Well, I’m into my second month here at BLM’s West Eugene Wetland office, and things are really picking up! A few weeks ago the Willamette Resources & Educational Network (WREN) held an educational event called “Walkin’ and Rollin’ through the Wetlands” for families, and BLM had a booth. I created fact sheets on Fender’s Blue Butterflies (an endangered species found only in Oregon’s Willamette Valley) and Western Pond Turtles for it; we ended up with about 90 visitors over the course of four hours, which is pretty good considering it was cold and cloudy.
Our Walkin' and Rollin Booth
Speaking of Fender’s Blue Butterflies, I’ve been assisting our monitoring lead, Christine, in, well, monitoring. We’ve been keeping track of the Fender’s populations over the last month using long distance sampling and then catching butterflies to determine the ratio of Silvery Blue Butterflies to Fender’s Blue Butterflies (the Silveries look very similar to the Fender’s, so to get a more accurate read from the long distance sampling, we actually have to ID them). Catching butterflies is one of my favorite tasks so far. It takes so much more skill than I ever imagined to net a butterfly: you have to catch the butterfly, avoid damaging their host plant (the Kincaid’s lupine), and avoid getting the net caught in blackberries (I seem to have a special talent for accidentally netting spiders, which is unfortunate because they frighten me quite a bit). That moment you catch a butterfly and successfully identify it as a Fender’s is really rewarding!
Female Fender's Blue Butterfly
Male Fender's Blue Butterfly
Christine and I have also just finished up the Lomatium bradshawii monitoring and have moved on to Kincaid’s lupine monitoring. I find it interesting to compare this year’s findings with last year’s data. As part of the restoration process, some of our prairies were burned last year, and it’s truly amazing how well our native plant species are growing in the aftermath!
Kincaid's lupine
I’m really enjoying seeing the wildlife in the wetlands. There’s a Great Blue Heron that hangs out next to a bridge we have to cross to get to one of our sites (I’ve seen it every time I’ve been to that site, and it’s always a treat). I’ve also seen a few Western Grebes out by our Fender’s population, and having never seen–or even heard of–one, I was absolutely fascinated. The real highlight, though, was seeing a river otter. They don’t show up around Eugene very often, and I’d never seen one in the wild–it completely made my week! (Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a picture of the otter. I saw it on the one day I didn’t have my camera with me.)
Great Blue Heron
Western Grebe
Til next time!