August felt like it flew by. A month characterized by surprisingly good weather, fun weekend trips, and simply being in a grove with seed collection. It’s been nice to be so busy, at a minimum we’ve been collecting from one population everyday, some days from three or four. The office is filling up with brown paper bags of seeds and we are quickly running out of space. Because it is so dry here, we don’t really have to worry about the seeds getting moldy, however we still air them out and check them every once in a while. The main issue is the pests that persist in the bags after we bring them back. Lots of grubs, ants, stinkbugs, cute jumping spiders and sometimes less friendly critters :/. Yesterday, loud crawling noises were heard inside a Veratrum californicum bag that was collected a week ago. I brought the bag outside, opened it up, and out flew a large and angry hornet. Luckily it didn’t sting but still not a welcome sight. In the field we try to leave the bags open to allow bugs to escape but some seem to like the dark, cool bottoms of the seed piles. I read another blog post on here that mentioned the use of fumigation strips to deal with pests which seems like a great idea. I want to see what I can do about working that into our protocol here, thanks fellow CLM interns!

In addition to more seed collection, we’ve also started the mounting process for the vouchers we’ve been taking throughout the season. Its been an extremely satisfying process and they are coming out surprisingly well! The pressing process has inspired me to start collecting small specimens for myself. I’ve made a couple little mounted cards and hope to build a collection out of my car! It feels like an appropriate keepsake for my time in Plumas and I imagine they would make nice gifts. As I’ve started doing this in my free time, I began to realize how much this job has altered my perception of and relationship to the plants around me.

I’ve always appreciated plants but over the last couple months my fondness for them as certainly deepened. Going into this position I would have described myself as generally a wildlife, specifically bird, centric-person with a general and certainly not professional interest in flora. I think this was mostly due to lack of experience with plant-based projects and a very surface level technical knowledge. But by learning basic plant families, dichotomous key ID skills, more plant physiology, and restoration concepts, I’ve found myself thinking about plant life much more while exploring the world around me. This month, I went on three weekend trips to various beautiful areas around the Sierras. While hiking through the Eastern Sierras or climbing in Yosemite, I kept stopping to photograph, identify, and/or take little samples of any interesting vegetation I saw. In Yosemite, I met another seed collector who works there and she gave me some great tips about cleaning Asclepias seeds. According to her, if you close and shake the bag they are in, the heavy seeds should detach from the fluff and fall to the bottom. Wouldn’t have thought to try that and it probably saved us many hours of cleaning by hand!

It’s coming to that point where its time to start looking for jobs for the winter season. The end of our time here in Plumas is coming quicker than I thought. While on the job hunt, I’ve found myself leaning towards more botany positions. That’s kinda how I know that the plants have a good degree of control over me. I could see myself being happy toiling away to carry out their agenda through more seed collection, propagation, restoration and invasive control. This job has helped me give myself over to the plants!