Things have been quite busy here in the Mojave. I recently went on a week-long field stint where we camped Saline Valley in Death Valley National Park. We used the campground at the hot springs as our home base, which was quite nice at the end of a day in the field! We were working with a group of Sierra Club volunteers and spent our days travelling to the BLM wilderness units across the valley to survey for tamarisk in the riparian areas. It was a great week!

Most of my time lately has been spent assisting with Rangeland Health Assessments and Proper Functioning Condition surveys. I’m learning to recognize more of our plant species as well as signs of land health. We’ve been travelling to new areas (well, new to me) of the field office which is always neat. At the higher elevation areas, we’ve even been getting snowed on. I really like snow but I have definitely become a cold baby, it didn’t take long for the desert to spoil me.

Last week I attended a two-day desert tortoise handling workshop. In the classroom we learned about the genetics, natural history, physiology, scat/sign, survey techniques, and laws/regulations for desert tortoises. During the field portions of the class we learned about differentiating scat from other vertebrates, fencing techniques, creating artificial burrows, the basic processing of an animal and screening for clinical signs of disease, and walking transects. We got to learn from and interact with some prominent desert tortoise folks, and it was a really interesting class.