My second field season with BLM’s West Eugene Wetlands (WEW) started off with a bang! Well, it actually began with hauling several hundred Kincaid’s Lupine plugs and rolls of shadecloth to the upland prairie of one of WEW’s several sites, but you get the idea. Excitement, glorious fresh air, and all that jazz.

Together with my monitoring lead, the Institute for Applied Ecology’s (IAE)–a non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation of native species and habitats–Native Plant Materials Coordinator, and two of IAE’s dedicated volunteers, we planted over 500 Kincaid’s Lupine over the course of two days.

For those who have never heard of Kincaid’s Lupine (Lupinus oreganus var. kincaidii), it is a federally listed threatened species and the host plant of the federally endangered Fender’s Blue Butterfly. Although I had monitored both Kincaid’s Lupine and Fender’s Blue Butterflies last year, this year I actually got to plant plants.

Between the five of us, we soon streamlined the planting process into an assembly line with three positions: Dibblers, Planters, and Waterers. The Dibblers used an interesting utensil called a dibble to drive holes into the soil–soon-to-be homes for the little Kincaid’s Lupine plants. The Planters were the ones that actually put the plants in the ground, and the Waterers followed along behind with a watering can to quench the thirst of the young plants. Of course, during this we all took turns at moving measuring tapes and placing pin-flags since we were also creating a macroplot that we will monitor later this season.

Planting was a new experience for me, and although the previous field season held a myriad of fantastic lessons, this will always be one of my favorites. There is something soothing  about the silence that accompanies field work such as this. We had some distance from the electronic and industrial cacophony of the city, and though the quiet was sometimes broken by the cry of a red-tail hawk or the light-hearted joking of our miniature planting crew, it was the perfect soundtrack to the camaraderie of people working towards a common goal–threatened and endangered species restoration.

For the time being I am back in the office until monitoring begins. I could not have asked for a better start to my field season.