Sometimes Erin and I don’t need a map to get where we’re going anymore… that’s how I know we’ve been here a while, though the summer has seemed to pass so quickly. People in our office sometimes ask us how the summer is progressing and our answer is mostly the same; we are grateful for the variety of tasks this internship has offered over the last few months. Although the majority of our time is spent monitoring for the rangeland department, we have also juggled in some SOS collections, wildlife projects and will be monitoring wild horse populations starting at the end of the week.

Because our SOS collections were concentrated on sage grouse important forbs, most of our seed collections, presently totally seven, were squeezed into July. August has been spent waiting on sagebrush to begin flowering and keeping an eye on a couple late-blooming forbs. We are hoping we will end the season with a few more collections including green rabbitbrush, several types of sagebrush and Bigelow’s tansyaster. Also in the next few weeks our attention will turn towards boxing up our seed and shipping it away for official record and cleaning.

Erin & I collecting common yarrow seed for SOS

Machaeranthera bigelovii – one SOS species left to collect

One exciting project we helped with this month was greater sage grouse collaring, which requires working late into the night. This was my first time riding an ATV, but it also happened to mean riding it with only one hand and in the dark until 2 am. I could only use one hand to steer the ATV because the other was occupied by a spotlight to spot the sage grouse and keep them still until we could launch a net over them to keep them down. All this didn’t prove to be as enormously difficult as it sounded to me at first and turned out to be a bizarre, but fun first experience. Unfortunately our luck ran out after the first hour, during which we had collared only one female hen and we didn’t see many more after that. The project, which is run by a grad student from the University of Wyoming, is aimed at studying sage grouse habitat preference under manipulated habitat conditions. The GPS collars are important for tracking the female’s choices for nesting habitat and movement year round. He reportedly had much more success later in the week finding hens in a different area.

After collaring female sage grouse hen

The end of July corresponded with the end of data collection for a large on-going vegetation study Erin and I were doing for the range dept, which made up the majority of our field time. With this field work behind us, we have returned to sequentially monitoring riparian areas in grazing allotments for overgrazing. On Monday we were given the feat of monitoring a pasture encompassing an 8 mile canyon called Sweetwater Canyon. It’s considered a hidden gem in the field office because it’s difficult to get to and it harbors the beautifully cool Sweetwater River and its surrounding lush vegetation. Our job was to photograph the key areas along the bank for data about the utilization and to look for any cattle that may have been left behind in there before the fall/winter. Through hiking was made easier by a patchwork of cattle and game trails along side the river, but was still convoluted and slow-going in the steepest parts of the canyon. Despite the added shade it was still a hot day, but very rewarding by the end.

Showing the height of riparian species in Sweetwater Canyon

Weekends here have been spent zipping from one adventure to the next, from the Wind River range here in Lander to the Tetons and to Yellowstone. Although I’m looking forward to the fresh coolness of fall, my friends and I here are scrambling to get in the last weekend adventures before the end of summer, with its long days and the absence of snow.