I didn’t mean to fall in love with plants.

My college plant taxonomy class was interesting, sure, but when city parks’ weedy spring bloomers were the extent of botanical exposure, other pursuits offered greater appeal.

Four years later I found myself in the verdant rolling landscape of the midwest driftless region, on assignment to monitor the delightfully-spiraled and highly-endangered Iowa Pleistocene Snail (Discus macclintocki). A botanically-minded co-worker introduced me to local flora along the winding hikes to field sites. I learned names and stories of plants gracing the algific talus slopes, sand prairies, oak savannas, and wet meadows.

I began to see communities of ecosystems and recognize species by their placement and by their neighbors. I gained a sense of habitat quality, noticing diversity and abundance relative to the unique contours of the landscape, imagining where water flows and pools, observing shade and age of trees. I began to see the abundance of nature with new eyes, realizing there is a lifetime stretching before me in which I will never run short of species to learn or wild places to observe. I was falling sincerely in love: the sort of love you re-prioritize for, you commit to, you cherish with gratitude. I was falling in love with plants.

Fast forward a few months, and I was cruising westward to start a CLM botany internship in Vale, Oregon: a tiny town on the eastern edge of the state, deep in sagebrush country. This is the job I never intended to have, but as the snail position was ending and my appreciation for plants growing, I perused websites for floralistic opportunities and stumbled upon this internship. Lucky in love.

On my journey to Vale, I explored Death Valley’s wildflower bloom, San Francisco, and Salt Point State Park along the California coast. I learned some of my first western birds, including the curious Stellar’s Jay and brilliantly blue Western Scrub Jay. I frolicked among the flowers of Death Valley like a four-limbed solitary bee, nose and cheeks dusted in pollen, brain captivated in woozy ecstasy by the floral fragrance of desert beauties in bloom. Like many romantics, I wrote a poem:

Golden yellow hue flows like rivers down

hillside crevices

to death’s valley floor

where a protesting display

of thousands

millions

of flowers, wild, alive

are blooming.

This is the story of how I arrived. I have much to share from my first month’s adventures as a CLM intern – stories I will save for a new post next week. 🙂

Myself with Desert Gold

Phacelia calthifolia blooming in Death Valley

Gravel Ghost (Atrichoseris platyphylla), Death Valley

Desert Gold (Gerea canescens) blooming en masse in Death Valley

Entering Oregon BLM lands. This spot along Lake Abert is where I saw and smelled Sagebrush for the very first time.

Lauren Bansbach

Bureau of Land Management

Vale, Oregon

I’m very happy to have started my internship last week with Fish and Wildlife Service in Klamath Falls. Having never visited Oregon, it’s been really special to have the opportunity to learn more about a new area. Klamath has a rich cultural history that has included some problematic land use. As a result, some of the animals here have been listed as endangered or threatened. Our office develops recovery plans for these species and my internship will be involved with these plans.

We are waiting for two fish species, Lost River Sucker and Shortnose Sucker, to begin spawning so that we can collect sperm and egg samples to help create a reservoir supply of fish to be raised in ponds on our refuge. I met my first suckers this week and they were incredible but not quite ripe. Next week we will be going out on a boat with staff from Bureau of Reclamation to net more suckers for relocation and will hopefully be able to start collecting samples.

Another animal I’ll be working with is the Oregon Spotted Frog. Another intern and I performed egg mass surveys this week in which we waded through wetland habitat to count the egg masses we saw. It was overwhelming at first but we were able to spot prime habitat easier after some guidance and practice.

I’m excited to learn more and get out into the field more throughout the internship. The staff we’ve worked with has been very friendly and helpful and I feel positive about joining the team.

Oregon Spotted Frog Egg Mass

I have lived my whole life up until this past month within the warm embrace of the sea. Actually, that is a poetic lie. The Salish Sea has less of a warm embrace and more of a swirling whirlpool of mysterious riptides, algal blooms, freezing water and strange denizens of the deep. My sea is not warm and peaceful but dark, mysterious and deadly.

If Seattle could be said to be in the warm embrace of anything it would be the clouds. Our constant grey blanket traps in heat, light, and moisture making our winter’s dreary and wet, but ultimately mild. Despite an academic understanding of the concept, I never fully understood how much this was a function of the water until I moved over the mountains and away from the ameliorating effects of the sea.

Central Oregon was a revelation. Leaving Seattle I filled my bags with tank tops and sandals, bragging to all my friends about the sunny days I was heading to. My first week of work it snowed twice.

I used to complain about the capricious nature of the weather in the Pacific Northwest, but I now realize I had no idea what I was talking about. Around here you scrape ice off your car before heading to work at seven and then slather yourself with sunscreen before going into the field at ten thirty. Prior to moving here I was warned extensively about the heat, no one mentioned the cold.

These conditions have had an interesting effect on our work environment as well. Our second week of work we headed to a rather remote site in the south of our district to look for a rumored population of Lomatium donnellii. I am no stranger to driving a pick up down potentially treacherous roads but this one was just bad. It was a classic rutted, narrow BLM two track. Even before the cattle guard off the highway we knew what we were in for, it was preceded by a small lake of a puddle which splashed muddy water clear up to our roof. The next thirty minutes were spent skating our half ton work truck across puddle after puddle, thoroughly baptizing it in thick clay mud.

The kiss of death for our trip came in the form of a particularly nasty bit of road. I stopped and looked at the turn, a solid forty five degree angle, completely covered with at least six inches of water over thoroughly saturated, slippery clay soil. I took a moment to consider the embarrassment of calling dispatch for a rescue my second week of work, then turned around. Not even fifty feet back up the road it started snowing.

Not just a light smattering either, a proper flurry of fat flakes which quickly coated the landscape with a picturesque layer of white. I felt a warm sense of vindication in my decision to head back. 

But don’t worry, this story has a happy ending. Last Wednesday after two weeks of warmer, drier weather we returned. This time we quickly made our way down a now dry road to find exactly what we were hoping for, a very healthy population of at least 60 thousand plants in full bloom. Lomatium donnellii is an important species for restoration in our area and this collection will be an important part of our summer’s work. The road to get there may have been bumpy but in the end we got a great outcome and a pretty good story.

S Bower, BLM – Prineville District Office

Sunset after a rain in Weldon, CA

It’s been a month since I arrived in Ridgecrest, California. The Mojave holds a lot of beauty. Everyone tells me spring is the best time to be here and I’m glad to arrive at such a fortuitous time. However as things begin to warm up I’m noticing the faint green shading in the hill sides turning browner and browner.

Last week I participated in some rare plant monitoring in The Kelso Canyon that lies within the Bright Star Wilderness area which is in the Southern Sierras and the northeastern edge of our field office. This is truly a gorgeous area. To drive up out of the desert and see a creek heavily lined with cottonwoods and tufts of grass and nettles is a rare and refreshing sight. Unfortunately, my camera was dead for most of this trip.

But I included some photos of other cool things! I especially enjoy the Beavertail blossoms. This week was also exciting because we got to see our first Desert Tortoise! Such cute little creatures.

Beaver tail cactus bloom

A lone raven over the rademancher hills above ridge crest

Linanthus dichotomous

A close up of the Kelso Creek Monkey Flower

A size comparison of the Monkey flower

The Kelso Creek monkey flower a rare species endemic to this region with only 9 known populations

Wild donkeys

1st Desert Tortoise sighting!!

An accidental selfie taken while trying to photograph a flower

Hope everyone else’s internship is going as well as I feel mine is. I love the desert. Or wherever one might be.

We also made our first seed collection this week. We collected Plantago ovata . This little annual is widespread but has such small little seeds and is often under 6″ tall. This meant lots of stooping to collect nearly microscopic seeds.

Then we collected wildflowers for this weekends upcoming Wildflower festival which is here in Ridgecrest! A great chance to learn the local areas flora. So much variety. I saw at least a 100 different flowers all in the same room! What a information overload but truly worth it.

I think that’s everything!

Robbie Wood

BLM Ridgecrest Field Office

Hello Readers!

I have just started my CLM internship in Rawlins, WY. My internship is different from most other CLM internships as mine is Recreation focused, instead of botany focused. This is my second CLM internship, so I am excited to see how the work differs as my previous internship was botany based. Most of the projects that we will be working on this summer are related to general maintenance/upgrades of recreation sites as well as Wilderness Study Area (WSA) monitoring. Our office is about 3.5 millions acres, so there is lots of space for recreating. There also are 5 WSAs in the field office that we will be working in.

I have been working for about 2.5 weeks now and most of the time has been spend in training. I have been getting myself familiar with the BLM’s recreation management procedures as well as a few other required trainings. Unfortunately, due to the fact that it could snow here until June, I have not been able to do much field work. I did make it out to a few of the recreation sites and see some of the projects that are being planned for the summer.

Coming up in the next few weeks I do have the opportunity to attend a Recreation Workshop that is a week long. I feel like this would be a great learning experience as well as an unofficial kick off to field season in my mind.

Having done a CLM internship before I was aware of how the environment would different from the environment I am used to back home in Michigan. However, I did not anticipate that we could get snow until June! When I left Michigan to travel here spring had arrived. All of our snow had melted and the temperatures were warming up. That was not the case here and it took me a bit to get back into the “winter” mentality. Another thing that I did not anticipate is the wind…..it is always blowing here. However, the town and area does have many promising features that I look forward to exploring this summer. The area is a lot wetter than my previous internship location so I hoping to get to do a little aquatic recreating in my off time. More water also equals a different plant ecosystem and I look forward to seeing how those compare to my previous internship location. The town is also a bigger than the town my previous internship was in and I look forward to exploring it.

Overall, I am looking forward to the exciting new opportunities that my CLM is offering me this summer!

AZ

BLM Rawlins Field Office