Yes, the North Carolina Seeds of Success team is still making seed collections! This week, we travelled to Virginia to check out some National Wildlife Refuges on the coast. We visited four sites: Mackay Island NWR, Eastern Shore of Virginia NWR, Mason Neck NWR, and Occoquan Bay NWR. All four sites had species on our target species list! We ended up making seven collections total over the course of three days.

Cornus amomum (“silky dogwood”) berries

We’ve started finding some species we have yet seen in the locations we’ve visited thus far. One such species was Cornus amomum. Unfortunately, C. amomum fruits only contain one seed per fruit, so it was a challenge for us to get upwards of 10,000 seeds, the minimum number of seeds we need for each collection we make. Luckily, we found a big patch of C. amomum along a roadside at Occoquan Bay, and we were able to collect approximately 10,000 seeds in the course of just 45 minutes. Pretty impressive. Some other collections we made included seeds of Cakile edentula, Mikania scandens, and Borrichia frutescens. We also found a large population of one of our favorite species (or at least one of my favorites), Asclepias syriaca, which we’re hoping to collect next time we’re in Virginia.

Cakile edentula (American searocket) seeds

Asclepias syriaca (common milkweed) is getting ready to collect. So exciting!

Emily showing off our collections. That’s only the ones from two weeks ago! Not including the seven we made this week. Woo!

So there you have it! Our collections are slowly building up. Now we just have to find time to clean and ship all the seeds between all of our traveling…

Until next time,

Maggie

Today it is raining in the desert. I feel it must be a sign of some sort; things are changing. The summer monsoons have begun. The once parched wash nearby now brims and glistens. Thunder booms.

Not only is the desert transitioning but so am I. Today is also the last day of the internship, of course it is a day like no other this summer yet! Like the rain, I’ll travel away from here, soaking in the landscape as I stream across the countryside.

Today though, I am still here, still and able to reflect.

My season here at USGS began as the spring annuals bloomed after the winter rains. I characterized juvenile desert tortoise forage in the Mojave, observing the phenology shift from one phase to another, and analyzed our data. My skills in ArcGIS markedly improved – creating random points, maps, buffers, polygons – the list goes on! My plant ID skills also improved, helped along by the tiny desert annuals here that are difficult, yet thrilling, to identify – even more so when senesced!

I dove deep in Utah, unearthing and exposing insights into the murky mystery of oil well vegetation regeneration. The project demanded sifting through site selection, soil, and data, rooting around perennial shrubs, and uncovering and bringing to light the story of oil well land disturbance in Black brush plant communities of eastern Utah. Unfortunately, these wells are not ones the rain can fill with sediment and erase from the landscape, even after decades. A quick glance at the survivors will tell you this. The real mystery of course is which species regenerate and under what conditions.

In all, my experience at USGS has been incredible. From a Pediocactus survey to Night-time Golden Eagle prey surveys, increasing my knowledge of tortoises and herps in general, discovering the marvelous Mojave; this internship has been phenomenal.

Thank you so much to everyone at USGS and CBG who played a part!!

Amanda Cooke

USGS, Henderson NV

What great things will happen now, after the summer rains?

Howdy from Decatur, TX!
It has been an interesting couple of weeks, as I have began my journey with the CLM program with the National Forest Service at the LBJ National Grasslands. The LBJ National Grasslands are located roughly forty-five minutes from my home town. Meeting the crew has been an awesome experience as more of them pour in from fire details across the US. I have come to slowly realize that the world is a much smaller place than I had previously realized. Some of the crew are acquaintances of my recent professors at Tarleton State University, while others are related to friends of mine from my home town.

Welcome to the new chapter of my life.

I am humbled that I was allowed to go to the field on my own on the first week. My mentor has guided me toward the direction I needed to begin with this project. Recently, I have been going to the field with a plant conservationist from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Foundation to add to my botanical knowledge and skills. Now, I am recording occurrences of local milkweed species on the National Grasslands, collecting their seeds, and monitoring for monarch butterflies and their larvae. Although I have not had any luck with monarchs, we found a queen larvae on a very sad looking Asclepias viridis. (no worries the little guy was given a better home on the neighboring plant) The milkweed target species include Asclepias asperula subsp. capricornu, A. engelmanniana, A. viridis, and A. viridiflora.
Until next time…

Keagan Lowey

Recording coordinates of an Asclepias viridiflora.

Bumblebee pollinating an Asclepias viridiflora.

Stealth is key when trying to capture a picture of the mighty bumblebee in the act of pollination.

The queen butterfly larvae on a very sad looking Asclepias viridis on Unit 71 at the LBJ National Grasslands.

Gathering Asclepias species occurrences on Unit 49 at the LBJ National Grasslands.

Not a target species, but very beautiful Rosa foliolosa on Unit 71.

Recording the occurrence of an Asclepias viridiflora in bloom.

Asclepias viridiflora in bloom.

Hi everyone,

The wildflowers continue to still bloom in mid-August, and with rains bringing more moisture, new buds are still forming. It’s been a fantastic year in terms of rain, the forage is amazing and the pronghorns, deer, and elk are fat and happy. One of our sites near Capitol Reef has gotten so much rain that our Helianthus petiolaris collection has been blooming for three straight months. I’ve been lucky to be here on such a good year.

We’ve made 42 voucher collections and 37 seed collections so far. While many of the grasses and forbs of lower elevations have come and gone, we’ve moved up in elevation to montane communities. And, Bouteloua gracilis has finally arrived after seeing only skeletons for the first few months. I’m learning new plants everyday and have enjoyed seeing new plants bloom and thrive as the seasons progressed.

Soil color testing (with our field Jeep) in western Utah

Mounting voucher specimens in lab

Earlier this year our team toured recent treatments done to several areas around Kanab, Panguitch, and Cedar City. Pinyon pine and juniper has been rapidly encroaching on sagebrush and grasslands. Not many plants survive under the canopy and sagebrush almost if not completely disappears. A few target areas were bullhogged and seeded, and we went to check them out. The amount of diversity from treated to non-treated is amazing; non-seeded natives have emerged and thrived so much that they comprise many of our collections. I’d agree that the treatments were very successful, as we saw eight sage grouse utilizing the area near Panguitch. We’ve also seen countless pronghorn, deer, and elk in addition to many passerines. It’s exciting to see such areas succeed, it is definitely one of the most memorable experiences thus far.

Seed collecting Penstemon pachyphyllus in the House Mountain Range in western Utah

Our Buckhorn Wash site is so beautiful, it’s also just around the corner from the Buckhorn Draw Pictograph Panel

We hiked up to Bullion Falls after eradicating some spotted knapweed

Outside of work I have done quite a bit of traveling. In July I went to Yellowstone, and this month I’ve camped on Boulder Mountain and explored Grand Staircase. Pictures below!

My family came to visit and we went to Coral Pink Sand Dunes, our dog loved it! (picture just outside of the State Park on BLM)

The start to the Spooky Slot in Grand Staircase

Bristlecone pine pinecones are bright purple! Such cool trees

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone – amazing

Until next time,

Ellie Becklund

Richfield, UT

The last 2 weeks of July I was working night shifts with a crew of 2 other people using radio telemetry to track flying western long-eared bats. This was the most intense experience of my internship so far. A typical nightshift lasted from 7pm – 4am, except for a few nights when I did not get home till 8am.

It was amazingly difficult and sometimes frustrating work, especially when it was impossible to locate the bats. However, we successfully got enough locations to analyze 4 bats.

Luckily, there was almost a full moon for the last week of work! Coyotes, owls, poorwills, and cattle were frequently heard/seen every night.

After taking one day off to shift back to day time work,  I’ve spent the last 2 weeks in lodgepole pine forests measuring elk and mule deer hiding cover….. It’s been a pretty drastic change of scenery but I love the variety of projects I’ve been able to work on.

Cheers!

-Kathleen

My future boy-band album cover

This past month has been a busy one. Last week we attended the Compassionate Conservation Conference in Vancouver Canada. We were unable to attend the training at the Botanical Garden in Chicago, so this was our alternate. The conference was focused on how animal welfare and conservation interact. It was an eye opening experience, we got to hear from a lot of really interesting people, including someone from the Jane Goodall Institute in Canada. When we got back to Oregon fire season had started in full force. We had to circle above Medford for an hour before we could land because of smoke from a nearby forest fire.

The week after the conference we began work at the Fish Evaluation Station. This is a sampling effort of the irrigation canal, which is conducted by the Bureau of Reclamation. This year Fish and Wildlife are conducting a couple of studies, so we came out to help with that effort. The first objective is to determine if the same fish are being recycled over and over in the sampling process. To do this we did VIE tagging, which is where you insert a colored tag just underneath the scales of the fish. We also held suckers that will be introduced into net pens in the lake. The hope is that they can be raised for a few years and then released back into the system. This will help Fish and Wildlife meet the requirements for recovery set out in the biological opinion for suckers.

We are still monitoring the ponds as a potential place to rear suckers salvaged from irrigation canals (although fish from the FES will not end up here). It had been pretty quiet at the ponds, last month we began catching Sacramento perch, but we were only capturing a few at a time. This week we caught around 100 hundred Sacramento perch, 87 of them were caught on Tuesday. Then today we caught a sucker in the ponds! We are hoping to get some bigger traps soon and get some more suckers. Our boss is really interested in the growth rate of the suckers in the ponds.  There were 93 suckers put in the ponds last winter.  Over the next month we will be introducing more suckers into the pond from other projects in the Klamath Basin.  Hopefully we will be able to add to the population!

At 12:30AM on a Friday morning, the Mother Lode Field office is a peaceful place. Coming back after a late-night survey, motion activated lights lit the way back to my cube in an otherwise dark and quiet office. Between the coolness of the outside air and the tranquility of the empty office, my coworkers and I agreed that the night shift really wasn’t so bad.

We had gone out to do a survey of California red-legged frogs, a federally endangered species found on the coast and in the Sierra Nevada foothills. As a plant person, I knew very little about the frog, and decided I should do some googling before heading to work that evening. I read up about the ecology and distinguishing features of the red legged frog. But what stuck with me most from my crash course was that the red legged frog is California’s official state amphibian. I hadn’t realized that official state amphibians existed in the first place, and there I was about to get a privileged glimpse at California’s own in its natural habitat.

As it turns out, 20 states have official state amphibians, and two have unofficial amphibians. The list is dominated by frogs and salamanders, with newts and toads making the occasional appearance. The momentum to give the California red-legged frog this distinction began with an after-school program at an elementary school where students learned about how bills become laws. They made posters and buttons for the red-legged frog, and initiated a considerable letter writing campaign.

On June 29, 2014, Governer Jerry Brown signed a bill into law designating the red-legged frog as the state amphibian. On January 1, 2015, the designation became official. On June 30, 2015, after a quick lesson in frog handling, I got to have a photo-op with one of California’s amphibian ambassadors.

Where to hideout for the Apocalypse if you happen to be in OR

It’s getting crispy here

lovely view typical of the district

Wild horses try to drag me away on BLM land

the closest they would let me get

sagebrush mariposa lily

failed collection technique

As summer advances here on the Prineville district, my priority seed collections are shifting from sage grouse forbs to grasses and pollinator supporter species. The desert sagebrush steppe is home to target plants that are “crispifying” as I like to put it. A pair of brief but intense heat waves throughout the northwest region has brought this crispification on, and now we must let go of these too crispy to collect plants. So, leaving the crispy northern basin and range ecoregion for the E. Cascades and blue mountains I’ve spent several collection days on Dalea ornata at two different sites. I’m getting to know this plant really well now that we’ve spent so much time together. It’s a likeable plant being a nitrogen fixer, pollinator attractant native perennial. The seeds are encased in soft fluffy pillows, and it lends a very pleasant minty-floral aroma to the hands after collection. Little munching insects like it as much as me and the pollinators do though, so my collecting has been a bit of a struggle. I tried a tactic I’ve seen some teams use on species of lupin – tied little baby shower style mesh baggies over the seed heads, hoping to catch them before they dispersed or were consumed by hungry bugs. This backfired pretty good at the first site. I think instead of keeping bugs out, I locked bugs in the baggies, leaving them no choice but to devour all my seeds. At the second site I cut my losses to dispersal and insects, and decided to just way way overcollect to compensate for poor fill. My goal was to collect from more than 1,000 individual plants on my own. (sigh). Luckily, a youth empowerment Americorps group, the Heart of Oregon corps, stepped in to the rescue. Working with these recent highschool graduates was a lot of fun, and at the end of the day one of them even told me that he thought he’d like to become a botanist. Yes! I was happy that maybe my enthusiasm and babbling about the plight of native pollinators at the beginning of our day had a part in his declaration. I love turning people on to the natural world. The corps members helped me achieve my collection goals and I am looking forward to hearing back from BSE on our yield. Hopefully we added a great restoration plant to the Prineville seed mix.
I’m also contemplating native thistles. So much is talked about invasive thistles that I think some of our lovely native thistles may have gotten overlooked. Have you ever watched a thistle flower? It’s a pollinator smorgasbord! Unfortunately the bees and flies and other critters do not seem to make much distinction between native and non native nectar sources, so I hope that by seed collecting from the local yocals I can eventually “flood the market” with a better choice for them to dine. Collecting this year has taken me to some of Prineville’s more beautiful and sometimes more quirky sites. Pictures following! Good luck with your collections interns, I’m happy to report mine are going well. Remember your pollinator friends, and even if it is not top priority, perhaps try to get a few collections for their benefit.

It looks like summer has finally peaked here in New England!  The latter half of July brought some brutally muggy days with the occasional downpour, but these have since yielded to mostly clear skies with temperatures in the low 80s for early August.  The plants are responding well to the recent good weather, and our endeavors are finally beginning to bear fruit, which have to date comprised 15 collections; of these, nearly half are of the saltmarsh rush Juncus gerardii (which, unfortunately, has a tendency to play host to a parasitizing moth, Coleophora alticollela).  The remaining eight collections include false beach heather Hudsonia tomentosa, the sedges Carex scoparia, Carex crinita, Scirpus atrovirens, and the delicious ericaceous shrubs Gaylussacia baccata and Vaccinium angustifolium x myrtilloides)

The moth Coleophora alticollela which parasitizes the seed heads of blackgrass (Juncus gerardii).

Naturally occurring lowbush x velvet blueberry hybrid (Vaccinium angustifolium x myrtilloides), Wapack NWR, New Hampshire

Over the course of our collections thus far, we have voyaged as far north as Waterville, ME, to scout out the maturity of seeds borne by black spruce (Picea maritima) and purple pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea) in kettlehole bogs, east to Harwich Port on Cape Cod to collect Carex scoparia, and southwest to Stonington, CT to assess dam removal sites.  As a result of our sojourns, we’ve gotten to see a wide variety of flora and habitats:

Sphagnum mat, Foster Point Bog, Belgrade Lakes, ME

Red Spruce (Picea rubens) dominating the skyline on Monadnock Mountain, Wapack NWR, NH

Swamp rose-mallow (Hibiscus moscheutos), Long Pasture, Barnstable, MA

Indian pipe (Monotropa uniflora), Bennett-Keenan Conservation Area, Lynnfield, MA

False beechdrops (Monotropa hypopitys), Bennett-Keenan Conservation Area, Lynnfield, MA

In addition, we have also seen quite a variety of wildlife too!

Painted turtle (Chrysemys picta), Bennett-Keenan Conservation Area, Lynnfield, MA

Nova Scotian Great Spangled Fritillary (Speyeria cybele novaescotiae), Belgrade Lakes, ME

Red admiral (Vanessa atalanta) on buttonbush (Cephalanthes occidentalis), Bennett-Keenan Conservation Area, Lynnfield, MA

Osprey (Pandion haliaetus carolinensis), Harwich, MA

Salt being exuded from Spartina alterniflora

The dried shell of a crab found within Spartina patens.

Make sure to consult tide charts while on the marsh so that you don’t get stuck behind the rising water.

The New England Seeds of Success team has been traveling throughout the North East searching out ripening seeds that will be used in various conservation projects ranging from dune rehabilitation to stream stabilization. We are also collecting a wide range of common species that will be stored and become available in the case of future disasters and damage to plant communities.

Much of our time collecting in New England has been spent collecting salt marsh graminoides (grass-like plants), where rising sea levels threaten the delicate balance of fresh and salt water habitat. These systems are very important in keeping our coasts stable and act as a large filter as water makes its way to the sea. Despite being hugely important, these are not very diverse systems, often relying on only a few species.

There are no trees in the salt marsh, so sun beats down on us while we collect and the wind leaves us parched. The area is ruled by the tides and if one isn’t careful the water will quietly rise and leaving them stranded in a limited area of solid ground. It is also due to these factors that these areas are so beautiful and surprises abound when one takes a closer look.

It is partly due to the monotonous nature of these spaces that make the small things stand out. Watching the breeze roll across the huge open landscape can be memorizing. Spartina alterniflora, the salt marsh cord grass, glistens in the summer heat as it exudes salt directly out of its leaves. Small treasures can be seen throughout the marsh, from the dessicated shells of crabs that were deposited during a high tide to watching a horse shoe crab feeding the mucky bottom of a canal.

Salt marshes have so much to offer to both the function of an areas as well as to provide a beautiful landscape. We are fortunate to spend our days in such amazing spaces and to have the presence of mind to notice the things that are often overlooked.