Well, I’m now two months into my position in the Lander, Wyoming field office and I love it!  This place is amazing and the people are great.  So far most of what I have been doing is monitoring riparian areas by taking photo points, stubble height measurements of two key species, and conducting bank trampling surveys.  These riparian areas are in a very remote location in the field office, and I hardly ever see other people out and about.  Recently, I have also started doing droop height measurements around wells and reservoirs to make sure that those aren’t being overgrazed as well.  The next two weeks I will be working for another lady in the office doing a few different sampling methods that I haven’t done since college.  It will be nice to refresh myself on how to conduct the surveys.

I’m continually amazed at how beautiful the landscape is that I’m working on.  Most of the flowers are done blooming and the grasses are seeding out.  But, that doesn’t take away from the beauty of the land one single bit.  It’s such a diverse landscape!  There are areas that are sandy and have natural lakes, rocky areas with seeps, clayey areas that will get you stuck in a heartbeat, and everything in between.  The antelope are uncountable, the elk are a wonderful sight, the birds are singing beautifully, and the one coyote I have seen had a nice lunch of sage grouse.  Probably the most surprising thing I have seen in the past two months was a six-legged sheep.  Yes, a six-legged sheep.  A picture should be attached to this post.  I have always heard of that happening, but never thought I would see it myself.  I have also attached a picture of a field of Wild Irises.  They were at one of the riparian areas we are monitoring for bank trampling, stubble height, and photo points.  The bugs were about to carry me away, but I couldn’t resist stopping for just a few seconds to snap a picture on my phone of the beautiful irises.

I look forward to continuing my internship for the next four months and learning so much more than I thought I ever would.  BLM Wyoming has captured my heart and I hope to stay here for the rest of my life.  I hope everyone else’s internships are going well and that you are as happy as I am.  🙂

Working for the BLM or any government agency requires many training classes on a myriad of subjects, usually mundane and somewhat self-explanatory. However, this week I did the ATV training class and it was so much fun and different! Nine of us from the field office participated in the day-long course that required us to learn about safely operating an ATV while showing your abilities and proficiency in driving. We learned about important laws and regulations, safety tips and how to avoid dangerous situations, and basic mechanics of the machines. It was a lot of fun buzzing around the designed course and practicing fast turns and going over large bumps. With nine of us on the course at a time we had to get good at looking ahead and reading other drivers. I don’t yet know if we’ll use the ATVs for botanical work, but it sure was a fun training to have! We also experienced  a storm develop and come in as we wrapped up the final driving tests. The clouds and lightning were incredible against the mountains.

Until next time,

Austen, BLM Salmon Field Office, Idaho

From the hum of spring, into the midnight sun the field season at BLM in the Fairbanks district office is concentrated into 3 short months.

 

This week I headed down to NCTC in West Virginia for a GIS class and learned tons!

This next week I’ll be heading back up the Dalton highway to initiate AIM vegetation monitoring on few mining sites.

I’ll update more after next month once the season slows 🙂

After two months of monitoring rare cacti, my fellow botanists and I have moved on to collecting native seeds for the Seeds of Success program. We began collecting in Great Basin of Western Utah, where we captured a few species of Penstemon just in time before the heat of the sun dried up all of the forbs and turned them into a crisp. Now, it is hard to come by a target species in the low elevations due to the high temperature and dry climate, so, fortunately for us, this means we get to trek through the higher elevations in search for more collections. This has been a bonus for multiple reasons, but mainly because there are trees! When driving on the backroads of the Great Basin the only trees you’ll find were brought there by humans, you know miles ahead when you are about to approach a town because of the random patches of Populous fremontii. Lonely ranchers have expanded the range of P. fremontii into the west desert by providing them with ample water around their homes and agricultural fields. Up in the mountains, it has been refreshing to see trees in their natural habitat and also to have the luxury of keying out plants and eating lunch in the shade.

Every time I work in the field I see a plant that I have never seen before. This week, one of the plants that I fell in love with was Corallorhiza maculata. While collecting Packera multilobata seeds in the Dixie National Forest this Orchid luckily caught the corner of my eye. This plant is easy to miss because it blends in nicely with the dried leaves on the forest floor but it’s hard not to give it your full attention once you have found it. Its red stems and purple-spotted labellum make this plant very unique and adorable. C. maculata also has a special way of obtaining its nutrients, it is mycoheterotrophic. It’s clear that this plant does not photosynthesize because of the lack of chlorophyll in the stems and scale-like leaves. Instead, it parasitizes mycorrhizal fungi. The fungus in a situation like this end up being the middle man in the transfer of carbon from one plant (the host tree) to another plant (C. maculata).

Now it’s time for me to hit the field and collect some more seeds! Thanks for stopping by.

All the best,

Rayna

Richfield BLM

After some large collections in the past several weeks the seed collection has slowed as we wait for the last of our lower elevation target species to reach the dispersal stage. At the moment my days are filled with driving from site to site, checking phenology, and on occasion getting a little lost. If I learn anything in this internship it ought to be using a map to get back where I am supposed to be.  In this down time I have taken on a GIS project to identify sites for potential sagebrush seed collection. While it is frustrating at times it is nice to apply the skills I learned in a classroom setting, and that feeling of satisfaction when something works is more than worth it. Hopefully when I go out to verify these sites I find that it was a successful project.

Last week we were able to go visit another field office to see the process for planning for juniper treatments. The juniper trees have been spreading from their historic habitat into Sage Grouse habitat due to fire suppression and historic land use. We got to see sections that have not been treated, and then went to treated sites to observe how the recovery was progressing. It was interesting to see the decision making process on what type of treatment should be done where, especially since I had had the opportunity to read about the effects these treatments have on the native plant community. There is so much thought that has to go into the treatments and how to coordinate their completion that it is amazing that these plans are able to come together. I am excited that this internship gives me the opportunity to experience what goes into making rehabilitation and management plans. It is something I am extremely interested in, and I am hoping that after this summer I will know if it is something I wish to do in the future.

As seed collection comes to an end I am starting to learn about some of the projects I will be tackling in the upcoming weeks. I am excited to start sagebrush mapping and vegetation clearances, and to get acquainted with some new plants!

 

 

These are the days of summer on the North Coast. Often unpredictable – bookended by fog in morning and evening some days; on others morning fog gives way to wind strewn and pellucid evenings. Thirty miles or so to the East temperatures are high and the summer receives its thought-of heat, that awakens elevated flowers and splits to seed the lowland inhabitants. Summer is shifty: drifting between comfortable sensuous inaction and a leap in the metabolic movement of a life.

Here at the inner bark of summer – halfway through July – a turning reflection: I am more than halfway through my CLM internship!

My last day will be September 23^rd, a date readily approaching at the speed of life we know to be expectedly incongruous. The next adventure is decided, a return to Patagonia to work on a ranch I visited on my last foray to the South – Estancia Ranqilco. More on this in my final reflective post – today, a hopefully halfway reflective check-in from the land of Redwood, salt-breeze and changing fog!

I have been working mainly on collecting for Seeds of Success since my last blog post, enjoying greatly the cycles of phenology monitoring, seed collection, and packaging, data completion, the final sending off to the Bend Seed Extractory.

Being the one and only CLM intern at my field office, the joy of well-chosen companions in the field is not lost on me, and I have had a plenitude of this special joy over the past several weeks. Wildlife technicians, forest ecologists, and even the assistant field manager of the Arcata BLM Field Office have joined me on my seed collection missions! We build powerful connections not only to the people we work with but also to the work of others when we can take the time to commit to some inter-discipline-inner-office-cross-training. We are afforded respect, understanding and wholesome interrelation with those we share an organization with day in and day out. We are also gifted someone to help us with our multitude of tasks, and reciprocally are confirmed in our ability to be of use outside our particular expertise, happy to provide the gift of a little of our energy to another. This seems a crucial and fulfilling step, too often we are trapped myopically in our disciplines and resource areas. Trade a day with someone doing something very different from you in your office – it won’t be wasted time in any sort of way.

At another intersection, seed collection connects us to the more-than-human world in a way that is practical, physical, and ancestral. We have all been seed collectors. Regardless of race, gender, or personal beliefs, when we gather we enter into a nutritive relationship based on mutual respect for the creatures from which we gather. Rather than extoll the personal, ecological, institutional and spiritual benefits of seed collection – I will encourage CLM interns to collect with intention, career-minded adults to advocate for seed collecting/banking/saving and all to pursue opportunities to collect seed! In the beautiful words of Hope Jahren (author of the lucid book Lab Girl): “A seed is alive while it waits. Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year old oak tree that towers over it.” May we be fully alive while we collect and may the simple act of collection make us more alive.

Along this same rivulet is another experience I have gratefully accepted through the past weeks as a CLM intern. BLM recently donated a large old growth log that had been sitting in a parking lot to the Wiyot Tribe. An elder from the Yurok tribe agreed to help in the re-learning of the traditional skills of plank-making and dug-out canoe carving. I had the great opportunity to help swing the hammer with both my hands and drive the wedges that split this great 600 year-old log. An experience readily compared to a deep, cool well-spring where water is inimitably needed.

In the coming weeks – I will be working on Seeds of Success, monitoring grazing allotments, writing drafts of the Headwaters Forest Reserve Resource Management Plan Amendment, feverishly working on mounting and cataloging my herbarium specimens, preparing a butterfly field guide for the Arcata BLM office, and working alongside US Fish and Wildlife on a project monitoring coastal dune geomorphology and vegetation in response to a changing climate.

When I am not on the clock as a CLM Intern these days, I have been venturing away from Arcata most weekends, enjoying all the richness of Northern California.

Notably, the Trinity Alps have taken me in as a sojourner; their granite as much thrust to the West from the mother pluton of the Sierra Nevada as I have been. If one thing can be said certainly about the Trinity Alps, it is that it is a range with illustrious botanical wealth. Spring has arrived in the subalpine – and I had the special privilege to hike one of the steepest trails in the Trinity Alps with my Jepson Manual for an overnight botanical backpacking bonanza. Keep up with a few of the wonders here (or better yet take a walk!): Kaleb’s iNaturalist observations!

In this way, the unique landscapes in which we are placed give their ripe and ready interplay with our work as CLM interns. We do not simply halt our training and inclinations as naturalists, ecologists, conservationists, curious humans when we leave the field office. On the contrary, these skills shine bright after-hours in myriad ways, my anecdote above being just one of them. Because of this, we lead a holistic and wholesome existence in which the false dichotomy between work and play is enthusiastically and passionately eclipsed.

To summarize these past months and intensify my intentions for the rest of my CLM internship:

I have been beside the water, in large part, as we tend to be with summer coming complete, from the Pacific Ocean and Humboldt Bay to the Mad River, Van Duzen River, Trinity River, Stoney Creek, Echo Lake…

Why? For practice and the pertinence of permeability. To practice patient, longing listening — the melody of the greatest symphony; river, stone, air and sun. I come to practice the olfactory and audible — sweet subtle summer Redwood and Fir. To test remembrance: March storms, birdsong, flowers now gone to seed.

I come to practice my passive permeability. Our simple debt to water makes us naturally osmotic beings — shifting gradients — essentially terrestrial sponges. And so we come alongside the river, the mountains, the sea. Our openness defines what we are — and we must practice and guard our permeability.

Yours,

Kaleb Goff

Arcata BLM Field Office, California

When I close my eyes I see seeds. I reach for them, feeling out the iterative estimation outlined in the Seeds of Success protocol: I am training my eyes and hands to confirm that I am collecting 25% of a population of at least 50 individuals. I find seeds in my socks, stuck inside my pockets, even one currently embedded beneath the skin of my pinky (thank you needle and thread grass, Hesperostipa comata). Although the few that follow me home and creep into my dreams do not reach their ultimate destination designated by Seeds of Success, the remaining 10,000 plus seeds make their way to a processing facility before reaching their final home outside again, put to work to restore ecosystems.

Sometimes I feel like I am just taking, destroying, smashing tiny plants under my big-foot sized feet. I spend all day grabbing seeds, at a buffet where I can take 25% of whatever is there that day. While collecting seeds requires a second by second mentality, my attention span focusing on one handful at a time, this frame of reference is limited. I frequently remind myself that my taking will turn into giving. Idioms about stealing run through my head daily: Am I “robbing Peter to pay Paul” (except in this instance Peter is a sagebrush ecosystem and Paul is a future ecosystem in need of genetically appropriate, native seed).

While bats, ants, butterflies, and birds are traditional pollinators; in the Seeds of Success system, people are pollinators with a purpose, taking native seeds and spreading them to landscapes in need of restoration. At the end of long days, when I arrive home encrusted in dirt and salt from my sweat, I bend over to unlace my shoes and find dozens of seeds stuck to my socks. Through this daily ritual, I have realized that I have always been a pollinator, collecting seeds unwittingly wherever I go. The seeds I carry with me are not necessarily the ones I have been assigned to collect. They are often seeds of weeds, clinging to my feet in the hopes of spreading their range. These persistent seeds are like a comet’s tail, debris latching on to whatever comet happens to pass by.

It is through these incidental, unofficial Seeds of Success collections that I become aware of how connected my movement and actions are to the landscapes I move through. Every step I take contributes to the accumulation of both intentional and unintentional seeds. Each week when I mail our Taos seed collections to the cleaning and storage facility I can grasp the tangible magnitude of our daily actions. Assembling 100,000 seeds on one table prior to packing reminds me what humans have the power to do when we put our minds to it. In addition to assessing the intentional fruits of our labor, I wish there was a way I could regularly assemble and assess all of the unintentional impacts, both positive and negative, that I have on plants, places, and people. How many seeds have I transported through my shoes and introduced to new places? What didn’t I see at a collection site that I should have?

In light of recent events that have studded my time with the Chicago Botanic Garden (Orlando shootings the week of my Chicago training; Baton Rouge, Minnesota, and Dallas the week of my blog post), I must also ask how my actions as a scientist, intentional and unintentional, contribute to or dismantle systems of oppression. While I collect seeds I have time to listen to the news and podcasts. While collecting Hesperostipa neomexicana, a fuzzy grass, I listened to first-hand accounts of civil rights activists through the BBC Witness Series. As much as Charles Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt, and Asa Grey inform my work as botanist, listening to Franklin McCain of the Greensboro Four and Gwendolyn Webb, a child hero of the Children’s Crusade, influences my work as a scientist.

At a time when the dissonance between my daily routine of collecting seeds in scenic places as a white scientist and the routine violence experienced by people of color in America could not be more extreme, I must seek connections between the voices I hear through my headphones and the work I do while listening. The 100,000 seeds I have collected so far remind me that I have power to tangibly alter and influence the plants, places, and people around me and prompt me to ask myself and whomever reads this: what does this power look like when devoted to cultivating a community of actively anti-racist and anti-oppression scientists in addition to cultivating a community of native and genetically appropriate seeds?

Sophie Duncan–Taos Field Office, Bureau of Land Management