Hello all,

The Native Plant Society of Texas Symposium (NPSOT) was a fantastic experience!(minus the Austin traffic) The atmosphere of the symposium was both professional and friendly, as were the many representatives of the agencies present.  I was able to attend a botany field trip at the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Preserve and  nearby conservation easements. The tour leader, a retired Fish and Wildlife employee, was very knowledgeable about the local flora of the area and enthusiastic about sharing his wisdom with us. Unfortunately, a few of the field trips near Bastrop State Park and the Lost Pines area had to be canceled due to a wildfire.  Topics presented at the symposium included: prairie restoration of parks, observations of the local flora, and the recovery of the Lost Pines from 2011 Bastrop fire. The presentation over the 2011 Bastrop Fire was quite ironic, considering some of the area included in that study was currently ablaze again. I would highly recommend to anyone, who is even slightly interested about Texas plants, to go to the next NPSOT meeting.

Helianthus maximiliani at Clymer Meadow.

The week after NPSOT, I had the privilege to be a guest on the Texas Nature Conservancy’s Clymer Meadow Preserve at Celeste, TX to survey for monarch butterflies and Ascelpias spp. I had previously learned about the preserve from one of my former professors, who happens to be the former preserve manager. It was an awesome feeling to be working at a place that I had previously studied in the classroom.

The migration of the monarch butterflies along the I-35 corridor ended with the coming of a major storm system that brought North Texas a tremendous amount of rain and cold weather. It has been three weeks since I have seen a monarch butterfly. The storm system not only ended the migration, it brought major flooding to Corsicana, TX, the town where my wife and I both live.

Monarch butterfly on Symphyotrichum ericoides at Clymer Meadow.

Stay warm my friends. Winter is coming.

-Keagan

Leaf litter from the aptly named red maple (Acer rubrum).

Falls has come and the maples trees have been turning brilliant colors.

Pickle weed (Salicornia depressa) turning a beautiful scarlet in the salt marshes of Massachusetts.

The beautiful flowers of the Witch Hazel come out as the other woodland species are dropping their leaves. Depending on the timing, these flowers can be hidden by the fall foliage or be wonderfully conspicuous as one of the bright spots in an otherwise bare forest.

One of the great joys of working outside is connecting with natural areas and seeing dramatic shifts occur throughout the seasons. Collecting seeds from a wide range of habitats, from mountain peaks to coast lines, has allowed the New England team for the Seeds of Success program to experience each season.

Early summer felt like spring would never leave us (after a particularly long and harsh winter) with cold rainy day and mud everywhere. This was a great time to familiarize ourselves with the team and the protocols that we would be using throughout the field season. As Summer came into full swing the days grew hotter and flowers bloomed all around us. Extremely hot days ensued, with us taking refuge in the shade in between collections.

Fall has come and the temperature has been dropping as the number of collections are picking up the pace. The cool, dry air works well with a lot of the wind dispersed species, which in this area can range from Milk Weeds (Asclepias sp.), Golden rods (Solidago sp.) and grasses (Littile blue stem, Schizachyrium scoparium in particular).

These days have been a delight to behold and with the sun low in the sky the autumn leaves are beautifully colored. Many of the places that we have been visiting all season have changed yet again, as a last hurrah before the inevitable winter. Soon enough the colors will fade and we will have a lot of white snow.

Things have been quite busy here in the Mojave. I recently went on a week-long field stint where we camped Saline Valley in Death Valley National Park. We used the campground at the hot springs as our home base, which was quite nice at the end of a day in the field! We were working with a group of Sierra Club volunteers and spent our days travelling to the BLM wilderness units across the valley to survey for tamarisk in the riparian areas. It was a great week!

Most of my time lately has been spent assisting with Rangeland Health Assessments and Proper Functioning Condition surveys. I’m learning to recognize more of our plant species as well as signs of land health. We’ve been travelling to new areas (well, new to me) of the field office which is always neat. At the higher elevation areas, we’ve even been getting snowed on. I really like snow but I have definitely become a cold baby, it didn’t take long for the desert to spoil me.

Last week I attended a two-day desert tortoise handling workshop. In the classroom we learned about the genetics, natural history, physiology, scat/sign, survey techniques, and laws/regulations for desert tortoises. During the field portions of the class we learned about differentiating scat from other vertebrates, fencing techniques, creating artificial burrows, the basic processing of an animal and screening for clinical signs of disease, and walking transects. We got to learn from and interact with some prominent desert tortoise folks, and it was a really interesting class.

Picking Penstemon

high atop the White Mountians

hands cold, view brilliant

The weather thus far in New England has been unseasonably mild as of late, with only one day below freezing through the end of Halloween.  The leaves on the oaks and aspens were turning beautiful shades of ochre and vermilion as October came to a close; most of these have since fallen.  With the weather on our side, the New England team has already exceeded our collection quota (239 of 200) for the season.  Consequently, not much is left for us to collect, save for certain late-season asters (e.g., Baccharis halimifolia) and species with persistent fruit (Ilex verticillata, for example).

Milkweed field and forest edge, Callahan State Park, MA

Sea myrtle (Baccharis halimifolia), Avalonia Land Conservancy, Stonington, CT

Winterberry (Ilex verticillata), Round Marsh, Jamestown, RI

It is hard to believe that this is my final month of the CLM internship; though the time flew by, I have learned an immense amount, not simply about plant identification and phenology but also the habits and function of these plants in their respective habitats.  It has given me an incredibly comprehensive understanding of the ecology of New England biomes, and I hope to apply this knowledge in future field internships, graduate school, and careers.

The time has flown by so quickly during my internship here in Alturas and, just like that, it’s already over! This internship has been a really amazing and valuable experience and I really could not have asked to be part of a better program. I started my internship with very little experience outside of undergraduate research and have gained so many valuable skills, including general monitoring and surveying protocols that can be useful in countless different field positions and specialized knowledge on the plant and bird diversity in northeastern California. Everyone that I met and got to know during the internship, at the BLM office and elsewhere, were more than friendly and were always helpful. Our mentor was incredibly knowledgeable and was able to ID essentially any plant species in our resource areas, regardless of reproductive stage. Just about everyday of work was enjoyable for me. Whether I was conducting raptor surveys and bird inventories, monitoring raptor nesting habitat, collecting seed, conducting rangeland health assessments, monitoring plant populations and so forth, I was being payed to hike through scenic wilderness areas and work with plants and animals. In addition to assisting our mentor (a botanist and rangeland manager) in fieldwork, we also worked with wildlife biologists and archeologists during the internship.

Alturas may not have been the best place to live as someone single and in their 20s, given the sparse human population in and around the area. Nevertheless, Alturas was a beautiful place to live. The South Warner Wilderness Area is about a 25-minute drive from Alturas, so I was able to frequently make trips there on the weekends. The Warner Mountains seem to be a hidden gem – aside from on Saturdays, I rarely encountered other hikers in spite of how spectacular the trails are. I did, however, frequently encounter bald eagles, golden eagles, great horned owls, and even a black bear on one occasion. My adventures through the Warners were incredible and, in my opinion, on par with hikes I’ve done through Yosemite, Lassen, and other areas in California.

one seeded pussy paws

Cows and calves

Sunrise over Alturas

Burney Falls

Baker’s globe mallow

Desmocerus aureipennis

raptor observation point

South Warner W.A.

The last two days of my internship I got to assist with the Bureau of Reclamation’s efforts in salvaging fish from the A canal on the Link River that occurs annually. Fish were herded with a seine net to one end of the fish screen, netted and placed in a large bin. The bin was then hoisted up and sent to a make shift table in which we sorted through the fish. Through the mayhem of fish we had to locate and remove all suckers. The majority of fish being Blue or Tui chubs. Once you got a search image down, locating them became much easier. Overall I estimate we sorted through over 500,00 fish. Suckers were placed into a holding tank to then be processed. They were measured, some clipped for DNA and PIT tagged. They were then released in a spring fed stream that connects back to Upper Klamath Lake. More suckers were found than was expected, last year only 123 fish were caught, this year was over 300.

Fish being hoisted up out of the pit.

So many fish!

Julie Day (USFWS, Fish Biologist) and Bureau of Reclamation Staff sorting through fish.

It has been a great experience working at the US Fish and Wildlife Office in Klamath Falls, Oregon. I’m leaving with a more robust knowledge of fish biology and ecology plus a slew of new skills. With MOCC (Motor operator certification course) training standing out the most. Being able to use that knowledge and apply it to the rearing of an endangered species was extremely rewarding. But I’ve also learned a great deal more about the endangered species act (ESA), in its implementation and impact. And being a part of data collection for a biological opinion, which is a major component of the ESA. I’ve also learned the importance first hand of cooperation with other government agencies and NGO’ s in conservation.

Me, Erica and Nic, looking awesome in waders.

I will definitely miss working here in Klamath; I was able to work with some really great and inspiring people who I hope to keep in touch with. I am gearing up for a bunch of traveling. I’m headed to Seattle first, then Maryland, Vermont, New York and perhaps a trip to Ethiopia (fingers crossed). And after all that traveling I hope to continue a career in wildlife biology and conservation.

On our drive towards Caleveras county, I had no idea what to expect. I joined a team from our field office that was working on the emergency stabilization and rehabilitation plan for the devastating Butte Fire, which had consumed about 70,000 acres of land over three weeks in September. As we got closer to the edge of the burned area, there were more signals of what lay ahead – signs thanking firefighters and law enforcement, warnings against looting and unlicensed contracting, stations offering free food, water, and clothes.

Abruptly, the ground on one side of the road turned black – then, both sides. Some properties had escaped the flames, and some had suffered minor damages.  Others were burnt to the ground – small traces, an above-ground pool or chimney, were all that remained. The desolation was hard to comprehend as we approached the public land that we were planning to survey.

It was a huge relief to get out of the residential areas. Without the painful indications of human loss, one could almost imagine being on another planet.  Here, all was grey, orange, and red.  Without leaves blowing, or bees buzzing, it was very quiet – flies were about the only thing that moved.   But even here, you couldn’t look far without finding some trace of human life – a charred beer can, or the metal threads of a tire.  Even when these remnants were difficult to identify precisely, their geometry, their unmistakable built-ness, served as inescapable reminders that this still was, after all, our world.

Well, yes, we can find rare plants. The question really is: How many of the rare plants that are present in an area can we find? That doesn’t fit as well in the post title box, though.

One of the nice things about studying plants is that they are much more cooperative than animals. They don’t hide from you, run away, have large home ranges, or migrate. For those of us trying to survey them and map their populations, this is convenient. Nonetheless, not all plants are easy to find. There is basically a spectrum of survey-friendliness in plants. At one end, we might have something like Sequoia sempervirens: it’s big, easy to spot and easy to identify, and it lives for a very long time. At the other end, we might have something like Euphorbia rayturneri: it’s tiny, hard to spot, you can’t ID it without a hand lens, and it’s ephemeral. You can’t really find it at all unless weather conditions are right, and even under ideal conditions it’s going to be difficult to pick out from any distance or distinguish from the other prostrate spurges that are common in the area. Most plants, particularly in desert areas, are going to have at least one of these characteristics that make surveys difficult. So, today I’m going to give a brief example using one of the species I’ve already discussed several times on here: Peniocereus greggii var. greggii. For a desert plant, it’s reasonably large, generally 1 to 3 feet high. It’s easy to identify. It’s pretty long-lived. It is hard to spot, however. Here’s a large plant, pretty unobscured:

And here’s what you’re more often dealing with–a cactus hiding inside a shrub:

So, let’s suppose you’re surveying an area to ensure that some upcoming project won’t harm our peniocerei. What kind of detection rate is achievable? And, given that detection rate and some understanding of the density and spatial patterns of Peniocereus greggii var. greggii populations, how many individuals can we expect to harm simply because we couldn’t find and avoid them? Those are difficult problems and, instead of trying to answer them in any kind of rigorous fashion, I’ll just provide some anecdotes. We have three populations of Peniocereus greggii var. greggii that were thoroughly surveyed back in 2012, and for which previous CLM interns began a monitoring study in 2013. They’re just about our best case for high detection rates.

This year, my interns and I went out and remeasured plants in two of these populations (Steins and Swallow Fork). In the third (Big Cat), I went out back in May with several other botanically-inclined folks kind of poking around (I was just hoping to find plants in flower, and luckily I did!). In all cases, we found new plants. In the Big Cat population, three of us were wandering around for two or three hourse, mostly checking on previously-known individuals. We found ten new plants in an area where 32 were previously known. For the Swallow Fork population, we found 12 new individuals where 26 were known previously. In the Steins population, we found 58 new individuals, where 113 were previously known. So these put very approximate upper bounds on the detection rate in previous survey, somewhere around 67%. I’m sure if we had done full surveys in each of these areas, we would have kept finding more individuals, so the actual detection rate is probably substantially lower. Now here’s the interesting thing: many of these new individuals we found were right next to previously known plants! It was fairly common, in all three populations, for us to be looking for one of the previously GPSed plants, have a little trouble finding it, and stumble across another plant a few meters away. In all but a couple of cases we were eventually able to find the original GPSed plant, so it’s not just some kind of GPS error. Here are a couple of maps of of portions of the Steins and Swallow Fork populations to illustrate–notice the scale at bottom left, we’re dealing with pretty small areas:

Often, the previously known plants were in worse shape and harder to find than the “new” plants. So, how did the original survey crew find those beatup, unhappy plants while often missing a big healthy Peniocereus a few meters away? Well, they almost certainly didn’t. There’s a very simple explanation that wouldn’t have occurred to me. Drs. Ed and Beth Leuck mentioned to me about a year ago that Peniocereus greggii var. greggii that they’ve been monitoring seem to die back to the ground every now and then, particularly after flowering. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: these guys have big honking tubers. So they can die back to ground level, then pop back up next year. This is very odd for a cactus. It’s also pretty odd for a tuberous plant. Most tuberous plants, at least in our climate, don’t have woody above-ground stems that persist for a few years. So we’re dealing with a tuberous cactus that has somewhat ephemeral stems. After the stems die back, they are incredibly difficult to spot. You can be within a meter of a GPSed individual and still poke around for five minutes until you find that one dead stem that isn’t like the others. So, as a cactus, you would think that one of the things Peniocereus greggii var. gregii has going for it is that you’re dealing with a long-lived plant that is basically going to be where it is and be findable over long periods of time. Nope. So that moves it a notch or two away from the survey-friendly end of the plant spectrum. I guess the moral of the story here is just that, even though plants are easier to keep track of than animals, they’re still kind of a pain. And most plants are probably going to have some weird quirks like Peniocereus, you just won’t know about the quirks until you’ve spent some time with a particular species.

Now a few miscellaneous pictures.

Is it a legume? No, it’s a spurge, Phyllanthus abnormis!

And here’s a Pituophis catenifer sayi who was not pleased to see me:

Well, this fabulous internship has drawn to a close. It seems incredible to me that I have only been in Arcata working with the local BLM for 7 months.  I have built an entire life in this time. When I arrived in March I found a community ready and willing to embrace me, with roommate potlucks and workplace BBQs I was ushered into the world of farmers market Saturdays, greenhouse gardening, and land management. Between the plant surveys and the seed collecting there were hikes that raced the tides and secret swimming holes that were clothing optional. The wanderlust that so often has me…by the belly aching fire, was quieted for a time as I threw myself into rangeland health assessments and invasive weed management.

I am constantly looking to add to my “biologist’s toolbelt”; skills that will make me an even better, more well-rounded conservation biologist and geneticist. This internship was incredible for expanding my skill set, with new experience in California floristics, rare plant surverying, GIS, and range work. I was exposed to some incredible, passionate resource specialists whose joy for their job was contagious and whose experience and mentoring was invaluable for me as I decide my next step.

A huge thank-you to the Arcata gang, and the always amazing CBG.