The Bishop field office for the BLM covers a lot of ground, from  Owens Lake in the South all the way to the Nevada border near Bridgeport. Three-quarters of a million acres of habitats ranging from true desert to sagebrush steppe, alkali flats, wetlands and windswept mountains. While tracking down sage grouse nests and populations of seed-bearing plants I’ve come to appreciate all that our region has to offer, but my favorite habitat at the moment has to be low-sage scrub. Artemisia arbuscula is not a particularly showy plant, its grey-green limbs barely rising above the baked clay soils it prefers. Male sage-grouse prefer it for their leks, since females can watch them prance about unobstructed.  The reason I like low sagebrush however, is that our small islands of A. arbuscula seem to contain the vast majority of flowers in our field office. Even in this especially dry year, hardy perennials like Biterroot and Crepis species are turning the barren expanses of clay bright shades of yellow and magenta with their blossoms. Coincidentally, these are some of the same species that I need to collect seed from, so I get to soak in the display as I look for mature seedheads.

On that note, 10,000 seeds is a lot of seeds! I recently finished my first collection, the not-as-showy but still lovable Lomatium nevadense. Even with 20-100 seeds per plant, it still took a lot of searching with my head down to pick enough for a collection. Worth it though, since according to our wildlife biologist L. nevadense is a favorite snack for the sage grouse.  I know that if I spent my mornings jumping to and fro with huge yellow sacks on my chest, I would want a snack as well so I’m glad that we now have this seed to potentially use for revegetation efforts.