Today is the last day of my internship. My mentor and co-workers took me out for Thai food. They are such warm and fuzzy people!

Every year that I’m out in the field, I learn a bit more about my beloved shrub steppe plants. I really enjoy keying out plants. It’s like doing puzzles. Once I was stuck (well, more than once!), and I desperately googled “3.5 mm ligule, open sheaths”, etc. and I actually came up with an answer for a grass that had lost all of its seeds. I had keyed out this grass last summer.

This is the first summer I collected seeds. Collecting seeds makes a person take a close look at the plants when they’re beyond the flowering stage, which is good for doing “sleuthing” botany when all of the plants have dried up.

This year I was sent on a few different missions. I went for a day with the bat woman to look in old mines for bats. No success, alas. But, it was really neat seeing the old prospector cabin and all the tailings. We had great views of the huge fire northeast of Republic.

I spent a couple of days downloading three game cameras that were set up at watering troughs at Juniper Dunes. I counted the number of times each species showed up in the frames. Lots and lots of magpies! These birds just have a party at the trough–they relish their baths. Mormon cricket, porcupine and coyote photos were also plentiful. We had a single kestrel, a single great-horned owl, some ravens, doves, elk and deer.

I did some monitoring in more mesic plots this year, which forced me to learn a few more grasses (like quackgrass, finally) and forbs.

Just two days ago, I was hiking by myself (seven miles that day) and wondering out loud how far away the sagebrush was from the mesic area, when I noticed a coyote just right there. He didn’t even look up. He stared hard at the ground.  Suddenly, he made a most beautiful, catlike pounce, and next thing I know I am hearing him crunching bones. He happily trotted away without ever noticing me!

Yesterday I packaged up all my vouchers and shipped them off to Smithsonian and the University of Washington.

Today, my last day, a package came to the office containing neatly labeled bags of the excess seeds that we requested for restoration projects. It made me so happy that I collected enough (except for one species so far) to have excess. You always wonder if you did the calculations correctly. What a nice going-away present.  

Extra Seeds Arrived on my Last Day of Work!