CLM Internship Program Blog

September 2, 2010

I’ve been in Alaska for about three months now, but until last week I hadn’t learned much about the annual Iditarod sled dog race or the historic winter trail that the race takes it’s name from.  That all changed on a trip to the historic Rohn Roadhouse.  As part of a team of four I spent three days removing infestations of non-native plants around the cabin.

Idyllic Rohn cabin

This trip was exciting because I spend most weeks working on a seven-hundred acre BLM property in Anchorage, so  getting to take my first trip  in a small fixed wing plane was very exciting.  The “bush plane” as these vehicles are known here  is a uniquely Alaskan creature.  These wonderful machines are used almost like a charter bus is in the lower 48.   Except in Alaska charter vehicles need to fly because the majority of the state’s land area is not connected to the road system.  That means that people and supplies from the outside come in by barge or plane in the summer, and by plane, snow machine, or in the old days dog team in the winter.

Alaska AirTaxi "Beaver" at Rohn airstrip

When we arrived at the cabin to begin removing weeds we were greeted by two sheep hunters sprawled out next to the airstrip napping.  They were waiting for a ride back to Anchorage and had their meat and sheep skin hanging up next to them.  The hunters said that another group had bagged a caribou, but they were nowhere to be seen.  We brought out supplies over to the cabin and began working.  I was surprised to notice that throughout the day a plane seemed to land or take-off about every twenty to thirty minutes.  When I asked the other members of my team about this they simply responded with “It’s huntin’ season”.

The bi-hourly winged arrivals calmed down during the next two days and we were able to get to work.  On this trip I was designated as the “invasives expert” and it was my job to identify which plants were non-native and needed to be removed.  The situation was a little unusual because I was technically in charge of three people in their fifties.  It felt good to have knowledge that I could share with others and that could allow us to perform our job effectively, but it was novel and a little uncomfortable to be in vague position of authority that reversed the habitual age hierarchy.

Bagged plant materials from Rohn cabin infestations

In the end we worked well as team and got the job done.  Two of my workmates are Iditarod volunteers.  That means every year in March they spend one or two weeks at the Rohn Cabin for the Iditarod sled dog race.  They set up the checkpoint, feed dog mushers, clean up after mushers, load planes with trash and extra food, cajole straggling mushers into leaving the checkpoint, and much more.  They told wonderful stories about having to get their gear and them selves under 180 lbs to get on the plane, broken down snow-machines, and forty below temperatures.  They made it sound like one hell of an adventure and it was exciting to work with them to preserve an area that they truly love and cherish!

Carl Norlen

Bureau of Land Management, Anchorage Field Office

Anchorage, Alaska

For the past few months I have been lucky enough to work with John Carlson at the Bureau of Land Management in Glasgow, Montana. Being here has been quite an experience for me; my background is in marine biology and being located in a land-locked state and working in a prairie is considerably different from the coral reefs of the tropics! However, since my start date I’ve developed strong interests in this ecosystem…to me, it’s new and fascinating.

I have actively been engaged with a broad array of wildlife work that this office conducts on an annual basis. Projects have ranged from Greater Sage grouse habitat assessments to burrowing owl surveys to NEPA training and writing. Learning a new flora and fauna early on seemed like a daunting task, however, it came quickly to me and now it’s official…it made it to the resume people.

Now, as the field season has really winded down and we’ve completed all of our objectives (as far as field work is concerned), I’m working in the office every day. Though considerably less exciting than field work, it’s a good time for me to focus on an entomological project I began earlier this season…the hope is that the results will be publishable, but time will tell. Other than delineating a mass amount of insects, I maintain my sanity by learning GIS and familiarizing myself with NEPA analysis and writing. These are two skills that will surely make me more marketable and I’m glad to take advantage of the opportunity to become better acquainted with them.

Aside from the work I’ve been doing at the BLM, the town of Glasgow, Montana is a pretty good time. It too has grown on me a great deal since I made my way here about four months ago. I spend a good deal of my time fishing and running around the town…the fishing here is rather amazing, Fort Peck Lake is stocked (I mean REALLY stocked) with walleye. I would consider myself to be a bad fisherman at best, fishing here is like cheating…you just catch stuff, all the time.

I’ve also become addicted to Glacier National Park, which I regularly visit about once every two weeks now. I’ve spent a fair amount of time camping around the country, but Glacier is by far my favorite…I would highly suggest it to anyone who enjoys the outdoors (all of ya!).

As my time here is now beginning to wind down, I intend to learn as much as I can and enjoy myself as much as possible. I’m hoping to head westward (Washington/Oregon-ish) once this internship has ended for me in late November. I grew up in Buffalo, New York and I enjoy the left (west) side of the country a fair bit more, my hope is to kick it out here for awhile/ever @_@. This internship has been a wonderful experience thus far and has provided me with a great deal of useful skills that will certainly buff up my resume a bit. Aside from that, working in a federal government setting has been fantastic; it is something I will hopefully have the opportunity to do again in the near future.

Hope ya’ll are having as good (or better) of a time as I have had thus far!

Cheers,

Joe Carlo

We’ve been very busy since our last post!  It’s monsoon season here, which means everything is starting to flower all at once.  The desert landscape certainly gets a lot greener when you add water, and some locations we’ve been to many times look unfamiliar now that they’re covered in thriving, blooming plants.  This has been a great year for desert marigold (Baileya multiradiata).  Driving into the Bootheel area, we saw what looked like two big yellow seas on the horizon.  Overcome with curiosity, we walked about a mile to find that they were acre-wide expanses of densely-packed marigolds.

Naturally, with all of the flowering, there are more and more seed collections to do.  While we were struggling to get one or two collections a week in July, now there are so many seeds to collect that it’s becoming hard to keep up.  Not to mention, now we have to be careful to keep the truck from getting stuck in the mud.

We have also been busy helping with other projects going on around the office.  The most consuming of these has been the search for the rare scurfpea near the Hatchet Mountains. This includes long days of walking miles of transect lines with many BLM staff.  So far, we’ve found a few snakes, lizards, and many crickets, but no surf peas.  It’s interesting to see what the job of a rare plants botanist is like, but it’s satisfying to get back to seed collecting, where we can see the physical results of our work.

Hello again! Well, what can I say. It’s been about 2 and a half months and I absolutely love Boise, Idaho and don’t want to go back home to Washington D.C.  The experience so far has been challenging yet thrilling at the same time.

Let’s rewind to my first month here. It’s a bright Monday morning at the office and Susan (my mentor) sits Denise (the other CLM intern) and myself down and says that we will be going camping on Wednesday night and returning on Thursday. I was so excited and they didn’t understand my enthusiasm until I told them both that I had NEVER been camping. Upon hearing this, Susan was extra excited about my trip and she and Pam made this first time experience extremely memorable for me.  Susan got me a tent from the fire crew that assembled in just seconds. It was wonderful!!!

We got to the camp site around 6 on Wednesday evening, and I was wondering where we were exactly. We stood on the pier and were waiting, until I realized that we were waiting for a boat to come pick us up and take us to the camping site. Pam’s husband arrived in the boat and took us for a crazy fast ride across the lake and within minutes we arrived at our home for the night. Once we got there, we started assembling our tents and because I had the fancy one, I was done within seconds. A few hours later we sat down for dinner, and guess what we had – fresh caught trout, along with corn, bread with kalamata olives and penne pesto pasta. Amazing or what??!! And for dessert, what else but the classic – Smores. Again, I never had smores before so I definitely indulged in the chocolate and marshmallows until I couldn’t breathe.

I slept like a baby that night. Perhaps it was the fresh clean air or the fact that I ate way too much, but regardless, I woke up well rested. I thought we would eat something quickly for breakfast such as oatmeal, but no way, we had French toast, eggs and Italian sausages. What a way to start the day! Well, all in all it was a memorable experience, one that I will never forget.

Now that was my first camping trip experience, my second camping trip experience was just as exciting yet quite different. Pam and myself (The PK team) headed off to Bruneau to collect some Penstemon accuminatus and Munro globemallow. As the site was quite a ways from Boise, we decided to camp over. The food this time was just as extravagant; we had Mahi mahi and wild rice with Portobello mushrooms. Now, another first for me was that I had never seen stars before. I know I know, you must all think that I live in some odd place, but to tell you the truth, Washington DC isn’t a great place to look up and see the stars. Idaho, however is just the opposite. I got to see the Milky Way, some constellations and get this, even a meteor shower that night.

Now while we were seed collecting at the Bruneau river, I was able to get a firsthand experience about the detrimental effects of a wildfire. I had always heard about the wildfires here in Idaho due to the extreme heat, yet I had never seen the aftermath of one, until this trip. The fire had destroyed the habitat of so many species, including some Native Indian petroglyphs on the river canyon walls. It was devastating!

I never realized the impact of fires till this point and then it clicked, the Firewise Garden (an instrumental work by Roger Rosentreter with the BLM) was exactly the answer to these fires. The firewise garden shows you how to landscape different fire resistant plants around your house as a response to wildfires. Quiet an ingenious idea!!!

Well, last but not least, I would like to tell you about my fantastic white water rafting trip with Roger Rosentreter and the seed collecting crew from Vale, Oregon. It was quite a wonderful trip. I had never been rafting before, so when the idea was suggested, I got right on board. After getting the basic training from Roger (an expert kayaker) we got into our boats and began the thrilling ride down the Payette River. Surprisingly, we got some seed collecting in as well. We rafted and pulled over to different areas and climbed up on shore and collected seeds from Philiadelphus lewisii as well as learned to identify various plants growing near riparian zones. That would be some job – rafting and collecting seeds at the same time. Who knows, maybe I could be the first to do something like that in the future! A dream job incorporating both work and play…

Karen Dante

Boise, Idaho

Bureau of Land Management (State Office)

Contemplating the last 5 months working at the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park

Five months of collecting seeds is coming to a close.  As I think back through the months working at the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research, I’m amazed at how much I’ve experience and learned.  Not only have I had the opportunity to learn about the plants native to Southern California’s deserts, chaparral, and coastal sage scrub ecosystems, but I’ve gotten to see how research is conducted at a location other than a university, and even more uniquely at a non-profit organization.  The Applied Plant Ecology Division at the Institute has collected seeds for the Royal Botanical Gardens Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank the  for several years.  With a system already established, it was easy to learn the process of locating target populations, monitoring, collecting, short-term storage, and shipping.  We completed our required 50 collections, plus several more, giving us a feeling of accomplishment.  The long hours working in the hot blazing sun pay off when you come back with two complete collections of 10,000 seeds, one for SOS and the other for the Zoo’s seedbank.  There have been many great adventures from the past few months that will be told over and over, making this an experience I will never forget.

Sarah Brewster

San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research

The San Diego Zoo's sign board describing their commitment to the conservation of native plants

The field truck with a flat tire

The seed drying room full of seeds

Hey everybody!  It is crazy to think that the summer is almost over.  It seems like it has just started.  For me, it will be even crazier not going back to school in the fall.  I just graduated in May, and with summer winding down I have that “back-to-school” feeling in my gut.  I have never had a full time job that lasted this long either, so it feels like I should be starting something new.  But no, I’m only half done with my internship!  And fall is the busiest time for a seed collector.  Late July was a lull, but things have been gradually picking up speed and September through November will be hectic, but fun! 

The summer has been hot and humid with very little rain. The temperatures have been well into the 90s and there was even a week were it was in the 100s for a few days.  I’m sure all of you out west have to deal with similar or even hotter temperatures, but I wasn’t expecting this on the east coast!  The high humidity has added to the discomfort.  The high heat and little rain have been hard on fruit production, mostly on fleshy fruits.  Ridge top habitats are the worst- everything is dried up and dead.  However, the Prunus serotina or black cherry is doing exceptionally well this year.  We have also made good collections of Sambucus canadensis, Gaylussacia frondosa, andVaccinium corymbosum, or dangle-berry and high-bush blueberry respectively.  Some other collections includePolygonatum pubescens, Morella pensylvanica, Deschampsia flexuosa, Gaylussacia baccata, and Carex comosa, to name a few.        

Since I am stationed at the Greenbelt Native Plant Center, an actual nursery, I get to experience the process of preparing seeds for storage in the seed bank.  The nursery cleans its own collections and has short-term seed storage facilities as well.  I have been cleaning a lot of fleshy fruit lately.  We collect fleshy fruit into plastic bags and then store the collections in a refrigerator for a couple weeks to “after-ripen” which softens the fruit and makes the cleaning process easier.  The tool of the trade for cleaning fleshy fruit is…a blender!  We tape the blades of the blender so the fruit is mashed, which inhibits the possibility of seeds getting cut.  We simply blend up the fruit with some water until the seeds are loosened from the flesh.  Then we pour the mush into a large bowl, and add more water.  After gently stirring the mixture, the good heavy seeds sink to the bottom, while everything else floats or is suspended in the water.  The bowl is tipped and the fruit particles are slowly poured off, leaving the good seeds settled at the bottom.  These seeds are then spread out in trays to dry in the “Seed Lab” and then stored until winter, when they are put through another cleaning. 

I am one of the few interns not headquartered at a BLM office.  Like I said, I am stationed at the Greenbelt Native Plant Center on Staten Island, but the US Botanic Gardens and Botanic Gardens Conservation International play the crucial role of funding which makes this internship possible.   

Martin Schoofs

Greenbelt Native Plant Center

Staten Island, New York

This baby hauls five people and our plant presses--with room to spare

Working as a Seeds of Success intern out of Anchorage, Alaska has many perks. The beautiful Chugach Mountains rise up just at the edge of the city. Our travels take us to the gorgeous locales around Valdez, Glennallen, Fairbanks, and Nome. And we drive a kick-a$$ mini-van.

However, the real highlight comes during the actual seed collections. Perhaps it’s a hot and sunny day. Perhaps the collection is large and tedious. Perhaps we’re feeling a little tired.

The elusive, yet delectable, nagoon berry

Invariably, at this point, we stumble upon a batch of juicy and delicious wild berries. The lowbush blueberries are often tart, yet a handful can easily perk up my mood. Serviceberries (my favorite) are like blueberries, but bigger, mealier, and sweeter. Wild raspberries are great, but they can’t beat their smaller cousin: the nagoon berry.

Being in berry country means being in bear country, too. As winter slowly approaches, Alaska’s most dangerous mammals stock up on the ripe berries that remain. Although our single encounter with a bear while working was fleeting and safe, we always try to remain vigilant and make lots of noise while berry picking.

We do have to be careful to avoid some rather distasteful and aptly named berries, like soap berry (or worse, the deathly poisonous bane berry), but our berry discoveries usually end the same way. Five people, crouched over some bushes, devouring as many berries as possible– but, of course, never more than 20% of the total population.

Blueberries waiting to be eaten

Hello all!

I am writing with some bitter sweet news.  I was recently offered an emergency hire biological tech. positionwith NPS at Carlsbad Caverns.  I have been volunteering in the park on the cave swallow mist netting/banding program and met some of the park staff, including the seasonal bee surveyor.  We share a love of all things insect, so when his co-worker unexpectedly left he brought my name up as a possible replacement.   After much debate I have decided that the NPS job is a better opportunity for me.  I will be collecting and identifying hymenoptera and the corresponding flowers they are visiting as part of a three part project with NPS, U.S. Department of  Agriculture,  and Utah State University.  It is hard to find entomology-only jobs and the chance to learn how to identify bees down to genera and even species is going to a valuable skill set.  Long story short I am leaving the Carlsbad BLM and CBG intern program early. 

In no way is my job transfer a bad reflection on my previous position.  The time I spend as wildlife intern has been jammed back with useful information and monitoring techniques.  My experience with the Chinuaiuan desert at the BLM was one of the reasons they decided to hire me here at the park service.   While sad to leave the BLM, I have always wanted the opportunity to work for the Park Service and catching bees all day is going to be a dream job!!

Thanks again CBG!

Rachel Krauss

Carlsbad, NM

Ben Copp

Nome, AK

July 28th

The helicopter we’re flying in is a Bell 206 Long Ranger.  It seats 7, in the same way a VW bug seats 5.  There have only been three of us so it’s perfectly comfortable.  As the day goes: we pick an area and a few sites to visit, somewhere between 8 and 10 and head out to the furthest one and work our way back.  Fuel and weight are our limiting factors.  We’ve only got about 3.5 hours of fuel and as frequently as we power up in might be less.  When we arrive at a site we look for a suitable place to set down and begin our survey.  The surveys are simple and painfully unscientific.  Laurie (my mentor) and I stand side by side and envision a semi circle.  Within that area we consider the amount of cover of preferred lichen and the percent use of that lichen.  We record these percents within classes, take two large steps and do it again.  What we’re looking for are signs that the lichen has been grazed on or steps in the lichen.  When it’s hot and dry the lichens crumble under foot and hold big prints, and when reindeer or caribou eat they pull out clumps of lichen but only eat the very tops and drop the rest.

I’ve been in a helicopter once before but here I am spending loads of time flying around rural Alaska, where there are no roads or people, only the occasional sign of human use, a cabin or a two-track, for a week.  It’s awesome.  I have a flight suit and a helmet and gloves, which make it bad-ass and get to see bears and reindeer and musk ox and hopefully some moose from the air.  It’s a seriously good adventure.

Yesterday we got into a bit of a mess.  We flew early, getting out to Tom Gray’s Range about 100 miles east of Nome.  There were clouds around, some of them low to the ground but easy to fly around and avoid.  We got to our sites, 10 of them.  Ate lunch on the top of a hill, picked blueberries after surveying, generally having a great time despite a constant mists and chilling wind.  It wasn’t comfortable working but always fun.  I found a big moose antler at one of our sites but it was last year’s and had been gnawed on by some critters and torn apart so I left it to the tundra.  Even in the rain it’s great to be out on the tundra, better in the sun of course but the rain seems to accentuate the colors of the white and green lichens, red and blue berries, green mosses and grasses.  The complexity is hidden in just a few centimeters above the ground – it demands a close look.  Every site is a little different.  Some and boggy and wet, with high tussocks and lots of lichens and blueberry bushes, while other are in saddles or on hilltops that have been cleaned of lichens and turned mostly to rock.  The blueberry bushes are in a fully ripened state.  I’ve found that the little ones that are close to the ground and in a harsher place have the most berries.  When it’s boggy and wet, when the bushes are big and green, you have to pick one by one.  It’s the hardy little bushes that carry the most berries.  But back to the mess.  We were at site 10-05, our 10th site of the day and destined to be our last.  We wanted to make it a shorter day because the previous two had been long and it had been raining all day but we had made good time and I had a softball game to make.  We were up in a saddle working with the wind and mist to our back and finished quickly because we were getting cold and wet.  It was only about 45 deg.  We finished our assessment, took some measurements, and got back in the helicopter.  There were no blueberry bushes to keep us there any longer.  As we power up a thick cloud came and knocked down our visibility so we can only see the ground below us and nothing ahead.  We set back down and wait a second before trying again only to have the same result.  This time we powered down and waited for a good opening.  We sat and watched the cloud move past, rain thickening and thinning, the peaks to either side coming and going.   We got glances of trees below, the valley, maybe the river, but none long enough to make a run for it.  Calls went out to dispatch, still on the ground weathered in, 50 miles straight line from Nome, middle of no where.  I napped, ate, got cold, peed, ate, thought I see an opening, no.  On and on. We started to make plans.  We only had enough fuel to make a straight line back to Nome, which with this weather was unlikely.  If we did get off we might be able to make it back or at least follow the Council road back.  That’s the best option.  The second option was to fly to Council, only a few miles away and have the mechanic drive out and meet us.  The pilot could only work so many hours in a day and as that time approached option three, which was spend the night in the helicopter seemed more and more likely.  We relayed our options to dispatch and sat tight for more hours.  There was no making the softball game now.  It was 9:00pm – just about of 5 hour mark.  As we made the second to last call into dispatch, giving them our options, setting a time to talk in the morning, and all but giving up we get a little clearing.  Nate, the pilot, powered up and Laurie and I put things away and prepped for take off.  The clouds cleared out of the valley and we lifted off and flew down below the soup that had stranded us.  We found the road to Council and began to follow it towards Nome.  The going was slow, still clouds everywhere and a low ceiling.  As the road climbed a hill and we followed it we reentered the mess of clouds and rain.  Now flying 20 feet above the road, going 20-30 miles an hour we couldn’t make it back to town.  I could read mile marker 56 as we passed by- 56 miles to Nome, no chance.  It was now 10:30, just 10 minutes from the pilots shut down time, so we set down at the side of the road powered down, put a call into the mechanic to drive out and pick us up, and sat tight.  The wind was up again and so was the rain.  I could see my breath inside the aircraft.  It took an hour and a half for the truck to get to us, and eventually we were home.  A warm shower, some proper dinner, and bed.  I didn’t get to bed until 2am, but that didn’t matter.  I wasn’t in a helicopter on a hillside or still on the road to Council.  I was back and able to sleep in.

Tomorrow we’ll do it all again.

Photos of it all are here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/bacoppvi/Alaska?authkey=Gv1sRgCLr_gPen9KiasgE&feat=directlink