July kicked off with the most anticipated task of the field season: vegetation monitoring. Two and a half weeks filled with… Botany! Interns, technicians, volunteers, and specialists worked collaboratively to monitor four different tall grass prairie restorations. At each site, four 100 meter transects were established. Every four meters, a quadrat was randomly placed, and each plant within the quadrat was identified to species and recorded. That adds up to a total of 400 quadrats!

Groups of three would rotate roles, ensuring that there were always two identifiers and one recorder. The recording process was often quite intense; identifiers would continuously call out species like Sporobolus heterolepis, Heliopsis helianthoides, Oenothera pilosella… Meanwhile, the recorder would frantically scroll through the species list, occasionally selecting the wrong species and fall further and further behind. Nevertheless, identifying the plants presented the best opportunity for me to enhance my botanical knowledge and occasionally showcase my skills when I felt confident in my identifications. I relished every moment, from the plants to the people.

The data collected during these two weeks will help in estimating species richness and evenness, providing a deeper insight into the annual changes observed in restored prairies. While it was satisfying to successfully complete this project in a timely manner, I was sad that it ended so abruptly. I can only hope for the chance to participate in a similar project in the future.

July brings a breathtaking display of colors and structure to the prairie. The towering inflorescences of Silphium laciniatum and Silphium terebinthinaceum, standing in some cases at an impressive 12 feet in height, inspire awe. Amidst this spectacle, the vibrant red flowers of Silene regia catch the eye from considerable distances. One species that never fails to excite me is Porcupine grass (Hesperostipa spartea) this species might have the longest awns of any grass in North America, reaching lengths of seven and a half inches. The seed, heavy and sharp, falls to the ground. The awns then “drill” the seed into the soil, twisting back and forth in response to changes in humidity. While the diversity here is undoubtedly remarkable, it is when you take a closer look that you truly begin to appreciate it. It feels like just yesterday the prairie was only knee-high now, it has transformed into an almost impenetrable thicket of forbs and grasses. I imagine it will go as quickly as it came, and before we know it, it will all start over again.

As our initial phase of seed collection draws to a close, the sedges are wrapping up for the season. Our attention shifts towards the genus Symphyotrichum, which takes center stage later in summer and extends through fall. Additionally, we look for members of the genus Sporobolus – a group of warm-season grasses. Amidst it all, my experience at Midewin has been incredibly fulfilling. The work itself is a joy, and the camaraderie amongst my fellow interns enhances the experience even more. A special shoutout to Dade, Veronica, and Harsha – you’re all truly amazing individuals.

The great war of me v. seed had started long ago when I choked on some sunflower seeds when I was a kid. And now I get my just retribution by taking 20 percent of some Zizia aurea seeds. Admittedly I would have liked my revenge to be more decimating, but I’ll settle for 20 percent. 

I’m now getting into the swing of things and I think I’m shining as Midewin is a wondrous place is what I’ve been finding, not only am I surviving but I am thriving. Along with seed collecting we did dinner brush cutting where we took very scary power tools that had a whirring buzzsaw to some shrubs. While in the field I found a bone, whether from a human post them being brush cut or some animal I don’t know, but it is in my home now as a trophy for surviving my brush with brush cutting. 

After massacring the shrubs with sharp edges we switched from physical to chemical via the use of a chlorine swimming pool blue gooey herbicide covering of the cut stumps. Carrying the thorny shrubs to the dump trucks left our arms scratched red, but overall the whole experience was so fun and I’m glad we did it! 

We also spent some time vegetation monitoring which involves standing around a quadrat and identifying every single plant in that square. No cutting corners with the square every plant must be recorded. As we encircled the non-circle I learned the common and scientific names of all these plants that make their home in the prairie, such as Penstemon digitalis seen here in digital form.

I was born in 2001, the year of the serpent, so it was only fitting that I got to do some snake stuff while I was here. There are many metal and wooden boards all around the prairie here that could theoretically have snakes under them, but usually have wasp nests. I did get to hold and measure a snake.

A beautiful specimen that I was honored to caress in my arms. I related very much to the snake because my own arms from a lack of lifting have the same amount of definition as a snake’s body. Along the way we ran into a large blackberry bush that stopped us in our tracks as we ate from the bush for a while. 
I don’t have any children and I don’t plan to anytime soon. But in the meantime my surrogate children have been the plants that I have planted at the River Road Seed Beds that we have. I make a home for these plants in the ground that includes Liatris spicata and I nourish them liberally with water. In time they have aged from babies to toddlers which has happened so quickly. They grow up so fast!

I spent this month working on seed collection and surveying penstemon, white bark pine, and pollinators. All of these missions required our team to conquer rough terrain going up steep grades of elevation. We had a rough first week after the 4th of July, where we seemed to run into roadblocks along every step of our long commutes. We were turned away by downed trees, flooded roads and even getting stuck in the mud. After this week our luck seemed to shift, and we began stringing together some extremely productive days catching bees and counting penstemon. We hosted a “botany blitz” where we welcomed volunteers, youth crews and other forest service teams to help us count and categorize Lemhi Penstemon.

We are always looking for diverse meadow settings for potential seed collection sites, but also for pollinator collection sites. Specifically, we are on the lookout for penstemon wasps and western bumble bees. Though we didn’t find any of these species this month, we collected a beautiful variety of pollinators!

Seed collection began to pick up toward the end of the month, when we were able to make three collections of Poa secunda. Grass ID is tedious, and there was a bit of a learning curve, but our seed populations seem to be high quality. Since pictures of grass are a bit bland, I decided to include some cool things below that we found along the way while looking for seed populations. I was excited to hear that monotropa could be found in Beaverhead-Deerlodge but didn’t expect to be able to spot one. They tend to be hidden in forest litter, but definitely stand out with their white color. The Monotropacae are considered myco-heterotrophs, relying on parasitism on fungus for energy rather than photosynthesis. Next to that photo are some bright red lupin seed pods, a beautiful member of the Fabacae family. The last picture is of a curious grouse, who seemed to enjoy looking right back at the camera for a photoshoot.

I’ve been attending as many local events as possible during my free time. A highlight this month was Bannack days, an event where the popular ghost town gets revitalized. Historic arts and crafts, fiddle players and community members came to provide a glimpse into what life may have been like during the gold rush days. It is not uncommon to see similar prospecting sites on forest service land on our way out to our survey sites.

Ross Gay, in his collection of essayettes, The Book of Delights, ruminates on the nature of delight. He believes delight is a type of invitation to notice the things and events happening and unfolding around us, and find joy in their spontaneity and sorrow, their strangeness and their beauty.

Which is to say… seeds are here! Across the Tongass, plants are teeming with seeds of their own making. And we are taking some of them. Collecting seeds is a delight, which means it is about paying attention. It is also a meticulous and at times, tedious, act. For this post, I will revel in this delight: the detailed beauty of fruits, capsules and pods, and their accompanying seeds.

Western Columbine (Aquilegia formosa) is an elusive forb that often stands alone or in smaller groups, making it difficult to find an extensive enough population to collect from. But, early this month, we encountered a steady group of them on the side of a freeway on Prince of Wales Island. Only a few bowing red and yellow heads remained — most had hardened and browned and were full of tiny black seeds. These seeds became our first collection.

Blueberries, (Vacinium sp.) with their sour notes of blue, are packed with 20-30 seeds per berry. There are subtleties in the varieties of blueberry — the bog and dwarf blueberry are smaller, and sweeter than these traditional, larger wild blueberries. Vacinium alaskensis are abundant in this forest, pops of blue and purple carpeting the forest floor. And they were our second collection.

Foamflower (Tiarella trifoliata) keep their seeds close. They go to seed so quick, it is easy to miss the event: tiny white clusters of flowers that, when blooming, look like mini constellations of stars mirrored onto the forest floor, elongating into seed pods, each filled with sometimes three or five, but more often one, single black seed.

By and large, this month was berry month.

Devil’s Club (Oplopanax horridus) are bright, flat umbrellas of green. Their stems are full of sharp spikes, and they balance large triangles of red berries atop their leaves. Bears relish them; we take a few from every plant we can get close to.

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis) pack themselves tightly into stream systems and along roads and trails. This month, droplets of plump berries hung from their branches, coming in colors gold, red, or sometimes a combination of both. They taste like water, but bitter too.

And the Fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium) — the most vibrant shade of purple-pink you will ever see, brightening the road systems and stitching up the slopes of tall mountains. We collected their seed pods just this morning — sleek and slim green-bean-like capsules, pink on top with a green underside, each filled with up to 8,000 seeds. Abundance.

Stink Current, Ribes bracteosum, leaves your hands smelling of lemon and mint. These delicacies became our most recent collection.

It is clear that each plant and their seeds are exceptionally designed to work for them, their morphology, their pollinators, their eventual dispersal. Everything about them is carefully and thoughtfully designed. They produce seeds of their own making.

After harvesting comes drying, sorting and cleaning the seeds for storing. This is a tedious process, one that is also all about detail and care (especially when everything is soaking wet!).

As seed collectors, we are one mode of transport, one of these plants’ dispersal units. In the process, we try to ensure that we are leaving enough behind for the bears, for the birds, for the plant’s own survival and promise of future generations. If we take, we must also give back.

Seeds are gifts from the earth. They are plentiful, but they are also limited — a resource we collect in the case of needed restoration, which is also plentiful.

Joy and sorrow. Seeds are delightful.

On a walk down a trail at the end of a long day, exiting dense stands of red cedar and western hemlock, just entering a muskeg, there, delicately dropped in the middle of the trail: a speckled eagle’s feather. An offering. A delight.

Like every other work day, my seed collection partner, Tori, and I planned out a route through the forest to travel. Most of the first couple months working in the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest involved scouting out populations and exploring new parts of the forest, but this time would be the first day dedicated solely to seed collection and brought along two Montana Conservation Corps interns who were stationed at the same forest as us this summer. The population we would be collecting from was near a small pond in the Castle mountains of the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest. Tori had scouted it out at the end of last week and said it was ready to collect. The aim was to spend the whole day collecting Geum triflorum, or prairie smoke. 

We drove for an hour and a half, stopping along the way to check on a population of Phacelia hastata, before arriving at the intended collection point. Strangely enough, we did not easily see the wispy fruits made by Geum triflorum and got out of the truck to inspect closer – in case they were blending in with the other plants in the area. On closer inspection, there were not nearly as many of the plants as we had seen when the population was first noted.  Looking around the area, we realized that this location had been destroyed by grazing cattle based on the many cow patties around the area. We also noticed that the other side of a nearby fence was far more lush  than the area around the pond – evidently the cows had not crossed to that side. Because of this, we decided to adapt our plan and move further down the road looking out for Geum triflorum outside of the intended collection point as well as checking on a Frasera speciosa (Green Gentian) population that we had recorded before. 

Soon enough, we reached a scouting point we had made for Frasera speciosa and the population was perfect! The fruit pods were dried up and each fruit was full of mature seeds. Then we each armed ourselves with double-bagged paper bags and started collecting Frasera speciosa seeds. Each of us had our own preferred methods – either picking off the entire dried up fruits filled with seeds, sitting by a plant and dumping out the seeds, or bending over the top half of the plant into the bag and letting the seeds fall out with a few shakes. We continued for a couple hours before returning to the truck for lunch and then moved down the road a little more where we saw a moderate, ready to harvest, population  of Geum triflorum too! To get both species at the same time, I tied two double-bagged paper bags to my belt, one for Frasera and the other for the Geum, and continued to collect both species for a few more hours – moving down the road just once more. A couple of us had earbuds in and were listening to music or podcasts while collecting and, since I had forgotten my own earbuds, I listened to the fire team talking over the forest service radio. At one point the clouds looked pretty ominous,but luckily they passed over us without any droplets and the rest of the time went well. 

After returning to the station, we weighed each bag in order to calculate how many seeds we collected and set the seeds in a container with a no-bug strip for the weekend. After doing some math, we figured we collected about 50,000 viable Geum triflorum seeds and about 70,000 viable Frasera speciosa seeds on this one trip!

This was just the third day of actually collecting seeds for me, and I was happy with how it went! It was a little sad that the original location we planned to collect from had been destroyed, but sometimes things happen and we have to be able to adapt. So many things can prevent seed collection – from cows eating and trampling over the plants, missing the sometimes short fruiting times, a lack of fruiting (as we have seen so far with Frageria virginiana (virginia strawberry) and Berberis repens (creeping oregon-grape)), or the abundance of invasive species causing us to not be able to collect in an area. Even so, we were successful in still collecting the planned species as well as another in the same area and are hoping to switch over to mostly making collections for the rest of the season!

Clouds come and go, but the mountains remain. The dew point temperature in the morning is typically always reached here with the cooler mornings. The increased condensation in the atmosphere makes the mountains invisible, as the surrounding clouds block your view for miles. But now that we’ve finally had 70 degree days up here, the warming temperature deviates from the dew point temperature, and all the clouds evaporate to leave a stunning view. This is one of the best ways to experience the Alaskan alpine hikes, almost as if mother nature is revealing a secret to you.

These have been my favorite places to go on the Chugach, although the flowers are still barely emerging. As my eyes scan across the land, surprisingly it is the smallest plants that catch my attention. Drosera angelica, the English Sundew, is inconspicuously about 5 cm tall and found in most peatbogs in Southcentral Alaska. This interesting character is a carnivorous plant, that uses leaves covered in red mucilaginous glands with a resin tip to lure in their prey. Once the unlucky insect is trapped, the tentacle like structures then bend toward the prey and center of the leaf to maximize contact. This unique adaptation is a survival technique to live in nitrogen deficient areas, such as bogs.

Another plant we had to get down on our hands and knees to search for is the rare Aphragmus eschscholtzianus, or Aleutian Cress. This mustard is so small, it was first described in the last 75 years. One of the terrestrial crew’s projects is to monitor the subalpine valleys saturated with snowmelt to observe long-term population change. This involves going to previously mapped plots, finding due north and due east from a monument stake, measuring a 5×4 m plot, and using quadrats to measure Aleutian Cress abundance in a given area of the plot. This work also involved traversing the hillslopes off trail to ideal habitat areas to find new populations. At first I hated it, as this work is like finding a needle in a very large haystack. After hiking all day, our crew finally found a population of about 5, giving us all a euphoria and sense of accomplishment. I thought I could rule out rare plant monitoring from my career goals but instead, this experience has only made me more indecisive.