This last month was quite the adventure! I went all over Nevada looking for ERUM and collecting seeds. We collected quite a few seeds from a number of areas in Nevada and Idaho. I also went to Reno to help with the common gardens. We went downtown after we finished work and saw this amazing art!
I also went on a GLORIA project trip and monitored the top of mountains. I learned a lot from experienced botanists. We also found ERUM up in the alpine habitat and went back last week to collect, and got two different varieties of ERUM seed collections!
One of our locations that we used for camping in Nevada was Angel Lake, which had a lot of ERUM and was also a beautiful locations.
We found a ton of beautiful campsites in Nevada!
Beth tried to take a panorama of our campsite and ended up with this monstrosity of a photo… Anyways, it was another great month, and hopefully I will get a lot more seed collections in this next month before the end of the season!
This month has gone by fast! The Rocky Mountain Research Station has been busy this month!
Since my last post, I have been busy traveling for seed scouting. One of the research station’s techs, Marguerite, joined me on a seed scouting trip. We are completely focused on Eriogonum umbellatum, and we went looking up by Council, Idaho. We went to this neat lookout with an amazing view.
Lookout ViewMarguerite and the Lookout
While we were searching for ERUM, we came across something pretty cool! We left it alone, but it was a neat find!
Old shotgun and ERUM!
Then, Elric and I went out to Nevada with another one of the RMRS techs, Bebe! We had a great time searching for ERUM in northern Nevada. This was during the tropical storm warning, but we lucked out and never hit rain once. We found wonderful places to camp and explore, and we saw some gorgeous sunsets and stunning alpine lakes! We also collected one population of ERUM, and are going back in the future when the plants are seeding to collect from two more populations!
Duck Valley CampgroundAngel LakeEast Humboldt Mountain RangeNevada HikingVibrant SunsetNeat Rock formations by ERUM siteNeat RocksSunset night 2Elric and I
Elric and I went to explore South Mountain (in the Owyhees in Idaho) in search of ERUM. We found a ton of Eriogonum heracleoides, but unfortunately no ERUM. We stopped at a neat lookout and had a nice time exploring the area.
Lookout on South MountainSouth Mountain
To end August, a forest service tech Joe and I went to explore Steen Mountains in Oregon! This trip was grand. Steen Mountains has a 60 mile loop road that is accessible for most cars (washboards but no potholes), and is 100% worth the trip. We found ERUM all over this range, and in the high elevation site it was still blooming! Joe and I had a nice time exploring the area, and we woke up one morning and realized it was in the 20s while we were sleeping (brr). After a successful seed collecting trip, we traveled back to Boise!
Wildhorse LakeFish LakeFrost on tentPage Creek CampgroundSunset!Fish Lake CampsiteSteens Mountain LookoutJoe at Steens Summit Lookout
This was a great month of exploring and seed collecting! looking forward to next month with my team!
Before going on trips to collect seed, our team does research on every plant on our list so that we can understand what it looks like at every stage and be better prepared to identify it within the field. It usually takes quite a while to learn the key characteristics and the plants sometimes meld together in my mind. For some plants, they are so unique and unexpected that I am ecstatic to find them in the field. One such plant is the bottle gentian, Gentiana andrewsii. It has 5 fused petals, forming a tube that will never open. This closed tube resembles a closed bottle, thus the name.
the icon, the legend, Gentiana andrewsii
While in northern Minnesota, the team saw one in the parking lot of our site and nowhere else. It is such an interesting inflorescence because it never opens. I could not imagine how it could be pollinated. After some outside research into the scientific literature, I learned that only bumblebees are physically able to crawl inside the tube and rub pollen on their sternum in the process. Oddly enough, the corolla tube of Gentiana andrewsii is much longer than the tongue of the two studied bumblebees. This would make it very difficult for bumblebees to access the nectar at the bottom. Instead, most bees access the nectar through lateral lacerations. The bees studied were not known for being corolla perforating species and no other mechanisms for lacerations were provided. Even as they steal nectar from some inflorescences, it was only observed coupled with also entering the tube to retrieve pollen. My theory is that the stealing is not driving changes on either side because the bees get nectar and the plants still get their pollen spread.
Flowering Big Bluestem (Andropogon gerardii)
Gentiana andrewsii is a dependable species for bumblebees because no other pollinators are in competition for the resources. I was bummed that we did not find a large population, but future collections of this plant would be great for native bee restoration efforts!
Check out this video on Facebook of a bee diving head first into the plant.
It has been an eventful and uneventful month. Now you might be wondering how it can be both. Well, as I looked over my camera roll to determine the subject of this month’s blog, nothing stands out. That’s not to say that I didn’t do anything exciting this month because many interesting things happened at work as well outside of work that included many of my first.
First Seed Collection
For instance, Peter and I started our first seed collection of the season since seeds here are finally starting to mature. Our first collection is none other than the lovely Allium cernuum. However, this was after a few failed attempts to collect seeds from Mertensia franciscana and Mornada fistulosa. The plants were either grazed by elk and wild horses or most of the seeds dropped. It was a bit discouraging at first and a learning lesson, but I knew there was other species to collect from.
First UTV Ride
We spent the rest of the month scouting for more species across the forest and monitoring the phenology of scouted populations. As a result, we had the privilege to ride a UTV at the Sacramento Ranger District (SRD). Angie, the Wildlife Biologist at SRD and the one who drove us around, insisted that we take a photo in it to brag to our Wildlife Crew members as they don’t have any.
Although it was a fun experience, I don’t think I will ever get on one ever again. That’s because as we drove, a long stick went through the UTV floor and hit the seat next to me all while making a loud noise due to a stainless steel bottle on the floor being shoved out of the way. At the end of the day, I rather not be impaled by a stick while riding a UTV just to get to a location faster.
Peter and I awkwardly smiling while seated in a UTV.
First Salamander Encounter
The amazing part of being at the Smokey Bear Ranger District is the opportunity to join the wildlife surveys. Usually, the Wildlife Crew at the district joins the Salamander Crew to survey the Sacramento Mountain salamander (Aneides hardiiI), but Peter and I were able to help them for one day since the Wildlife Crew was busy with other surveys. I had never seen a salamander in person before, so I was excited not only to learn the process of surveying them but also to finding one myself.
So after disinfecting our boots to prevent any possible spread of chytrid fungal pathogen to the salamanders and going over the protocol at the site, I was ready to find salamanders. The process involved flipping a lot of rocks and logs, but eventually I was able to capture a few. Initially, I was afraid to pick any of them up as some were tiny that I thought I was going to harm them in the process of putting them in a bag. Moreover, I didn’t know how the salamander would feel. However, the fear quickly went away.
In the end, different data was collected that included surface area of the object where the salamander was found, soil moisture, the weight, and length the salamander captured. Any new adult salamanders that was captured, were marked with a “tattoo”. Which really involved injecting them with a needle filled with fluorescence pigments in a specific sequence to help with identification if they are recaptured again in future surveys. Once all the data was collected, the salamanders were placed back to where it was found.
On the left, a captured salamander is being carefully injected with a fluorescence pigment by a member of the Salamander Crew. On the right, a marked salamander is shown under a black light.
First Meteor Shower Party
Growing up in Chicago, I never had the chance to stargaze due to the light pollution. As a result, I never knew about the Perseid meteor shower. Peter, on the other hand, knew all about it and that’s because he watches it every year on his birthday. Now, that I reside in smaller town with minimum light pollution, I was determined to experience my first meteor shower.
I searched up places that had a meteor shower party and found that El Malpais National Monument was having one after Ranger-led bat outflight guided walk on August 11. Bats and meteor shower on the same day? Count me in! The only problem it was 3.5 hours away and there was a chance of rain, but I figured it was a perfect opportunity to do a weekend road trip.
In the end, I got to see some bats despite it raining, but I didn’t get to see the meteor shower due to the clouds blocking the night sky. Thus, my first attempt to watch a meteor shower was unsuccessful. Fortunately, I returned to Ruidoso in the afternoon the next day and there was no clouds in sight. Spontaneously, I and a Wildlife Crew member from SRD decided to camp at a lookout that night to see the meteor shower.
Not only was I able to see my first meteor shower, but also the Milky Way!
With most of our seed populations hitting or nearing their harvest date, it has been extremely important to prioritize time efficiency during our daily routine. We have been camping weekly to reduce our overall travel time and on further trips we just backpack in.
This month we logged our most intense trek in yet, a daunting two-day and 16-mile trip with steep elevation. We had the Bitterroot team tag along as we hiked trough miles of post-burn forest, then up a mountain pass and back down to a beautiful lake on the other side. We made frequent stops to catch pollinators along the loop and were botanizing along the way.
Backpacking trip into the Pintler Wilderness looking for native pollinator populations.Hiccup the pup checking in on everyone’s safety!
It was great to have volunteers and Hiccup along for the trip because it was definitely a different vibe than going in a smaller group. It was a lively and fun experience to backpack into the wilderness with 10 other people!
Campsite after long tripMy view from my tent!
After setting up camp, pinning our bees and making dinner, our group was treated to a beautiful sunset displayed on the face of a nearby mountain. Then, early the next morning, we continued catching bees and hiking the return route back to the trucks.
We were off running after the backpacking trip with thousands of seeds ready for harvest. The coming weeks were spent running between surveying wetland rare plant polygons, searching for white bark pine in pre-treatment areas, and marking/collecting seed populations. We try to rotate between areas daily when not camping, or weekly when camping, so we often are marking, monitoring, collecting and surveying for differently things as we come across potential populations. It is easy to distinguish potential habitats for species at interest in an area with such abrupt changes in features. Between wet meadows, lodgepole forest and steek scree deposits, we are spending less time locating the habitat, and more time surveying in the right spots.
Searching for rare wetland plants
Crawling around in vegetation puts you eye-to-eye with some super unique insects! We have come across some interesting galls, moths and caterpillars while surveying. I think that entomology is an awesome way to break of the monotony of identifying/looking for the same plants over a long day.
We utilized a few new techniques in some interesting studies this month. At the beginning of August, we deployed our first pollinator “vein traps” and we collected the jars this week. This trap uses yellow color to lure pollinators into its basin which is coated in a slippery substance. The collection is bagged and preserved in alcohol, then sent to Montana State University for identification.
Collecting our bee vein trap from the only tree in the area
We also surveyed a biochar application and reseeding site. This area was a post-burned lodgepole forest with transects of different applications: Seeded with annuals, seeded with perennials, and treated with varying amounts of biochar. Our survey was the second revisit of a long-term study, and it was really interesting to see such stark differences between species in each transect. We used a pencil drop method to record plants at each interval and stood on a crate to use photo frames to estimate vegetation coverage per species.
The biochar treatment in a post burn forest
This August culminated with seed collections on top of seed collections. Considering my limited amount of office time, it has been very hard to get much seed processing and electronic documenting done. Instead, we have been working to maximize our populations quantities and abundance. We are beginning to prepare our first seed shipment, but our daily priorities are much more urgent. So, our methods for now are: Collect, collect, collect and document all data! and we will deal with office hours once seeds are done for the season.
One of our sites had two large populations of Penstemon albertinus (Alberta Penstemon) and Heterotheca villosa (Hairy False Goldenaster). It was right next to some abandoned charcoal kilns and made for a long day of collection at one site. Last month was filled with grass seed collection, so it has been great to target other types of seed. Overall, we completed 6 quality collections between these two species.
The canyon creek charcoal kilns
I try to make the most of my limited free time and squeezed in some great adventures during this month. Some highlights were watching the meteor shower from the top of Blue Mountain, backpacking in Glacier National Park, hiking to Storm lake, touring Lewis and Clark Caverns, digging in Crystal Park, and always… the great local hot springs!
Meteor shower at Blue MountainHike back down through huckleberry habitatBackpack up to Lake Otokomi in Glacier National ParkArrival at Storm LakeFishing at Lake Otokomi
