-cedar and Russian olive respectively. The removal of this species will improve native wildlife habitat. Our team consisted of two wildlife biologists, our mentor and botanist Jessi, fellow CLM intern Dani, and myself. The wildlife crew would take us to the spots where treatments would be applied and then plants crew (us) went in and assessed the area to try to come up with a monitoring plan for before and after treatment plots.

The following week I starting out by going out in the field with the weeds tech Jim. The plan of the day was to spray with herbicide the invasive species white top, which mostly occurs in riparian areas. The first half of the day went well but after we returned to the truck and loaded the UTV spraying vehicle, we noticed we were missing a pin from the trailer gate. We had to go back to town get it fixed before any serious damage happened. After we fixed that we went out and did a little more spraying. During this week I also completed another certification.  Then I explored the Seeds of Success database from previous years’ collection seasons and tried to figure out where to start scouting/collecting this season’s seeds. We ended the week by touring around the Vernal BLM resource area with two biologist from the US Fish and Wildlife Service Utah state office who were interested in seeing the work and progress being done in the conservation-monitoring of various sensitive species; a few of them were two species of penstemon as well as two different species of barrel cacti; Sclerocactus wetlandicus and Sclerocactus brevispinus.

So far this internship looks promising for a fun and learning work experience in the conservation and natural resource management field.

Until next time!

Hector Elias
2014 CLM Intern
BLM Vernal Field Office
Vernal, Utah

It has been a month since moving out to Idaho and starting work and things are starting to take off.  The sagebrush and grazing pastures are starting to look familiar, and I no longer feel completely disoriented when we take a new route to a site.  Our work consists primarily of HAF (Habitat Assessment Framework) monitoring to collect data on the vegetation and habitat available to Greater Sage Grouse in Twin Falls’s field office.  I’m still struggling with many of the plants and some days feel that grasses are beyond my grasp, but it is incredibly rewarding to be able to walk through a pasture and name so many of the forbs we pass on the way to our transect sights.

The days are long and we are still working on establishing a routine in order to get more sites done in one day.  Despite the long days, the work is interesting.  We will never revisit any of our sites and I am intrigued by the idea of spending so much time and effort on 100 meters of an area only to uproot our transect lines and move on without much more thought.  The world shrinks down to one meter points for a few hours and then expands back out into the large skies of the sage brush.

We just got the third member of our five member crew.  The three of us are all CLM interns and it’s been incredibly enjoyable to help train him in and watch someone else experience the brush with such enthusiasm and pleasure.  Next week we’ll start doing 4 days camping out in the field in order to reach the further sights.  I’m thrilled at the idea.  Our trailer will be in a campground by a river.  To be near water again is going to be wonderful.

The desert here is beautiful, with the real beauty showing in the details and the intensity of the landscape.  From a car the scene looks homogenous, varying only in so much as whether areas are grassy or filled with sage and rabbit brush.  Once on the ground the area is quickly differentiated by many details and the land’s character shows through.  It is a harsh landscape in that there is no shelter whatsoever, from sun or the often intense wind.  But it is a wonderfully serene place and I am always thrilled to be able to see for miles and to watch the clouds move in.  These kinds of skies are some of my favorites.

I’ve had the opportunity to see some phenomenal birds while out here, including our main focus the sage grouse.  Horned larks, Brewer’s sparrows, sage larks and Swainson’s hawks are daily companions.  We lucked out to see what I think was a short-eared owl sitting on a fence post the other day and drive by a Ferruginous Hawk’s nest.  Horned toads are everywhere and even a bull snake was spotted today.  Earlier this week we were watched by four pronghorns, all strung out along the horizon line, and two days ago a group of young cows attempted to eat our transect tape.  The animals are ever present and often very subtle, a challenge and daily delight.

I’m looking forward to the next several months and the thought of becoming adept at the work.  I am also delighted by the idea of what we might see during this time and how we will begin to understand the area better.