A Break in the Clouds: Striding the North Coast

A month gone — and I am gratefully sunburned and flower saturated, as any naturalist living another unfolding California Spring hopes to be! My internship, at the BLM Field Office in Arcata, CA is off to a diverse and rolling start! The rain fell strong and the sun shone bright during these past weeks, taking me from the coast to the upland oak woodlands — from North Spit to South Spit, around Humboldt Bay and back again!

As I outlined in my last blog post, a recurrent and rather large project we have going here is vegetation monitoring, at five different sites across BLM properties on dune habitats in Humboldt County. I have completed 12/14 30.5-meter transects, each with approximately 200 individual quadrats aligned along 20 benchmarks. Within each quadrat, I quantify the amount of vegetation, identify and record the occurrence of every species, and count the number of Layia carnosa, a federally endangered annual dune plant. This week I will finish dune monitoring!

This all said, one of the most exciting logistical things about my position (many reading this know how and what truly excites me — those living/flying/blooming multitudes!) has been the diversity of my work. A whirling selection to prove it:

I have visited many of the prominent Arcata BLM lands. This is a remarkable task because one unique aspect of the BLM in Humboldt County as compared to other BLM offices in the nation is that our office has very few large tracts of land, and hundreds of smaller parcels. In these visits I am swept by the magic of blooming coastal dunes, struck by sun shining on wide rivers, listening for sparrow songs or watching the Norther Harrier glide low, pulling non-native pines high above the roiling northern oceans on coastal prairie, or lost in a wind-waving sea of European beach grass!

I am working on a project to teach 7th graders from Freshwater Charter School about the epic adaptations of the dune-forest plants, while they film me and create public service announcements on Ipads! I had my first scoping meeting at the site with local filmmaker Barbara Domanchuk and in the next month will lead the field trip and make a classroom visit! Gulp!

I also had the opportunity to attend the National Association of Interpretation Regional Conference! This weekend I will help lead two field trips for the Arcata’s Godwit Days Birding Festival!

The next large project at the office is our contribution to Seeds of Success, a national native wild seed collection program. Our office intends to contribute collections from 7-9 species, which is quite involved! First, we scout out locations and possible target species and in my office, where the program has been running for several years, it takes some creativity and work to keep it fresh! For each species, we collect, press, mount and accession 2-3 voucher specimens in Spring. In summer, we generally begin collecting seed, making sure to collect AT LEAST 10,000-20,000 seeds from 50 or more individuals. In Fall, we groom the data collection and send our seed collections to be processed and cleaned in Bend, Oregon. For now, I am happily emulating Willis Lynn Jepson and easily fantasizing that I am an important rare plant explorer! Too much fun!

Throughout all of this, the plants have led the way, and I have expanded my botanical knowledge widely — I won’t bore you with the big list of new plants I have seen recently, but see below for several lovely pictures of my favorite recent sightings. I am also adding several of my new sightings to: my inaturalist account!. This is the gracious and heartful ground of our naturalist path, the pure enchantment of coming to know parts of our world, beautiful parts, that we never knew were in existence prior to that moment of revelatory discovery.

Beyond the work frame, I have been spending every possible moment in the field, exploring and delighting on a fresh and personally unexplored region of California. I made a quick backpacking trip to the King Range, remembering the value of even the shortest backpacking trips and delighting in the thickest Iris douglasiana blooms I have ever seen. The most notable creature was a moth…a very, very notable moth, Saturnia mendocino, (get the close up) which I took a very sloppy and overly excited photo of:

Saturnia mendocino -- note that it had landed (incredibly breifly, let me assure you) on a burned and recently resprouting Manzanita burl.

Saturnia mendocino — note that it had landed (incredibly briefly, let me assure you) on a burned and recently re-sprouting Manzanita burl.

This moth, part of the impressive silk moth family, is an elusive creature, flies in the day on the edge of chaparral and madrone/mixed forests. Some professional lepidopterists in California have never even seen it! In addition this this little trek, I also made my way north to see the serpentine bogs home to the California Pitcherplant, Darlingtonia californica! What a world!

That’s all for now! Enjoy every second of Spring from where ever you are reading this from!