On our way out of Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge a few weeks back, we spent a good ten minutes talking to a couple of women from the Midwest and Oregon who happened to be traveling around the country with their husbands after having sold their homes. We had a nice chat about conservation and restoration, and how the two of them had been academics.

We parted ways, at which point we came across another interesting character: a man who claimed to be working for the National Audubon Society taking photos of wildlife, namely birds, in the salt marshes. He said he had been a Marine Biologist and stressed the importance of having a wide skill set. His had helped him stay afloat – there wasn’t always a lot of money in Marine Biology, and having photography as a hobby paid off during the lulls in his main career.

He spoke to us about a trip he took with his wife during the summer in which they encountered a family that claimed to have fields and fields of Ginseng, which for any of you that are familiar with the plant know that it sells for a lot money. Apparently a lot of people in the mountains of NC (and probably elsewhere) make such claims to impress their friends, so take the story as you will.

Anyway, once we left his company we headed back to our car to stow our seeds and press our herbarium specimens. While getting everything packed up, one of the women we spoke to earlier came up to us and exclaimed, “have you two heard about the whale”? We obviously didn’t know what she was talking about since we had been in an interdune marsh all afternoon, so we asked what she meant. A whale had washed ashore and she and her friend went to see it, as there were many people stopping on the side of the road, pulling out their cameras, and hiking the dunes to gawk.

We assumed it was probably still alive, and maybe there would be a need for our new Marine Biologist friend to have a look at it and contact the necessary authorities to help it back into the ocean, if that’s what it needed. Much to our dismay, the whale was dead. Very dead. Like d-e-a-d dead. It must’ve been sitting there on the shore for well over a week, rotting in the sun and being eaten, inside and out, by who knows what.

The smell was awful, for one thing, and the sight of it was pretty bad too. For those of you that have smelled a dead animal before, but are not quite sure what a dead whale might smell like, imagine this: take a dead deer, for example, maybe roadkill. Stuff the body with all the seaweed you can find, throw a few fish in there for good measure, then let the corpse do its thing on the side of the road for a while in the heat. That’s about what this whale smelled like.

Once we got over the smell, we took a good look at this thing. The skin was mottled and stretched, full of holes like a balloon that’s been blown up too far and is wearing thinner and thinner. The entire back end was gone. The tail and what seemed like half the distance from the tail to the dorsal fins had been torn off. We’re not sure if it was a someone or a something that took it, but it made for an interesting view of the vertebrae. The head was mostly eaten away, but the big wide tongue remained.

Neither one of us knows a whole lot about whales, so maybe someone else can enlighten us on what type of whale it was. I’ll include one picture for that purpose, and I’ll spare the ones of the rotting flesh dripping from the skeleton.

We see a lot of interesting things on our travels. Maybe one of these days we’ll get to see a live whale!

Till next time.

Looking at posts from the other interns, I’m as surprised as they are how fast my internship has gone by. It seems like just last week I was driving out to California, stepping out of my car believing I was in the Mojave Desert and abruptly realizing I had moved to the surface of the sun. Overwhelmed by my new surroundings and immediately missing hills, trees, and water. Thankfully things have cooled off since then, I’ve been many unique places that most people never get a chance to see, and I’ve learned to appreciate the beauty the desert can offer. I’ve formed many valuable relationships in the office and truly appreciate the people that I’ve spent time with. As with everywhere else I have worked and gone to school, it’s the people that make a place feel more like home.

Since my last post, we’ve continued our rangeland surveys. We’ve also performed a few Proper Functioning Condition surveys with the help of a botanist who recently retired from the field office. He worked here in Ridgecrest for almost 40 years–he’s such an interesting person to talk to and is an immense bank of knowledge. He knows the field office like the back of his hand and can point at just about any mountain and tell you the last time he hiked it and what populations of rare plants are found there. He’s also very well-versed in geology and hydrology, and knows all about how the features in the field office formed. I wish I could listen to him tell stories about the mountains here all day.

We’ve moved out of the northern portion of the field office and into a new allotment in the southern portion, and it’s been great getting to explore new areas. We’ve gotten to go through the Walker Pass area and have been spending many days up around Kelso Valley. The Starks would say, “Winter is Coming,” but they’d be wrong, because it’s here–I’m regretting not packing more winter clothes but that was the last thing on my mind in July! Apparently they don’t get much snow here in the valley, but some of the higher elevation areas have been turning white. Hopefully the weather holds out for one more week until I go home for Christmas.

Some final-internship-month highlights in photographic form:

The New England Seeds of Success 2015 season has now come to an end and it’s time to reflect on what we were able to accomplish. Each of us on the team has learned so much about the local environment, native taxa and not the least of which, how to describe the Seeds of Success program.

Throughout the past season our team has traveled throughout New England collecting seeds for restoration projects that ranged from establishing salt marsh plants in the face of rising sea levels to proving seeds to help stabilize river banks after removing dams. The common theme between all of these species, regardless of state or habitat, are that these species are the building blocks for each plant community.

It is these common and often under appreciated species that create and define each habitat. By collecting and storing these familiar species we are able to provide locally sourced native plant seeds to conservation efforts in the future. Although it sounds more glamorous to work with rare and endangered species, it is crucial that we also work on the commonplace species, because they provide the structure to support everything else.