I can’t believe it has almost been two months since I arrived in Farmington, we have been so busy looking for seeds, keying out plants, and learning the flora of this area time is flying. Upon our return from the Chicago Botanic Garden we were greeted with the beginning of the summer monsoon. It is impressive how fast the plants have responded to moisture this past month. The perennial bunch grasses are re-sprouting and the once crispy looking forbs are starting to flower up! Hopefully this is the start of a new precipitation trend because with a couple more weeks of wet weather we should have lots seeds ripe for collection.

With few seeds to collect we have been focusing on learning the local flora, last weekend was spent at a tree and shrub workshop discovering the wide verity of local woody plants in San Juan County. One of the teachers, Arnold Clifford, is an avid geologist, botanist, and ethno botanist working on the Navajo Reservation and surrounding four corners region. It was exciting to not only learn new plants but also the Navajo uses for the plants as well as the geologic formations each plant prefers. Our other teachers Ken Hyle and Bob Savinski had a wealth of knowledge on the woody plants of the Farmington area and led us all over the county so we could look at the dominant plants of many ecosystems.

We have also been able to branch out of the botanical world a bit. Last night we went out to mist net bats and trap rodents with the threaded and endangered species biologist. Though the catch wasn’t too bountiful, we only caught one bat, one moth, and a bird, it was interesting to learn about bat ecology and netting. Bat echolocation is amazing as far as predator prey dynamics are involved. Bat sound wave frequencies very widely from species to species mostly because of the specific hearing ranges of the moths and bugs the bats are feeding on. So a bat that likes to eat moths will hunt at a frequency below what the moths can hear, take that Christian Bale!

Deidre on the hunt for some seeds

Our only bat, Myotis spp.

The Sphynx moth we caught was larger than the bat.