Hello from Needles, California!
My name is Steve, and for the rest of this year I will be bringing you tales, facts, and pictures from the Mojave Desert while I work as a Conservation and Land Management (CLM) Intern. I will be working for the Needles Office of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Needles sits right on the Colorado River, along the California-Arizona border, so I’ll be working in the eastern portion of southern California. That means desert country, and my field area includes portions of both the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts.
You want a typical picture of the area around Needles? This is it.
Now, I’m a Midwesterner from Illinois, so the southwestern desert is a dramatically different and unknown place to me. I’m looking forward to learning about this part of the country, and discovering how the ecology of the place functions. I have already begun to encounter lots of new things. New landscape. New vegetation and wildlife. New culture. New climate. (Ah yes, the desert climate. Get ready for some fun temperature updates. Here’s a teaser: the highest temperature so far, on May 27th, was 109 degrees Farenheit. Don’t worry, I’ll keep the complaining to a minimum.)
My co-intern and I have been working in our new office for a week, so we are starting to figure out exactly what kind of work we’ll be performing this year. We will likely spend the most time making native seed collections for the Seeds of Success (SOS) program, but we’ve been told to expect a variety of other projects to come our way as the season moves along. Variety sounds great to me, so I’ll keep you posted about the different and interesting projects that we get to work on this year.
If you decide to read any of my blog posts this year, hopefully I’ll reward you by giving you an idea of what the ecology and plant life of this place are like (as I figure it out myself). That’s my plan anyway. And I’m sure that I’ll have good stories to tell along the way. And on that note, I’ll leave you with a classic desert plant that I’ve seen plenty of during my first week:
This is the desert after all, so I might as well show you a cactus. This is a barrel cactus (Ferocactus sp). This particular plant reached up to my hip, and this week we’ve seen some that were up over 4 feet tall.
I’ve seen lots of them around, and I continue to be impressed by how striking their red spines are.
Also, in case you didn’t know, cactus flowers can be absolutely beautiful. And they are much loved by the local pollinators. We usually find them being visited by bees.
They happen to be flowering at the moment, so we have been treated to plenty of color from these plants. Notice the ring of flowers they produce at the top of the plant. Very cool.
That’s all for now! Until next time!
– Steve
Needles Field Office, BLM