Wow. This is it. My CLM internship is over. I can definitely say that this has been my favorite internship so far, for many reasons. Coming out here I didn’t know exactly what to expect. I knew that I would be working as a range tech for the BLM in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Oregon. I grew up in Salt Lake so I wasn’t worried about living out west or being in high desert, but all of the plants I knew how to identify were eastern plants. I knew nothing about sage brush or grasses, things I would be working with here. However, I knew this would be a good challenge. In the past four months I’ve learned how to identify at least 10 species of grass, about six species of shrubs, and countless wildflowers. I really impressed myself and I’m excited to head to a new area of the US and learn even more new plants.

For the first month here I spent a lot of time being trained out in the field with one of the range specialists or sitting at my desk studying a book on grasses. After a few weeks I was ready and raring to get out of my own. Finally I was given some tasks to do on my own. I became really good at looking at maps and the GPS and figuring where I needed to be. I also started paying attention to different landmarks, like Hart Mountain or Abert Rim, which helped me orient myself and know which way was north, etc. While out in the field alone I also ran into some struggles, such as opening difficult fences, flat tires, and getting stuck in the mud. Until I had a partner I had to get out of those tricky situations on my own, and that just gave me even more confidence in my abilities.

In the beginning of May another range tech started work. I was not happy about that because I had to train him, and I was so used to being out in the field by myself and doing my own thing. For a while I struggled with working with someone who needed a lot of direction and didn’t do things my way (even though he was doing them just fine. I’m just particular in that way). I soon realized that we would be stuck together for the rest of the summer because we were running out of utilization to do and were starting in on trend plots, which are easier to do with two people. Eventually I got a better attitude about everything and started having fun with my partner. He was a big help, especially when it came to tricky gates and taking out the UTV.

But enough blabbering on here. The point is, I learned so much this summer, made some really good friends (in and out of the office), and gained a lot of confidence. I’m so glad I got to work in Oregon because it is such a beautiful state, and I really enjoyed exploring it on the weekends. Some advice to future interns would be don’t get worked up over small things, learn as much as you can, make friends, and explore the area that you are living in. Because who knows when you’ll be there again.

Allyson
BLM, Lakeview, Oregon

Woodland pinedrops (Pterospora andromedea), in flower in mid-July

Ash-gray Indian paintbrush (Castilleja cinerea), federally threatened

I’ve been surveying in the Santa Ana River Valley and along Sugarloaf Ridge, which is north of the valley.  Sugarloaf Mountain and the surrounding ridges contain extensive pebble plain habitat.  These open areas of clay soils are extremely harsh environments and are home to some unique plant species.  Rare species of the pebble plains include ash-gray Indian paintbrush (Castilleja cinerea, federally threatened), southern mountain buckwheat  (Eriogonum kennedyi var. austromontanum, federally threatened), Bear Valley sandwort (Eremogone ursina), and Parish’s rockcress (Boechera parishii, sensitive), among others.  As part of the same project, I’ve been working down in Barton Flats.  Barton Flats horkelia (Horkelia wilderae) is a species endemic to this area of the Santa Ana River Valley, where it grows in montane conifer and oak woodland, often in openings or partial sun. 

On August 31, we conducted night surveys for arroyo toad upstream of the Mojave Spillway.  Arroyo toads are endemic to southwestern CA and northern Baja, and inhabit perennial streams.  These nocturnal toads forage for insects at night and burrow themselves in sand during the day.    This lower part of Deep Creek is heavily used, and beaver, trout, and bullfrogs also occur in the stream.  All of these impact arroyo toad populations.

Interesting (plant) finds from last month include new populations of white adder’s-mouth orchid (Malaxis monophyllos var. brachypoda) in two different meadows on the forest, and a new location of Botrychium crenulatum, also in a meadow.  White adder’s-mouth orchid has an interesting distribution in North America; it’s primarily found in the Midwest and Canada, where it grows in swamp forests.  The only records in California are from the San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains.    

Mountaintop Ranger District

San Bernardino National Forest/USFS

I am starting my third month in Pinedale. It feels good that the wildlife seasonal and I have both gotten into a routine and can take control of our project each day. Most of the last month has been our Lynx habitat inventories, we only have 10 points left to review. It went by pretty fast and we have been a lot quicker with our assessments, horizontal cover readings, and navigation.  Navigating the two track roads on ridges, hills, and through oil and gas fields has been something to get used to but after the past few weeks I am a lot more confident. We haven’t had to retrace our steps in a while! Oh and mud…the daily rain has begun but I now am very capable of rescuing rigs that are stuck in the mud. I’m sure many other people have been experiencing the same thing. Life skills!

Navigating the faint two track

On our way to work through a maze of roads

We still have Lynx data to complete but I am happy that I still get to go out and help with smaller assignments in between. On my list of upcoming projects we have a sage grouse catch up and radio collar, post burn aspen monitoring, amphibian surveys, signage and fence maintenance, grass height measurements (to account for amount of cover the sage grouse will have to nest in the spring) and a few other surveys that may go through. It has been great to get a lot of experience with a variety of techniques.

Post burn aspen monitoring

I was also lucky enough to hear about the Wyoming Wildlife Society conference in Sheridan this year and our office is allowing us to go. It will be a great networking experience with plenty of student and professional talks and exciting necropsy and habitat workshops. It is only a few weeks away and I am grateful to get to go and help with events and projects at the conference. Can’t wait!

We also found out that some CBG interns who are working in Cheyenne will be coming to Pinedale for a week to get some more field experience. It will be fun to be the one showing people around and I met these interns at the workshop in Chicago so it will be awesome to meet up with them again!

I haven’t stopped exploring either. There are plenty of hikes and National Parks to visit and I’ve been taking advantage of it all!

Alaska Basin

Moose on hike out from “Alaska Basin”

Jackson Lake, Tetons

Oh a hiking we will go!

That’s it for now, but I’m sure I’ll have plenty of adventures for next time!

Sydney

BLM, Pinedale, WY

Let me preface this post by mentioning how much I love working at Fort Ord and for the BLM. Watering the plants, finding horned lizards, managing the land — what could be better for a guy interested in restoration ecology?  I could tell you about all these things (and hope that you’re as into plants as I am), but instead I think I should tell you about an interesting and tough week that I recently had. I’m going to tell you how I got the water truck stuck in the sand…twice.

As the temperature continued its gradual rise in the Mojave desert, we entered into July and the Monsoon season began. Finally the rains poured and it was an amazing spectacle. Lightning crashed and thunder boomed, the streets roared with water, and 30 minutes later it was over. A few more storms had come and gone through our office but luckily we hadn’t been caught in any of the flash floods.

A storm system north of town.

The summertime in the Mojave makes seed collecting difficult both for the heat and the lack of flowering plants. However the early monsoon season was a pleasant surprise as we wait for the ephemeral post-rain annuals to pop-up in August and September.

The sky after the monsoon had passed.

One nice break from the heat was an education program we had put together. The Needles public library hosts a summer reading program for children and Steve and I were given the privilege to create a presentation. We chose Animals of the Mojave: Past and Present. We talked about the extinct Shasta ground sloth and prehistoric horses, rattlesnakes, scorpions and mountain lions. We had the kids attention, especially with all the skulls we had brought, but what really got them excited was Lipton, the baby desert tortoise. The kids had fun, we had fun, the parents had fun, and everyone learned some more about the desert wildlife.

The house and visitors center at Mitchell Caverns

One week I had talked to Chris, the NPS liaison in our office about Mitchell Caverns, a cave which had been closed to the public for years. She had put me in contact with a guy looking over the property and he invited me out to help with a vegetation survey in a nearby canyon for exchange of a tour of the “closed” park. In the surrounding area there are badgers, bighorn sheep, and gila monsters and within the cavern there are ringtails and a type of Niptus beetle found nowhere else in the world. Aside from the caverns, there are 4 houses standing that were built by hand in the 1930’s  by Jack Mitchell, and the walls contain volcanic rock, petrified wood, and even petroglyphs (wrong, yes, but pretty amazing). I had a tour of the caverns and watched an outstanding sunset from high up in the Providence Mountains while hanging with Chica, the adopted ranch dog. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.

Snakes are also quite fond of the temperature in the cavern.

Chica hanging out looking for lovin.

So, we meet again. Drawn together by the mutual attraction of plant propagation and the desire to rob plants of their reproductive organs and store them in a warehouse…

Still chipping away at a target species list for seed collection/propagation for the ol’ Taos Plateau.  It’s quite an assignment. I’ve been consulting with local specialists, reviewing literature, and consulting again. The challenge is answering how many should be collected, and of that collection, how many should actually be grown out. Some of these are greater fundamental conundrums beyond my pay grade. At least the ordering is done and I am freed from requisition forms! The next step, which is a rather large one, is to develop a management plan for the growth facility, the Rael property. This will entail several weed treatments, some minor construction, and most likely tree thinning and pruning. Selfishly, I want to release a small herd of goats on the field and then have a luau when they’ve eaten all they can. If you haven’t had roast goat, you’re missing out.

The monsoons have brought some much needed moisture back to the Taos field office. This also presents some unique driving situations. Driving down a wet bladed road is akin to driving on sheet ice. You will slide down into the bar ditches. You will probably need to call someone to come get you out. I’m thinking of implementing a baked goods rule for every time you get hauled out of a ditch. The day following a ditch incident there should be a mandatory dispensing of doughnuts to the entire office. Shame doughnuts. Getting stuck happens, but I think enough shame doughnuts will impart discretion in which roads to go down on a rainy day. For the record, I’ve avoided self-disdain and shame doughnuts.

Lately, I’ve been assisting with the AIM crews. I was a crew lead for AIM for nearly three years before I took this position so I have graced them with my field expertise (*cough). On one plot in particular, I found a pottery shard along a transect. I’ve found arrowheads in the field but never a pottery shard. For those who don’t know, New Mexico is one of the longest continually inhabited areas in the country. Euro-American presence goes back around 500 years, whereas most other areas of the west are around only 200. And going further, Ameri-Indians have been here for eons before that. This particular plot was at the juncture of several major historic eras where there has been consistent human habitation from multiple time periods. There were also petroglyphs adjacent to the plot dating back a few thousand years and signs of the inevitable conquest of the railroad in the west (which historically ran about a half mile from the plot and north to Santa Fe) memorialized by an antique railcar. I garnered some of this information from the ranch manager, who was a Kiwi and had just returned from wrangling a rogue bison named Hercules. It was like a Hitchcock film. The intersection of time and space illustrated by the petroglyphs, the railroad, a Kiwi, the shard, and Hercules. I’m pretty sure there were crows circling.

There’s not much else to report. Working on the management plan, tackling an environmental assessment (EA), and finding time to plan a campground reclamation. The proverbial train is gradually gaining speed. Sooo…. Until next month.

More plants. More dirt.

-JD

My time over the last month here in Kemmerer, Wyoming has been spent on various range projects. I have had the opportunity to measure green line stubble heights as an indication of livestock rotations, maintained fence for a wildlife habitat refuge, implemented step point intercepts in an attempt to gather hard quantitative data for permit renewals, analyzed utilization on areas previously grazed this growing season, and experienced the most rain Wyoming has ever seen.

Greetings,

The last couple of weeks, I have been supervising surveys for Pediomelum pentaphyllum and Peniocereus greggii var. greggii. In southern New Mexico, grassland was once extensive and dominated primarily by Bouteloua eriopoda, but overgrazing (especially in the 1890s) and perhaps other factors (climate change is a possible contributing factor) have resulted in most of our low-elevation grasslands being replaced by shrublands dominated by Larrea tridentata and Prosopis glandulosa. In an effort to reverse this trend, the BLM and others have been conducting herbicide treatments, primarily with pelleted tebuthiuron. Unfortunately, tebuthiuron is a fairly broad-spectrum herbicide, affecting most eudicots to some extent, and can therefore kill non-target plants… including rare ones! So, in areas where herbicide treatment has been proposed we go out and survey for rare plants to ensure that protected species are not being killed. Interestingly, there seems to be a spike in forb diversity in about the first decade after these herbicide treatments. The vegetation dynamics are not understood very well as yet, though, so when rare plants are involved we try to play it safe and exclude them from herbicide treatments.

In southwestern New Mexico, the rare species that might be adversely affected are usually Pediomelum pentaphyllum and Peniocereus greggii var. greggii. Most of the treatments that have been proposed for later this year and next year might affect Peniocereus greggii var. greggii but are unlikely to include plausible habitat for Pediomelum pentaphyllum, so Peniocereus greggii var. greggii has been our primary focus. We’ve been heading outside and walking lines at 100 meter intervals across these proposed treatments looking for it. We’ve found 16 plants on proposed treatments so far. Apart from helping us design these herbicide treatments to avoid rare plants, this lets us go outside and walk through pretty places! Here’s one of the areas we walked through last week, around Antelope Pass in Hidalgo County, New Mexico:

We have also encountered one of the hazards of botanizing in New Mexico: when the rains are good and plants are happy, the roads are bad. They get washed out. Arroyos that are dry 364 days a year are suddenly flooded. Low-lying areas that are usually hard clay become brown slime. So, this is a “road” (really, it is a road, we drove down it a couple weeks prior with no problem):

And this is a stuck truck, supervised by Michael Kolikant:

Finally, in an attempt to break the record for most pictures in a CLM blog post (if there is such a thing) here are a bunch of Peniocereus greggii var. greggii that we found. The basic problem with these critters is that they generally look an awful lot like dead sticks, and they usually live in the middle of shrubs (especially Larrea tridentata). This makes spotting them difficult. I think I’m getting the hang of it.

Yeah, that’s a lot of pictures of Peniocereus greggii var. greggii. However, my guess is that this is an average of 1 per 3 miles walked. They’re out there, but they are sparse and not easy to spot…

My second month at the Surprise Field Office has been busy. Fellow CLM intern Amy and I have been working hard to meet our goal of 16 collections. We’ve got 10 so far, and are currently working on 2 species of grasses. The main challenge has been finding riparian areas with sufficient populations to collect. It’s also been raining here on and off for the past 2 weeks, so a lot of our riparian areas are totally flooded. The rain is definitely a good thing, but we’re not able to collect anything when it’s so wet.

The rest of the time I’ve been working on an Environmental Assessment of a juniper reduction project we’re proposing. It’s still in its early stages, so writing it is a fairly dull task, but we’re grinding along. Learning how to write NEPA documents is something I’m really glad to be learning. I’m not sure where else I would be able to get this experience without any prior knowledge of the NEPA process. I’ve been taking some time to do online GIS courses through ESRI as well. I had almost no GIS experience coming into CLM but I now feel comfortable navigating the program and using its basic functions. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to integrate my new GIS knowledge into my NEPA report.

Here’s to another month of new experiences.

Matt Phillips
BLM Surprise Field Office

As things move to coasting speed in the world of the suckers, I have gotten a chance to branch out and help with other projects around the office. Namely bull trout research. The last five years of CLM interns have spent several weeks every summer electrofishing and tagging bull trout as well as red bands and browns. Fellow intern, Casey, and I joined in the tradition and raided the office’s communal supplies of camping gear for a great week of trout work. Electrofishing is like high speed treasure hunting for science. You walk up a stream and turn on the circular cathode of the electroshocker in areas that look like good trout habitat to create a current strong enough to temporarily knock out the fish. Ideally these are deeper sections with slower moving water. It took me a while to realize this. At first one area that the team leaders would say looked good, would look identical to another that they would pass by. But then it gets exciting. The stream can be totally clear and you won’t see any fish until you turn on the electroshocker. Instantly there will be trout everywhere and you will need to move fast to catch them before they get away or wake up from the stun. It doesn’t matter how many fish you catch, every one elicits cheering with bonus points for more than one fish at a time or stylistic grabs. It may be my new favorite thing.

Casey and I also got the opportunity to learn to tag the bull trout. Sticking a sharp needle with a tag into the back of a small fish is very intimidating for someone who has never even really handled fish before, but I got the hang of it. It helped that the other guys we were with caught and killed an invasive brown trout for us to practice on. It felt a little like a cat bringing home a dead mouse for their helpless kittens to learn how to hunt, but I appreciated the help.

Only a few days after electroshocking, we were given another chance to get out of Klamath Falls, Oregon for a few days. To check on our sucker rearing pens in the middle of the lake, we need to be able to drive the office’s two boats. The Department of the Interior requires that you have passed a Motorboat Operator Certification Course to do this, so off to Orofino, Idaho we went to spend three days playing with fast boats on a reservoir… I mean “working with”…yeah. Now Casey and I are free to go out in the field and deal with our ornery boats all by ourselves. This is a freeing feeling but also a little scary since our mud boat spontaneously decides to stop behaving sometimes. I’m sure we can handle it though. And if not, that’s why we pack extra oars.

Never a dull moment with Fish and Wildlife!

Until next time,
Alanna

On the hunt for trout!

Casey sizing up a trout

I’m tagging fish! And rocking a great outfit.

A bucket of trout ready to be tagged.

A bull trout