Hard to believe I’ve already finished the first half of my internship, but as I filled out my timesheet this week, I noticed that I had just hit the 440 hour mark. I guess time flies when you’re out in the field all the time! June and July are definitely crunch-time for our office, and the race is on to collect seed, monitor fire plots and characterize sage grouse nesting sites before everything with chlorophyll in it is turned into crispy, unidentifiable remnants. On the plus side, this means I’m out in some pretty cool places almost every day.
One of my favorites, oddly enough, is the Indian fire, a 13,000 acre burn in the hills just south of Mono Lake. It must have been a dense shrubland at one point, but after the burn and without any plants to hold down the soil in the big winds off the lake, it has been turned into a sculpted dunsescape. The only trace of the shrubs, and even the fire, is in the ghostly, twisted stems of bitterbrush, charred by the blaze and smoothed by the wind-driven bits sand. However, even in this desolation, the plants have come back strong, with carpets of annual wildflowers, perennial grasses and even resprouts from fire-adapted shrubs. One of the annuals, Phacelia bicolor, is so thick in spots that from a distance entire hillside seem pink! Its pretty crazy to me that a seed weighing maybe 1/100 of a gram can turn into a sprawling plant the size of a plate in only a few months, and all in one of the driest years on record! Makes me feel better when my entire seed collection won’t even fill a sandwich bag.
Another fun little tidbit from the last few weeks was a Cicada hatch! I didn’t even know California had cicadas, but for a week or so the air was filled with the buzzing and clumsy flights of big orange bugs, doing whatever it is that cicadas do in their brief time above ground. I thought it was pretty cool, and I’m sure the birds and other insectivores were pretty happy as well! Anyhow, I’m looking forward to the second half of my internship, and even more so now that I have a fellow intern to work with!
Signing off,
Bridger
