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…