Hello!
I’ve been working in the Eagle Lake BLM office here in Susanville, CA for maybe two months now. Probably more like a month and a half. I work with three other interns, and we’ve had so many wonderful adventures! We’ve done over thirteen seed collections so far, and we have monitored quite a few special status plant populations.
The landscape is very rocky! Lassen County, where we work, has a volcanic legacy that manifests in surprisingly and often suddenly rocky terrain.
A picture of me at my first ever plant collection, purple sage. It’s a very fragrant plant!
We often refer to the plants we are collecting by their NCRS (maybe that’s not the acronym?) code, and this is me with one of our favorites, CRAC.
We often run into grazing livestock on our journeys. This mama cow is squaring up in the road to fight off our jeep. Thankfully, the confrontation ended peacefully– the cows moved off to join the rest of their herd in the adjacent field.
Rachel, Jill, Andrea, and I got to go to the horse corrals and see the wild horses that are up for adoption. We got a tour of the facilities. It was a very informative day!
It’s always exciting to see the real thing, though, even if the horses are a nuisance and tear up the landscape. They’re so majestic! But there are quite a few out there, beyond this picture there were maybe fifty horses in the dry lake bed we were visiting.
An exciting thing happened! We were driving and I spotted the freshest little calf on earth. He was so new, we accidentally frightened his first steps out of him, I think. It was magical!
I am really enjoying myself and this job. We go on so many adventures every day, it’s almost as if we’re not working! (But we definitely are working)
Anyway, until next time!
Lillie P.