Well here I am entering my last few weeks as a CLM Intern in Washington. Since my last blog, I’m mainly filled up my time with more rare plant monitoring (Silene Spaldingii), lynx habitat assessments and fire area mapping for severity.

Going out into the shrub-steppe at this time of year can be excruciatingly uncomfortable as I’m sure many of you are aware. Luckily, my field partner, Rosemary, and I have often found ourselves in a number of lush oases, trying to cling onto canyon wall corridors between data collection sites. Wildlife has the same brilliant idea and we’ve noticed these canyons are teaming with all sorts of creatures. In a span of only a few days, we were stopped in our tracks by a badger, porcupine, coyote and great horned owl. I’ve now seen firsthand the importance such corridors between natural ecosystems, particularly in an area so devastated by agriculture and human presence.

One of my recent highlights was trekking up to north-east WA, and exploring some cedar and Douglas-fir forests, searching for Lynx habitat. What a relief from the scorching shrub-steppe!

The Wenatchee field office has been in chaos since the start of the fire season, causing most of our original field plans to be turned upside down. However, it’s been very exciting to adapt to the current situation. Last week I helped map over 6,000 acres of BLM land scorched by the Carlton Complex fire. The best and most exciting part was to actually go out to assess the landscape afterwards for potential restoration measures and fire severity records.

It’s amazing how quickly some of the plants can regenerate, even in high severity areas. Here’s a shot of Asclepias spp., in an estimated population size of 10,000 – Yay for Monarchs!

Good wishes and happy adventuring to you all!

Hello fellow interns,

It is time to blog again. However, I don’t have much new news to report. I am still up to my neck in permits with deadlines quickly approaching. First and foremost, I am trying to finish a draft of a CEQA document to begin construction on the giant garter snake restoration project I am working on.

I recently took a leave of absence as I am also employed separately as a wildland firefighter. The handcrew I work on was assigned to small fire in the El Dorado National Forest later named the “Twin” fire. Access to the fire was a grueling trail that ascended 2200 feet in about 2 miles distance. We hiked in to this location and out every day for two days until the fire was completely contained and extinguished. After securing this fire we moved on to the Bald fire east of Redding. This fire ended up consuming nearly 40,000 acres and took several days to complete our portion of the line.

I returned to the Preserve and was immediately tasked with helping to prepare several or our wetland ponds for a methyl mercury study that is scheduled to begin here in less than two weeks. I am splitting my time between backhoe work in the morning and writing the Bjelland CEQA in the afternoons.

Hope everyone has been enjoying their summer internships!

This photo may ignite memories of a bygone-era, of “The Price is Right”, or some kind of rugged sales pitch for “life is great!” on the range. And yes it is, Summer of Fun 2014. Thank you to my photographer and fellow CLM intern, Brittany King, for getting the lighting, angles, and wardrobe just so. Hair and make-up, yeah right!

Couldn’t have used my time on the land this season in a more engaging way. Worked in 11 Eastern Washington counties and countless ecosystems including Ponderosa pine forest, interior Douglas fir forest along the Canadian border, the rolling hills of the Palouse, Juniper Sand Dunes, steep canyon lands, riparian coulees, countless lakes and wetland margins, and the remains of functioning sagebrush steppe. In addition, we had the worst fire season in WA state history which translated to far less road access, more hiking, and some uneasy moments with fire spotting. If that weren’t enough we wrestled with two flat tires, a badger, black bears, rattlesnakes, and getting caught in a lightning storm. I’m exhausted!

All that travel, all the logistics, and no one hurt. No major bumps in the road. Our rare plants were found and we gratefully contributed to efforts to conserve and restore them. If that wasn’t reward enough a last ditch search effort was made to recover a field friend of ours (Olympus Camedia C-5060 5.1 Mexapixel) last seen while hunting a rare pink, the federally listed Silene spaldingii (Spalding’s silene), near Spokane WA. Goes to show you that “not all cameras who wander are lost,” for long…(yes that is an original quote).
Wishing all you big and bright stars many blessings and transformations, the ability to see the path, know yourself, and always keep pushing out your greatness, your brilliance, your gifts in whatever form. Love and light!

Not All Cameras That Wander Are Lost.

In the past couple weeks we here at the BLM CO State Office have finished up several species monitoring for the year including the Astragalus osterhoutii, Penstemon penlandii,  Eutrema penlandii, Physaria congesta, Physaria obcordata, and Penstemon grahamii.  Traveling to the Kremmling, CO area then to the mountains near Fairplay to monitor the little arctic mustard, and finally out to Meeker, CO and almost to the Utah-Colorado border to Rangely, CO.  With all of the travel we came back to the state office to input the many pages of monitoring data to start the analysis and make any changes needed for next year (adding transects or if we are lucky get to remove a few and still get the same amount of certainty in the change of the populations or we can continue with the same number of transects which is just as good).  Along with the simple functions that we utilize in Microsoft Excel to show the necessary analysis of the monitoring data we are going to try and learn to use R and then hope to apply it to some of our monitoring data as well as the data we collected in the Modified Whittaker Plots in the alpine to create species area curves.  We will see what the learning curve is for R, I do have a little knowledge of C++ so if any of the programming I learned for C++ can be applied to R that would be great.  I have a feeling I am going to be learning a whole new syntax of programming and the crossover from C++ to R might be minimal at best but I will find out.  Since we are not specifically trying to create new programs, and just trying to call existing programs and functions to analyze our data that the learning curve will be acceptable to utilize the program.  Along with this new challenge we are continuing with our sensitive species monitoring with Phacelia formosula and Eriogonum pelinophilum coming up soon and then implementing the new monitoring protocol for Corispermum navicula sometime later.  While we are up in North Park for the Phacelia sp. monitoring we will assess the Corispermum sp site and the current stage of the species to better determine when the monitoring should take place to ensure that the best representation of the population is monitored.  In between all of this we might also be helping out Vail Botanic Gardens in a few seed collections.  Fun Stuff to come here in Colorado!!

Regards,

Nathan Redecker

Lakewood, CO

BLM Colorado State Office

It’s been raining an unusual amount in Twin Falls, Idaho for the past couple weeks and I’ve been absolutely thrilled about it. Coming from the Midwest, I have been feeling more than a little dried out in the arid sagebrush with the very harsh sun. Yes there’s no humidity, but that’s only a trade off part of the time. We’ve finished doing the Habitat Assessment Framework for Sage Grouse a couple weeks ago. At the end of HAF surverys we were up in the South Hills of the Jarbidge field office and saw grouse almost every day or at least several times a week. After months of seeing nothing more than droppings and some feathers, the actual birds were a great gift. A crew flushed eighteen birds along a single stream one day. As elegant as they are when displaying, they are ridiculous, noisy, and panicked when they take off from the sage.

Since then it’s been wetland inventories, thermograph data retrieval, and a variety of other activities depending on what’s needed in the office. One of the unusual days was when we got to help one of the Wildlife Biologists out with Spotted Frog monitoring down in a set of beaver ponds. The Frogs are very rare and only found in this one section of the Field office. A group of us lined up and started up the stream through the beaver ponds. I gave up on being dry very quickly and ended up chest deep in some places looking for frogs on the emergent vegetation. At first we saw absolutely nothing but by the end we had a decent count despite a local rancher pushing cows through to get them out of the canyon and away from the river. Caught a snake or two as well as the frogs.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed the most lately is the opportunity to shadow or talk with other staff in the office. Myself and Maria Paula were able to go out with our Recreation Coordinator, and we all got the chance to hear the Jeff, our archeologist, speak about his work. I’ve been very impressed with the people we’ve worked with both personally and professionally. I am always surprised when they accord great consideration to our time and schedules, since as interns, our schedules are fairly flexible and less packed than theirs. Additionally I am struck by the knowledge of their work as well as an awareness of the areas’ management as a whole. Both staff were able to speak to management concerns outside of their fields very knowledgeably and with a sense nuance that stuck. As someone looking to go into the management field somewhere along the way, I was really interested to hear what people who had been in the field for a while, considered to be good and bad qualities in a manager. It has helped bring a sense of reality to what I’m working towards and filled out the challenges a little more.

On a lighter note Maria Paula and I took a road trip to Wyoming to Cheyenne Frontier Days and the Cheyenne Rodeo. On the way back we stopped for the night in Dinosaur National Monument, did a bit of hiking and saw Colorado and Utah on the way. It was a fantastic trip. The scenery was desolate and beautiful by turns. Cheyenne Frontier days was an absolute trip with a strange assortment of people and a great rodeo. Mostly it was great to get out and go someplace. I get more than a little myopic during field seasons, especially right in the middle, so getting out of town was amazing. Dinosaur National Monument is incredibly beautiful and definitely underrated. We were able to see a huge wall of dinosaur fossils, pictographs, one of the most beautiful canyons I’ve ever encountered, and swim in the Green River. Of course, we also became Junior Rangers.

Spotted Frog looking a bit dazed

These Fine feathered fellows staring at the car

(“The Buffalo, Wyoming CLM Interns! Determined to monitor and collect seeds!” ^_^)      (Artwork by Jo Smith)

Monitoring and Seed Collecting in the Wild West

We were getting to the end of the line in terms of field monitoring! The grasses were drying out and the majority of the forbs would be dispersing their seed. Sara and I have been concentrating our monitoring efforts in two places. The Bighorn Mountains and the Cabin Canyon area near Gillette, Wyoming. There were many sites to monitor around Cabin Canyon, so we would be leaving early in the morning and camping over night to try to monitor all of the sites. Cabin Canyon was difficult to travel through. Due to the heavy rains we had recently, many of the roads and small bridges have been wiped out! Sometimes it would take us three times longer to get to a site, because the road had been washed away.  Some of the road locations that were digitally inputted into the GIS program in the past were really cow trails! We would be driving down a two track road only to find out that it was really a cow trail. Hahaha!! Despite all of our challenges we were encountering, we had a great time identifying forbs and grasses. Thanks to the rain, the plants held on a little longer, so we could properly identify most of the plants.

The bridge is out! O_O
A common sight to see around canyon sites after a rainstorm.

We have been seeing many cool birds out in the field. We would typically see all kinds of sparrows, kingbirds, grouse, and lark buntings. One of my favorites birds would be the sage grouse. They were not the smartest bird alive, but they were very interesting to watch in the field. They would typically stare at us while walking slowly in front of our truck. We were always cautious around them and made a note of where we saw them.

A sage grouse decided to stop in front of our truck and stare at us for a brief period of time.

One of our side missions was to help Jill and Heather with seed collections for S.O.S. A large amount of seed collections had been completed so far! Sara and I would take a break on some of our work days to help with Jill’s S.O.S. seed collection. We have been collecting seed from needle and thread (Hesperostipa comata), bluebunch wheatgrass (Pseudoroegneria spicata), Hood’s phlox (Phlox hoodii), and Indian rice grass (Oryzopsis hymenoides/ Achnatherum hymenoides) to name a few. Some of the seeds were difficult to collect from, but we eventually made the goal that Jill set up. The S.O.S. collections were successful! Jill still has a couple of plant species she needs to collect from, so she might need our help in the future.

Time to collect needle and thread seeds!!…After we were done picking these seeds, we would find a large amount of them sticking to our socks and shoes. <_<

The Shadows that Roam

Sara and I would usually leave to monitor different sites around 4:00am. We could take advantage of the cooler temperatures and complete our projects before the intense afternoon sun would be overhead. Recently, we have been monitoring up in the Bighorn Mountains. The huge forests of ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa), limber pine (Pinus flexilis), and quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) could hide a lot of animals and make the trip difficult if we were to hike over a mile through forested, uneven rocky terrain to a site. We would always monitor during daylight, but we would leave early so we could start monitoring immediately when the sun rises.

Everything was very quiet in the morning and we could begin to see signs of dawn approaching. We headed down the main county road known as Hazelton Road. We had to drive slowly due to the roaming shadows. You might be wondering, “What is a roaming shadow?” A roaming shadow was basically a very large animal walking through the darkness. All you could make out was a large shadow. With the intense full moon we have had lately, we would see a lot of shadows on the trip up the mountains. Sometimes you could tell what the creature would be and other times the large creature would appear briefly in your line of sight before heading into the dense forests on either side of the road and you would be asking yourself, “What was that!?” The truck does a good job at illuminating the area in front of us. We mostly see glowing eyes or fast moving shadows. When dawn approaches we could see what the shadows really are. Most of the time these shadows would be large mule deer, cows, elk, and even moose!  We would slow down and watch the elk herds cross in front of us or see a lonely moose forage for grasses. Before dawn, these shadows with glowing eyes look pretty intimidating, but when dawn comes, these shadowy creatures become majestic, furry animals.

Roaming shadows looking at our vehicle.

As the sun rises, most of the deer, elk, and moose disappear. The lamb herds usually become active and we get to see fluffy Great Pyrenees guarding the sheep herds. Marmots would run across the road or sit on a rock, chirping at every passing truck. During the day time, the Bighorn Mountains would look totally different compared with the early morning. Monitoring in the mountains was awesome, especially when traveling in the early morning when we get to see the roaming shadows!

Great pyrenees resting near a herd of sheep. IT’S SO FLUFFY! \(O_O\)

CLM Interns vs. Convolvulus arvensis: Field Bindweed All Out Attacks

A month ago, the BLM office had a field day where we would all go out to Welch Ranch Recreation Area and plant native seeds for future harvesting. We planted mostly green needlegrass (Nassella viridula) and bluebunch wheatgrass. One of our bosses wanted Jill, Heather, and I to go out to the site and do a routine maintenance check. We were told to check the water levels and weed all of the field bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis) and Russian thistle (Kali tragus/ Salsola kali?). When we got to the site, we were shocked!! There were weeds growing all over the place! One particular nasty weed was the field bindweed. The weed thought it was kudzu (Pueraria lobata)! D: Field bindweed was growing in the beds, strangling some of the native grasses. The weed was also growing along the beds creating dense mats of foliage covering the ground. Jill, Heather, and I began our attack.

Field bindweed growing around green needlegrass.

The field bindweed was difficult to clear and took a lot of effort to remove without hurting the native grasses. I never seen field bindweed be this destructive. I usually saw it growing at the side of the road in a small patch. The field bindweed here tried to take over the north half of the field! After many hours in the intense sun, we cleared most of the field bindweed and created piles at the end of the rows. The Russian thistle to the south was our next destination. Luckily, the Russian thistle was still soft and not prickly when we removed it. Towards the end of the day, we cleaned up the field and were proud of our hard work. The field bindweed would probably return, but at least we cleared a lot of the bigger plants that were choking out the native grasses.

Weeding for field bindweed.

Misadventures

Sturgis Rally

On one of the weekends the Buffalo CLM interns traveled to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. There were a huge amount of motorcycles around and everyone was very active in the town. Mostly we took pictures, went shopping, visited different exhibits and went to different motorcycle rally attractions. There were so many interesting people that had some of the coolest motorcycles! We had a fun and exhausting day!!

Sturgis Motorcycle Rally!

When we were heading back to Wyoming, we encountered a thunderstorm! At the state border we got out of our vehicle to take pictures of the Wyoming State sign and the double rainbow that was behind us!

Wyoming Border!!

 And Now….. Your Moment of Zen….

OH WOW! O_O A double rainbow!! So intense.

Two DSL in one trap

I can’t keep track of time anymore because it seems that I wrote my last blog only a couple days ago. Even though all the other interns from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) have left, the wildlife biology department is still keeping me busy with multiple different projects.

Last week I finished pitfall trapping for the New Mexico State endangered Dunes Sagebrush Lizard.  I had originally set a goal to set traps at 30 different pitfall arrays, but because of help from other hires, I was able to set 34 pitfall arrays. I was very happy that we were able to catch 16 different Dunes Sagebrush Lizard, all in areas where they had never previously been captured before. All of the new capture locations will be downloaded onto the BLM Carlsbad GIS and no development will be allowed within 200 meters of a DSL capture location. I feel great accomplishment knowing that because of my work, the BLM will be able to better protect this endangered species and its vanishing habitat

I am now going to be shifting my focus from pitfall trapping to a number of different projects including Yellow-Billed Cuckoo surveys, aquatic macro-Invertebrate surveys, and funnel trapping in known heronry locations. I have started the Yellow-Billed Cuckoo surveys. Specifically, we are trying to see the presence or absence of another state endangered animal (Yellow-Billed Cuckoo) along the Delaware and Black river. We survey along both rivers in areas where there is good tree cover and write down all the birds seen in a 20minute window. We then move another 100 meters down the river, or to the next available dense tree area, and survey again. A recording of the Yellow-Billed Cuckoo call is used, in an effort to attract any nearby individuals. Although we have not seen any Yellow-Billed Cuckoos, we have seen some other riparian obligates including summer tanagers, blue gross beaks, belted kingfishers, and Vermillion Flycathers.  In a effort to arrive at our location as the sun is rising and maximize our chances of spotting a Yellow-Billed Cuckoo I have had to wake up at 4 am the last week, and my sleep schedule has been a little out of whack.

I am still enjoying myself hear in Carlsbad and the job never seems to slow down. This week I participated in a local radio show explaining what the BLM and I were doing trapping the DSL and to help raise awareness of the lizard and other BLM projects occurring in the area. I am keeping active on the weekends and trying to see as many places as I can in the Chihuahuan desert. I have attached a few images of me doing bird surveys and pictures of the last couple of Dune Sagebrush Lizards I caught and me talking on the local radio station.

Local radio show trying to raise awareness on conservation efforts

Yellow Billed Cuckoo surveys

Hello!

Everything is still going well in the Missoula, MT field office. I am wrapping up my final month here and time has been flying by! Our field crew is continuing forest inventories, seed collection and sensitive plant surveys! This week we have done all of the above.

We have recently been collecting for bitterbrush and serviceberry seeds, which are ecologically and culturally important to Montana. I must admit we have had quite a few trials and errors! We began by picking bitterbrush seeds individually, and quickly realized there has to be a more effective way. So today, we went out and brought a huge bucket and hit the bitterbrush branches and let the seeds fall into the bucket! We collected 10 fold more seeds today than before. Not to mention way more bugs than before! I must admit it has been a fun change of pace from forest inventory!

Unitl next time,
Cara

Hello everyone,

It’s funny to read my last post from back at the end of June…along with my crewmates I was moving our camping site to a sheep pasture to continue HAF monitoring in the foothills. Since then we’ve been also monitoring wetlands, attending trainings and moving on to working with thermograph data!

First of all, although we finished after the first week of July, it wouldn’t be right to leave out our last week of camping and HAF monitoring from this blog entry. The sheep pasture turned out to be a spot fairly close to the main road so that it wasn’t as remote, but far enough that we could take a quiet walk through the grassland or climb the hill behind our trailer to see the stars and watch the sun sink into the horizon at the end of the day. Those two weeks that we spent finishing HAF and living in that pasture definitely presented a whole new set of challenges and new experiences. In a way, it was like going back to the beginning of the season: we worked in unfamiliar roads in more remote sites that took longer to navigate and hike to. Also the vegetation species richness (amount of different species) just about exploded in the foothills, I’d never seen such a high forb density and we were taking plenty of specimens back to identify, so we learned a lot of new species! The fields of lupine and penstemon created a beautiful landscape of red, purple and yellow, you could even smell the lupine!

On the weekends, I’ve been going on some trips to explore the west, including Dinosaur National Monument, Ritter Island, Shoshone Falls and even Cheyenne Frontier Days in Wyoming! On the way back, I caught a glimpse of northern alpine Colorado and I want to check it out more. But I am absolutely in love with Utah (so much like San Juan!), so I’m building up a list of places to hike and camp in on my way out at the end of the internship.

Living in a trailer, I realized how content I am living in small spaces. It’s cozy to be in a nook, taking up a small amount of space with a wild, empty expanse around you. Now that our fieldwork camping is at an end, we are driving from our field office daily to our work sites, often to collect data on wetland vegetation, attributes and map it on GIS. But now we are also downloading the thermograph data, which consists of using a GPS to find the thermograph apparatus, which is staked down in a stream pool collecting water temperature data and importing the data onto a field computer before re-launching the thermograph again to gather data for another year.

These thermograph streams are often in remote canyons, so we’ve been lucky to see a lot of cool landscapes, plants and rock formations. I love sitting back against an aspen and thinking about when the last human was last there.

Of course, in terms of some of the thermograph sites, someone visits them annually, but they probably don’t stop at the places we would stop or go further beyond the thermograph sites.  But leaning against this exact tree? Perhaps I am the first.

Working on wetland inventories takes us to more lush regions with access to water, so the vegetation tends to include riparian sedges and rushes.

Sometimes we’ll see birds, and we always are on the lookout for wildlife. I think we’ll also start Lepa monitoring (rare peppergrass species) pretty soon!

‘Till next time!

Maria Paula

Jarbidge Field Office

Twin Falls, Idaho