Hello Curious Readers,
This month, Carrie and I have been working on our main two tasks, collecting seed to use for the re-vegetation of the Rush Fire and monitoring Special Status Plants (SSPs). We searched for the candidate species Webber’s ivesia, aka wire mousetail, Ivesia webberi, at a location near Vinton, Ca, where it had been seen in the ’90s. We unfortunately could not find it. We have stumbled upon a couple populations of Susanville penstemon, P. sudans, while searching for other SSPs and collecting seeds.
The endemic Susanville penstemon grows in some unlikely places, including this rock outcrop at an elevation of 6,000 ft.
Beautiful outcrop on a slope near Babbitt Peak.
We collected seeds from Mountain Mahogany, Cercocarpus ledifolius var. intermontanus, on Horse Mountain, and Great Basin Wildrye, Leymus cinereus, in Secret Valley and near Willow Creek.
See the corksrew shaped tail? When the wind blows on the seeds, it drives them into the soil. The hairs on the seeds are also very irritating–they feel like insulation.
Basin Wildrye, the large clumping grass in this picture, was growing mostly on the steep slopes of the valley wall, making collection a little challenging!
We’ve assisted in some other projects, too, which have proven to provide great field experience. Last week Carrie and I helped Valda, Amy, one of our rangeland managers, and Derek, our rangeland supervisor, in completing surveys of AIM plots. I practiced my line-point intercept, canopy gap, and soil characterization while getting to experience the Horse Lake area in the cool, gray early morning. During the last week of July, Carrie and I assisted Missi, our wildlife biologist, Valda, our ecologist, Marilla and Sharynn, our archaeologists, and Clif, our fuels specialist, with a survey of the Jeffrey pine forest near Cleghorn Reservoir. The forest needs to be thinned to allow for saplings to grow and to prevent overly-destructive fires. But before treatment can occur, the units have to be surveyed for sensitive plant and animal species and habitat, archaeological artifacts and other aspects that could be damaged from the machinery and process of cutting down the trees. Surveying required long days of constant walking, but it was fun to spend time in the vanilla-scented forest—most of our field office is high desert—and I learned a few things: how to identify black bear scat, the call of a nighthawk, what a young red tail hawk looks like, how uncomfortable water-bars are to drive over, and dozens of plants.
On top of look-out near north Eagle Lake.
Deb