Hello Fellow CLM’ers!

I am a Master’s student at Northwestern/Chicago Botanic Garden. For my CLM internship I’m doing fieldwork for my thesis on the Colorado Plateau at the Rio Mesa Center in southeastern Utah. I’m studying native grass selection to invasive plants to determine if certain seed sources are more competitive with invasives, which could improve restoration success at previously-invaded sites. At the Chicago Botanic Garden I grew Sporobolus airoides seedlings from plants collected at long-term Acroptilon repens (Russian knapweed)-invaded populations and nearby non-invaded populations. I planted these seedlings in a common garden in a knapweed-invaded floodplain at the Rio Mesa Center to compare trait differences between the different seed sources (invaded plants and non-invaded plants).

We’re also driving all over the place (near Moab and Grand Staircase) doing seed collection for SOS and another master student’s thesis (Maggie Eschleman) and having a great time. Highlights include a nighttime drive through Arches National Park and lovely drive up Onion creek where we found the elusive Astragalus lonchocharpus we were hunting. We’ve also adapted to a siesta-like schedule to avoid the 100 plus midday heat by waking up early, taking a long midday break, and going out again in the evening when it’s cooler. So excited to be here all summer! Looking forward to more adventures!

Accommodations at the Rio Mesa Center

Terrible biting fly and knat year!

Putting out plant tags to keep track of over 450 Sporobolus airoides plants.

Looking good 1 month after planting.

Common Garden study plots in a Russian knapweed-invaded floodplain at Rio Mesa

Hello again everyone. It seems my internship is coming to an end here in wonderful Kemmerer, Wyoming. I have had a wonderful time and I have been able to gain so much knowledge; I would have never had the chance to learn without the CLM program and my mentor. Having a chance to work in the wildlife field is something I will never forget and hopefully I will have the chance to do again. Much of my time this winter was spent doing paper work, although paper work can be very boring, I was able to gain understanding of what NEPA work really is. Also, I was able to spend much of my time this winter working in the ArcGIS program.  This program seems to very valuable, but can be very complex. When field season finally did role around I spent time mapping springs and reservoirs for habitat functionality. I was able to complete Sage Grouse lek surveys, which by the way is really cool, if any of you reading this ever get the opportunity to do lek surveys make sure you jump at the chance.

Although I did have a wildlife internship, all of my background and degree have been focused in the Range Ecology aspect of land management. Having the Range background, my mentor let me also spend some of my time with the Range Management Specialists in the office.  This time was spent learning how to do important tasks, such as grazing permit billing, grazing permit transfers, learning the BLM filing systems, and working in the computer programs RAS and RIPS.  With the aspect of understanding Range Ecology and Wildlife Biology I feel I have a better understanding of the relationships these two fields have with each other.

With the ending of my internship I will be taking a week off over the 4^th of July week, and returning to the Kemmerer BLM office as a seasonal Range Technician on Monday the 7^th. With my return to work I will have the opportunity to continue working with others at the office, and continue my learning process working in both, range and wildlife.  Hopefully after this summer technician position I will have gained enough experience to find a permanent job with the BLM. If I haven’t by then, hopefully I will be back as an intern next winter.  Have fun, and be safe!

Jeremy Sykes

Bureau of Land Management

Kemmerer, WY

Its been a little over a week back from the CLM internship conference in Chicago.  It’s also been a little over two months into my internship in the San Juan Islands National Monument.  I’ve spent the bulk of my first two months planning my project and creating databases for my information.  Now I’m finally at a point where I get to the field nearly every day.  Let me tell you, I don’t miss the computer time.

Last week, I completed several forestry surveys, line point intercept surveys, and recorded several listed rare species in the archipelago.  I worked primarily on Lopez Island, the homebase of the monument, but got to spend a day on the beautiful Patos Island.  Patos is a two hundred acre island and is the very northwest point of the continental United States.  On it is a lighthouse, 8 campsites, and plants not seen anywhere else in the archipelago (namely Columbia Lily and While Fawn Lily).  It’s also a great spot to view marine life, with frequent seal, oystercatcher, peregrine falcon, eagle, and porpoise sitings, and less frequently ocra sitings.  I came to Patos with Keepers of the Patos Lighthouse, a group that works to maintain the island with monthly work parties and stays on the island during the summer months to educate its thousands of visitors about the lighthouse and its history.  Though I wasn’t helping them with work party I saw them remove loads of blackberry and maintain the trail.  It’s always impressive to see how much work they can accomplish in a day.  Also around on Patos that day was the American Hiking Association; they had been volunteering with various public lands that week and were on Patos to help maintain the trail.

My time on Patos and on Lopez last week was largely spent in the forest.  The salal, roses, Himalayan and trailing blackberries don’t make it easy to reach a sample point, but I’ve found the forest systems of these islands fascinating.  The topography, soil type, bedrock, and water availability are hugely variable within any given parcel of land on the islands, and these abrupt changes can be seen looking at the forest canopy.  The Douglas Fir is the dominant tree in the San Juan Islands as well as most of the western coast.  However, I often come across pockets where grand fir, red cedar, rarely sitka spruce or bigleaf maple dominate where conditions are favorable.  While west coast tree diversity often pales in comparison to the east, I was impressed to find a stand on Patos island dominated by Grand Fir and Douglas Fir, with Red Cedar, Douglas Maple, Western Yew making the understory tree community.

Typical Douglas Fir forest in San Juan Islands, WA

This week I spent surveying land on coastal bluffs.  This means lots of grass identification and not a lot of plant diversity.  Still, I can’t complain about the view.

View from line point intercept sample point at Point Colville, Lopez Island, WA

Here are a few pictures captured within the last few weeks of field work.  I hope everyone is having a great field season with lots of collections and tons of new plants.

Jen McNew

Spotted Coralroot (Corallohiza malculata) in early July on Lopez Island

Nodding onion (Allium cernuum)

Hooker’s Onion (Allium acuminatum)

Harvest brodiaea (Brodiaea elegans)

Orange trumpet Honeysuckle (Lonicera ciliosa)

We have fish! We spent a week setting drift nets between 8 pm and 1 am (when the larval suckers are higher in the water column), off a bridge over a river where the adult fish are known to spawn. The first night we filled two coolers with tiny fish. We left them in the coolers over night, with a bubbler to keep the water oxygenated, and then transferred them to the pens the next morning. Each night we got fewer fish, but in a week we managed to collect enough to fill three of our five pens. The remaining two pens we filled with larval suckers brought up from a hatchery in California. The fish from the hatchery are Lost River suckers, the fish we caught are either Lost River or short nose suckers, they’re still too small to tell which. With any luck they’ll be short nose suckers, but either way, they’ll be valuable in testing and developing methods of rearing larval suckers.

Dock in progress at Tule Lake site.

Pens at Upper Klamath Late site.

Nets set at night to collect larvae.

Algae at one of the pens.

Since getting the larvae into the pens, we’ve been working on deploying Data Sondes to monitor water quality. We’re particularly interested in, among other things, dissolved oxygen because at some point in the season the algae is going to start blooming rapidly. Not too long after that, it will all die and the dissolved oxygen is going to plummet. At that point, we’ll be setting up an aeration system with a generator powering a bubbler that will aerate the pens 24/7 until conditions improve. So the focus over the next few weeks will be to get a good system down for reading and re-calibrating the Sondes and monitoring the fish and the water quality, and preparing for the crash.

A cooler full of larvae.

Up close and personal with a larva.

Larvae from the hatchery.

A lamprey that got caught in our net.

The heat is creeping up on us at the Safford BLM office. While the days are merely warm now, in a few short weeks southeastern Arizona will be as hot and dry as ever.

Our crew has been spending time mapping invasive Tamarisk as of late. We have been hiking remote drainages and using a Trimble Juno 3 series to map the locations and details about populations of invasive Tamarisk. These populations will be removed as soon as possible by work crews. The mapping project has allowd our crew to see some beautiful areas. One drainage was located in the Dos Cabezas. Only small pools of water existed, but a plethora of flowers were in bloom around these areas. Several small populations of tamarisk were mapped along ~5 miles of the draingage. Another large mapping project took place in Deer Creek, a drainage that runs into Aravaipa Creek in the Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness. Access to this area was very remote, but once we arrived we area able to map ~15 miles. The first day we hiked the upper 6.5 miles up stream from our camp. This portion was fairly rugged with a lot of exposed bedrock. We met 4 rattlesnakes on our journey: 2 western diamondback, and 2 arizona black. The 4th snake we came upon was hidden in a pile of flood debris, and we didn’t notice it until I had reached to grab a walking stick out of the debris and received a vigorous rattle in response. Quite a fright! Only a few small tarmarisk were mapped in this stretch, and it should be fairly easy to remove these populations once the area is reached. The second day we hiked the lower 8 miles from our camp. This portion quickly turned from an open wash to a magnificent slot canyon. The canyon walls were absolutely beautiful. A couple of small springs along the way provided enough moisture for incredible plant diversity. We located several populations of the rare Arizona woodfern, and saw diverse flowers in bloom, including Golden Columbine, one of my favorites. In the cool, shaded canyon the snakes weren’t even around; another plus! With such beautiful scenery, it was a challenge to focus on finding our foe the tamarisk, but we did map at least 15 individuals. Over two days our crew hiked 29 miles. It was a feat, but well worth it to determine the efforts needed to remove tamarisk from Deer Creek, and enjoy such a beautiful area.

It is also the season for us to complete fish monitoring at Bonita Creek, Aravaipa Creek, and the Gila River. The annual Bonita Creek monitoring was a week-long task that required many hours of UTV travel to reach some of our sites. The upper portions of Bonita creek are remote and much more pristine when compared to the lower portion, where our non-native removal takes place. The Reservation Boundary, Midnight Canyon, Red Knolls, and Lee Trail are the Upper Bonita Creek sites where non-natives have not invaded, and intact populations of native fish are doing well. Gallery, Upper Site 1, and Serna Cabin are the three monitoring sites in Lower Bonita Creek where non-natives are prevalent, but native fish are still present as well. Our monitoring consists of setting promar, red promar, and metal minnow nets in the large pools and electrofishing the riffles and glides. This was my first time to electrofish! We also performed a pebble count with the gravelometer to measure the substrate in each habitat. Each fish that is caught is identified and measured to obtain age data. The Bonita Creek monitoring was started in 2003, and data from all 11 years is kept at the BLM office. Lee trail was my favorite site. Along a rock wall there is a deep pool where the natives could be easily seen. Sonora Suckers could be observed mating. Several males were following females around in the shallow sandy area. The females lay eggs in sandy areas for incubation. Males follow the females waiting for her to deposit eggs for fertilization. A large number of Gila Chub were also visible enjoying the great pool habitat. I had not traveled to any of the sites in Upper Bonita Creek, so getting to explore this area and see so many native fish was a treat. Observing natives flourishing in proper habitat without the presence of non-natives highlights the importance of the work I do here. Without non-native removal efforts and habitat monitoring and improvement, these native fish would be in even more danger then they already are.

The spring fish monitoring in of Aravaipa Creek was just completed as well. Aravaipa is home to 7 native species of fish, 2 of which are federally endangered, the loach minnow and spikedace. It is always a great pleasure to monitor in Aravaipa. The canyon scenery and intact native fish assemblage makes for a wonderful couple of work days. Our monitoring protocol in Aravaipa was established in 1963 by Dr. Minckley. The collection of data from the fish populations in Aravaipa for so many years is extremely valuable information for the species that live there. Each 200 meter site is seined throughout, by either seining downstream, or kick seining. In the upper sites, a healthy number of both endangered species were collected. In lower sites, some non-natives are present, including red shiner and yellow bullhead, and native populations are not doing quite as well. The Gila River monitoring is scheduled for June.

My work with ArcMap has continued and my skills are becoming more defined. Updating the Gila River Guide maps was a good task for me to work on, and I am much more proficient with creating maps in ArcMap. I have also been working on extracting data from SEInet to get precipitation information on the pollinator plants we are growing at the greenhouse. I am realizing what an amazing resource ArcMap is and the diverse projects that can be completed using this technology.

After a week at work in Alaska and a wonderful week back home in Chicago at the CLM intern training I am back in Fairbanks, AK and officially settled in to my new home for the next 8 months.  The first few weeks of my job have consisted of mostly office work and trainings, and so I was quite excited when I finally got the opportunity to go out into the field the other week.  I shall recount that story here.

Twenty minutes before some fellow interns were to go out in the field to fix a water catchment system at a cabin and survey trails, I found out that I would be able to go with them.  Even though the weather was less than ideal, I jumped at the opportunity to get out to the field for a few days.  Despite the rush I was ecstatic to finally be getting out to the field—might have even leaped for joy at one point…

We ended up leaving Fairbanks around 5 for the foggy and damp 1 hour drive to the White Mountains. Upon arrival, however, we discovered that one of the interns had forgotten some essential items—namely water for himself and the garbage can lid that we were to use to replace the water catchment system.  So we ended up driving back to Fairbanks, buying a garbage can lid, then driving back to the White Mountains, arriving back at the trailhead and beginning a ~8 mile, ~4 hour hike at 8:30 PM.  Good thing about Alaska in the summer is you don’t have to worry about the sun setting on you.

At this point the rain had picked up and the weather was generally pretty miserable.  The trail was in poor shape—the majority of it was flooded and areas that had boardwalks or wooden planks were mostly rotted away or broken.  We began the hike, often sloshing through standing water, climbing up and down mountain ridges, over fields, through spruce forest, never able to see much more than 30 feet from us due to the fog and rain.  We forged onward and ended up at the cabin at around midnight, cold and drenched to the bone.  We used the dregs of a few small propane bottles to heat up the cabin a bit, changed out of our wet clothes, read by the Alaska midnight sun for a bit, then fell asleep.

In the morning that beautiful wizard Mother Nature sent bright rays of sunshine through the tiny window of our cabin.  We awoke to an absolutely gorgeous day and even more gorgeous view of the surrounding mountain side and foothills that had previously been entirely shrouded in clouds and fog.  Our spirits much higher, we fixed the water catchment system and enjoyed the views. I took a trip around the cabin area to check for invasive species (none found, yay!) and we started the long walk back.

No invasives, just lots of spruce.

The morning/early afternoon was absolutely gorgeous and afforded us some beautiful views that overcast conditions had hidden from sight the day before.

What previously looked like Mordor is now a pleasant hike.

Shortly, however, that evil sorceress Mother Nature sent from the other side of the ridge an ominous dark cloud that promptly settled above our head, let loose an enormous thunderclap and began to quite violently spit hail at us.  We plodded on. On our way back along the trail, we stopped to take GPS points and denote the condition of the trail, boardwalks, and wooden planks. One of these stops occurred when the rain had briefly subsided.  I counted 57 mosquitoes on just my fellow intern’s legs at one point in time during this stop.

In time we finished the hike, again sopping wet and chilled to the bone once we arrived at our destination, but content on having accomplished something.

Since this adventure I have been back in the office.  Currently I am working on getting up to speed on NISIMS (National Invasive Species Information Management System), and loading data onto Trimbles for an upcoming trip to Chicken, AK to inventory for invasives.  In addition, I am using GIS and some good ol’ fashioned maps to locate rare plant populations that are accessible by trail and/or river float for future monitoring trips.