I’m getting my bearings here in central Oregon: I started at the Prineville BLM office on May 1, and after a few days of trainings and general office setup, I’ve started scouting for SOS collections by tagging along on plant monitoring trips.
The Prineville office has an herbarium specimen of Phacelia lutea var. lutea that was collected in 1985, but hadn’t been found or collected since. It was found in the Northern Basin & Range, which is my target ecoregion for this year’s SOS collection. My mentor thought this would be a great opportunity to go out with Hannah (BLM Botany Tech & former CLM intern!) to both search for this rare plant, and keep an eye out for potential SOS collection populations.
The notes on the herbarium voucher were thorough: the population was recorded within a square quarter mile on a south facing slope on the north side of Camp Creek. It seemed like a straightforward task: we had the herbarium mount as an example of the plant, thorough directions, and a relatively small swath of land to survey.
I was so excited to be following in another botanist’s footsteps: “This is it!” I thought. “This is what real botanists do! I’m a real botanist, out to find a really rare plant, maybe we’ll even find a new population of them!”
Herbarium mount of Phacelia lutea var lutea back in its original habitat, three decades later.
We drove along the gravel road up to the two-track jeep trail where we needed to cross the creek, only to discover one of the seasonal irrigation spigots was leaking to the point of creating a silty, marshy wallow completely covering the trail. Although it meant hiking an extra mile, we left the truck at the road since hiking was a better alternative to getting stuck.
After a long walk (because botanists do not walk quickly), we made it to our square quarter mile of creek where the samples had been taken years ago. We scrabbled down the loose, sandy hillside & perched on little protrusions of bank where the soil had compacted, intently scouring the slopes for these tiny plants. The largest sample taken was at most only 5cm (2.5in) across, and although it was recorded as flowering on May 8, we weren’t sure if it would be delayed this year because of the long, cold winter Oregon just received. For all we knew, we could be looking for recent sprouts that might only be 1-2cm (1/2in)!
Habitat for Phacelia lutea var. lutea. Southern exposure bank is left side of photo. Camp Creek runs through center of the valley, in this section more overland flow than an actual dedicated channel.
Coming to the end of our quarter mile section, we were starting to look at the context of our supposed habitat: “Look at the sharp bank on the south side of the creek…look at how the water flows overland, then cuts back into the channel…look at that headcut!” We began to wonder whether the banks we were sitting on were even the same banks that had been there 30 years ago. For all we knew this creek had been busy meandering, flooding, downcutting, and depositing over the years, and the sunny slope our predecessor had sat on was now buried under a broad floodplain or high above our heads where erosion forces had sheared away the soil into a flat wall.
A headcut and plunge pool just below our sloping “habitat”. Note the incision in the plunge pool already acruing. In 30 more years time, the slope I was sitting on won’t exist.
We still scrabbled along, hoping to find a plant or two that had survived or blown to a better location. We got down into the marshy floodplain and looked on either side in case it had found a new niche; we got as high as we could on the steep bank and looked into the tiny draws that formed along the top of the cliff faces. All to no avail – Phacelia lutea var. lutea does not appear to live on the southern-facing slopes of Camp Creek any longer.
This is the real reality of botany, and much conservation work. Habitat loss is almost always the top listed reason for species decline and extirpation, and P. lutea lost its habitat due to erosion. The other reality of botany is that the records we make and samples we take are invaluable time-points. Maybe if we had photos of where the botanist sat in 1985, we could compare to the current terrain. Better yet, a GPS point could have shown us whether or how far the old banks had moved. All the data we collect and notes we take might someday yield a clue to a future botanist about the conditions we see today. I’m going to think about this as I write my field notes and leave descriptions for someone else to follow. Even photos and GPS points can’t replace first-hand experience, so the more descriptive and complete information I can leave behind might make a future expedition a little more fruitful.
– Stefanie Lane, BLM, Prineville, OR