Seeds of Success? Oh yes!

Oh ma gawd, where do I even start?!  Nevada is beautiful!!!  Or what I saw of it anyway :)  I guess I'll just jump right in!  So, on Monday I, along with my co-intern Kathleen, drove from Bakersfield, CA to Las Vegas, Nevada - it's about a 5 hour drive, but we eventually got to the La Quinta where we were staying.  So, quick side note, the Chicago Botanic Garden who runs the Conservation & Land Management Program (CLM) that I got my internship through, graciously paid not only for this training I was going to in Vegas, but also my hotel for the three days I was there.  BLM of course let us borrow a vehicle and covered the gas to get us there.. just so very thankful for all of this, I would never had been able to give myself this opportunity on my own!

My very first live-in-person Joshua Tree!!!  Seen heading east from CA to NV

And tons of wind mills collecting energy up on the Tehachapi's!

Bienvenidos a Nevada!!

Ok, so in case you didn't know my reason for going to Nevada, it was to attend the national Seeds of Success Training Program.  This is a program that was started by the Bureau of Land Management, that collects native plant seeds from populations across the country to be kept in a national collection for long-term rehabilitation and restoration purposes.  Each collection from a species needs at least 10,000 seeds for submission and the SOS Program encourages multiple collections from the same species in different areas of it range to help with genetic diversity.  When some plants only have 2 seeds per flower, you can see how this would take a while, if you can even find enough plants to draw from in the first place!  But it's not impossible - since the program started in 2001, there have been over 13,000 sets of seed collected from all over the country!
So, with that explained..  I got to Vegas on Monday afternoon and decided to lounge by the pool for a bit, still working on my John Muir book.  It was a pretty low key night since I had to be up at 6 the next morning.  We met in the lobby on Tuesday morning to carpool to our classroom site - Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.  I was absolutely blown away by the geologic beauty of this area - who would hang out on the strip when this was just 20 minutes away?!
So we got to class and did our training from 800-430, learning about the process and protocol, reviewing prominent plant families and gaining a better understanding of what this is all for.  We started with introductions which was fun.  We were randomly paired up and got to know each other for a few minutes and then had to tell the class about our new friend :)  Mine was John, a restoration biologist from Vegas who had been working for Fish and Wildlife for more than 20 years, great guy - a lover of trees and penstemons.  Anyway, there were some great minds in this class!  Not just interns, although there were about 10 of us from the Chicago Botanic Garden (CLM) and the Great Basin Institute (GBI).  There were people from all states in the west - Wyoming, Oregon(!!!), California, Idaho - and from all agencies - USFWS and BLM mostly and then a couple private entities.  Great, smart wonderful people!  After this first day of training a group of us decided to go to this little tapas place right by our hotel for drinks and food - great plan!  Don't worry, I won't disappoint you!  I indulged in a  delicious farmhouse saison.. 'twas perfect!

Counting the number of seeds in an Erigeron flower (Asteraceae Family) to determine how many flowers from how many plants we would have to collect from! Each plant contains roughly 1144 collectable seeds, which means we could have our 10,000 in no time (9 plants?!).. However, Asters are known to have a very low viability rate (10%-ish), plus our population has to be at least 50 plants.  Ah, the technicalities!!  ;)

So we did our first day of training and then the second day was supposed to be all field work.  We were going to spend the whole day out in the field doing a mock seed collecting; the west has been especially dry this year, so we were going to do what we could in the field.  Going through the whole process and then collecting in actuality if we could.  Well, wouldn't you know it, the one day we're set to do field work in the desert, it pours!!  We were out from about 9-11am, but the rain was just relentless so the instructors suggested that we head back to the classroom.  Most of us were confused by this.. we're all used to these conditions in the field right??  But we were dressed for a dry, sweltering 95 degree day, so we gladly clambered into the vans and headed back.  We had lunch and then finished up the few hours of work we had planned on doing the next day.  The class was great and we really did learn a lot even though we didn't get to play outside as much as we wanted.  I still got to see a great number of new species in what I thought was just a barren desert!  Such beautiful plants!! :)

A rainy field day in the desert :)

This is a tufted evening-primrose, Oenothera caespitosa

But anyway, that gave us the first half of Thursday free before we had to drive back.  So I and a few other CLM interns, decided to see if the GBI interns of Vegas (Elise and Sam) needed any help with some seed collecting that they were currently working on.  They welcomed our help, and the 6 of us carpooled out to the east side of Vegas, into the Sunrise Mountains to collect Astragalus seeds.  This was so great!  A wonderful hands-on experience and quality time with great new people!  So after a few hours of collecting pods of seeds we had reached their goal (that had already collected some on a previous day) and so we headed back to town.  We exchanged contact info and then headed our separate ways back to our respective field offices.  Kathleen and I headed out in the early afternoon and got back to B-field in the evening.

After a few hours of collecting from about 50 Astragalus plants, this was what I had to show for it!  :)

All in all it was a really great experience and I truly hope I can get back to that area some time to tromp around a little more, since time was so limited on this trip!!  (Add it to the list baby!)  I really hope the pictures I post do this area justice - my camera died the day I got there and I forgot my charger at home so all of these photos are via my phone, grrr.  If you're not impressed by the shots I took, here is a website for the area, that is sure to please!  I just love that I went to Las Vegas and all I did was take pictures of rocks and plants! I didn't even have an inkling to look for a casino or be drawn into some shiny lights; this trip was just how I wanted it to be, even if it wasn't as long as I could have wished for!  Oh, if you have any questions about my trip or the area, please do ask, I'd love to tell you more about it!

View from our classroom at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area

So here are some pictures from the Red Rock Canyon trip (Nevada)

http://on.fb.me/IB2SYa

and here are the pictures I said I would post from the Paso Robles S & G that I went on a few weeks ago

http://on.fb.me/JtVrq1

Thanks for taking the time to read, hope you liked!!

Love & velvet,
Rach

Finally Gettin' Outiside!!.. and Then Rushing Back in to Stay Cool!

Even though it's only been two days since my last post, I have a whole week to catch up on!  So, over this last weekend I decided to head back to Panorama Park, at my baby's suggestion ;) and do some more exploring and just get some exercise!  So I rode the bike that Denis is letting me borrow, just up River Road (past a graveyard.. bleh); it's only about a 7 minute ride.  I biked back and forth along the path for a while, up above the river, then parked the ol' gal and hiked down to the river where there is another set of trails.  I saw some wild rabbits, but they were too elusive to photograph.  On the river, there was a dam but I think it was just for water control, I didn't see any signs of hydroelectric harvesting.
It was a really clear day in terms of being able to see the Sierras, and it was so nice and warm and sunny!!  People were flying kites and riding bikes and pushing babies in strollers, it was nice.  I hiked up back up to the top and found my John Muir (A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf) book and spent some time reading before heading home.  It was just the recommendation that I needed, thanks love!  And I am still recovering from some strained muscles in my foot so it was good to do a hike/bike combo, as opposed to just walking a lot and getting my foot all worked up!

The Sierras, the oil fields and the Kern River

Then, back to work!  So this work week, I was out in the field for three of the five days, which made me so happy!  Finally productivity!!  Or so I thought. lol  I got out to the Carrizo on Tuesday with Denis and Kathleen, he was going to show us how he wanted us to collect data from transects.  First we looked around at some of the vernal pools for signs of life, in the form of ferry shrimp, after the rains we got last weekend, but alas, there were none.

Yellow flower:  gold fields (Lasthenia)

Then we got to the field we were supposed to be monitoring, bringing all our gear and instruments.  But when we got out there, he wasn't quite sure how we should collect the data (what method), what the data was going to be used for and what the end result was that he wanted from collecting this data (how it could be used in the future to make better decisions).  So we literally just sat there in the field for two hours, talking to him about all these things, kind of trying to get information out of him to help him make a decision lol  Denis is a great guy, if you met him on the street, you'd want to go grab a beer with him after talking to him for 5 minutes.  And he's a smart guy too - he can tell you anything you want to know about plants.  But he is very, very scatterbrained, very unplanned, very seat-of-the-pants.  And for those of you who know me lol.. I don't do well with that type of mindset!  I am very planned and organized and productive; so this was very hard for me.  Anyway, we left the field not having done any transect work, but finally having come up with a plan for how we're going to do it.  So Kathleen and I came back out for the next two days (Weds and Thurs) and got all five of our transects done.
So basically, we were looking at the success of native grasses that were seeded (along with some native flowers) in this field the previous year.  Our procedure consisted of laying out 100 meters of tape (~330 feet), and setting up a 1x.5 meter plot, every 5 meters, along the tape.  Within this plot, we were looking for rows planted, as well as percent cover of native grasses, non-native grasses, bare ground, leaf litter and 'other'.  This can equal 100% or more (but not less!!), up to about 120% (that was our cutoff anyway).

one of our plots

A row of native bunch grasses (Nassella) right by the yard stick!

This cute little thing is a native called Tidy Tips, or Layia

So over the two days, we finished these 5 transects (100 sample plots) in what I thought was a very efficient manner :)  It was in the mid 80s both days, and I was decked out in so many layers of sunscreen, that it eventually just started peeling off because it wouldn't stick to itself anymore lol  But the weather was so nice, it's so great finally having a job that let's me be outside.  :)  

pretty much all the grass you see right now is a non-native oat grass,  Avena

Before wrapping this up, I would just like to fully share with you my new botanical obsession, the thistle sage.  I posted a pic of this flower in my second post, but I felt so guilty because that first photo really didn't do this beautiful flower justice!  So, here are two more of this simply gorgeous plant, that I will no doubt be obsessed with for the rest of the summer.  It's a very dainty, frilly flower with a fuzzy little head, no not fuzzy, more like cotton-y.  You have pull out little tufts of what seem like cotton, to get to the seeds.  It's just a wonderful find :)

thistle sage (Salvia carduacea)

Friday was very uneventful; I only had to work two hours to put myself at 40, so I just did a few things around the office.  Saturday included a horrible migraine which has yet to go away, after 36 hours, but I took some ibuprofen to keep it at bay until my body equilibrates.  Yesterday was 94 and today (Sunday) was 97!!!,  so Kathleen and I went to Dewar's Ice Cream and Candy Shop, for some cool down time!!  Maple Nut ice cream?  Yes please!!  I definitely recommend checking it out if you're in the area, it's really old-fashioned and family owned and local, they make their own cream on site, etc.  Really cute little place :)

Other things of importance:  I bought my ticket for a visit to Oklahoma at the end of next month!!  I am sooooo happy!!!  :)  Also, I'm going to Nevada (Las Vegas and Red Rocks) Monday through Thursday of this week for seed collecting and restoration training... Road trip!  I am stoked and will be sure to post all about it!!  

Ok, this entry has been long enough, but at least I'm all caught up now.  Hope you have a great week; thanks, as always for reading!!

Love & velvet, 

Rach

A Slow, but Uphill Ride!

Well, I am just finishing up my third week in my temporary position with the Bureau of Land Management, back out west in Bakersfield CA.  It feels like it's been so much longer, but no, I've only been in CA for a little over three weeks.  Ok, so let me catch you up on LAST week!  Last week contained an exciting new feature - we got to go out for an S&G, which is a Standard & Guideline.  Among other uses, BLM manages a lot of their land for grazing purposes, especially out here in the western US.  Private landowners can graze cattle on the land, as long as they have a permit and don't cause harm to, or alter, the land; they also have to own land that is adjacent to ours.  Permits are only reissued or renewed after an S&G has been performed on the grazed land.  So basically a good cross-section of our office goes out to this site and looks for signs of degradation or other reasons why the land should no longer be grazed on.  Typically in attendance are:  an archaeologist (looking for cultural findings that may need protection), a botanist (looking at plant diversity and perseverance), a wildlife biologist (looking for maintained wildlife diversity) and a rangelands person (who is looking at the land's overall condition specific to grazing).
Anyway, so this group, including my mentor Denis and my co-worker Kathleen (the botany group) headed out to one of the prettiest BLM sites, just west of Paso Robles (PR), about 2 hours from Bakersfield and maybe 45 minutes from the coast.  PR is a really pretty town.  The climate is a little different from Bakersfield because it's closer to the coast; they get a lot more moisture than we do.  So, to get a picture of this town, just picture Tuscany, really.  There are vineyards everywhere and rustic-looking, mediterranean homes are placed in between them.  There are of course tons of wineries here, it seems like a really prospering little city.  Anyway, it was a really nice reprieve from the sights of dry, oily Bakersfield lol  Even better was that there were so many oak trees in this area!!  Just picture gorgeous, rolling hills with huge elegant oaks dotted all over them.  And then it was kind of cloudy and a little bit rainy..  The combination of the weather and the trees made it feel just enough like Oregon for me to start daydreaming about it.. Long story short, it was a gorgeous drive over!

So anyway, we meander along these gorgeous uninhabited roads, seeing deer and turkey and beautiful oaks, to an area northwest of PR, near Lake Nacimiento.  We arrived at the owner's property, adjacent to ours.  He's a really nice older guy, and has been grazing his cattle on our land, via permit, for the last 20 years.  We talked to him for a bit and then headed out, walking a short distance over his land to get to ours.  We walked the property for a few hours, looking at great plants, while the others looked for their respective components on the land.  This property was about 40 acres, so pretty small.  We started out in an open grassland, then moved into oak woodland and then eventually crossed a fence and found tons of poison oak along with a gorgeous little stream, that again, reminded me of Oregon.. I loved having to climb over the big rocks and carefully avoid the stream and seeing slugs and being in a canopy that was shaded enough to allow ferns and mosses to grow - this was probably the best part of the day :)

In the end, we determined that this land looked really healthy and that no notable harm was coming from the grazing.  I love that these lands can be multi-use!  It makes me feel like co-existence is possible, even if it is tucked away in places like the coast range foothills of Southern California :)

The rest of the week was pretty uneventful, I had to take a 4-hour online Defensive Driving Course which suuuuuucked, but at least I'm done with it!  I finally got my ID badge, and earlier in the week, I went to a going away party for my short-lived mentor Heather, who is moving back to Oregon to take a job with the US Forest Service and to be with her husband, gosh that sounds nice.. 

Switching gears from professional life to personal, I am still missing Scott very much; it has been a very hard adjustment thus far, after only having had a little over a month with him in Oklahoma.  But I'm trying very hard to keep my head up and look for the positives, but.. somedays are just very, very hard.. One day at a time right??

Ok well, I think that's it for last week.  There are a million more pictures from the Paso Robles site, but I didn't want to clog up this page any more than I already did, so I'll try and find a Picasa link for you all or something similar.  And I'll definitely get another post up this week to get us all caught up!  As always, thank you for reading :)

Love & velvet,

Rach

One Week In

Ah, where do I even begin?!  I've been in Bakersfield for about a week and half now, and am much over due for an update since last weekend.  Nodding donkeys, bubbly tar pools and my very first real weekend!  Things are still going just swimmingly at Nadia's, here with my co-worker/roommate.  Nadia just insists on cooking for us every day - soup, falafels, hummus!  And all the eggs we can eat from the chickens - yay for protein!  Kathleen and I checked out Panorama Park one afternoon last week, and as far as the haze will let you see, there are "nodding donkeys" - these oils rigs that pump the ground of oil 24/7.  K and I have to skirt around the area of Oildale everyday to and from work, which is where all these things are located (for the most part).  Historically, this area was filled with "Okies" who had come from Oklahoma to dig for oil.  Now it is very much an eyesore of a town that is not the safest place to be at night.  But I've heard it's got a nice, old historic downtown, very much preserved, that I'd love to check out some weekend!

"Nodding Donkeys"

Looking out over Oildale from Panorama Park - Kern River in the foreground, and about a million oil wells in the background

In the middle of the week, I headed out to one of my future field sites, Carrizo Plains National Monument, which sits in a valley among the coast range mountains.  On the way there, Denis stopped to show us a real treat, some tar beds!  The liquid tar is pushed to the surface and forms a pool, which eventually spills over and kind of creates a little tar stream until it dries up; very cool!!  I posted the video of it on youtube so it wouldn't slow down my page - watch it here!

So, Carrizo is a very varied landscape, very dry of course, but with many vernal pools and small streams when the rain is sufficient.  The different soil types there can also make the place quite varied and differentiated, plant-wise.  Located here is Soda Lake, a huge dried up lake bed that was very salty and eventually evaporated leaving a desolate, sodium-rich lake bottom.  We were there for the whole day, getting a tour from our mentor Denis.  We identified plenty of great plants and saw some interesting animals too, including a tarantula, a juvenile gopher snake, an assortment of birds, antelope squirrels, and a jackrabbit.  The plants we saw were plentiful, even though there hasn't been much rain!

A beautiful thistle sage

Soda Lake

Baby breed of gopher snake! (when we picked him up to take him off the road, he was so stiff from the cool, windy weather!)

Carrizo Plains, with a vernal pool a little ways in the distance

Towards the end of the week, we went back out to Atwell Island, where we released the burrowing owls before, and Heather, our mentor that's leaving us to take a job in Corvallis, Oregon (JEALOUS!!), gave us a great, more extensive tour of the 8,000-acre property which includes some newly installed wetlands!  Many years ago, this area was actually a lake - Lake Tulare.  And it was the biggest lake west of the Mississippi, until it was completely dammed, diverted and drained for irrigation and agricultural purposes.  The BLM, along with the help of farmers who still own some of the land, are trying to convert it back to natural habitat.  It's hard though, because "natural habitat" is actually a lake bed; so the soil that is there, wants to support aquatic plants, with aquatic soils, but there's no way that we can fill Lake Tulare back up - it's way too expensive and the water wouldn't even be available anyway.  So we are converting what we can, to wetlands.  It provides habitat for species that have relied on this source for decades and is a good effort to putting the land back to what it used to be.  It was great to sap some knowledge off of Heather before she peaced out, and to get a better idea of the area through the tour.  We saw more plants that I am finally starting to remember!.. and more animals.  Lots of birds of prey out here, mostly red-tailed hawks, and super cute horned lizards!!  Oh my gosh they are just the best, and I am going to propose to Scott that we get one until we can have a dog :)  Here's a video of me "returning" one to the wild after holding it for a bit.  We also did some line intercept sampling (you'll have to look it up lol) which I am frustratingly perfectionistic at, but I will get better!!  Err, worse?  Whatever makes me more sane and comfortable with the work I'm doing :)

Some of the reconstructed wetlands

The back side of a horned lizard :)

Then, the weekend!!  My first weekend as a working person in over 8 months!  So what did I do??  Chores and errands of course!  Things that I couldn't do during the week - shopping, laundry all the fun stuff.  But K and I did go to a Sierra Club talk where our co-worker Heather was speaking about Atwell Island which really was fun except for the fact that the senior citizen Sierra Clubbers smelled fresh blood and were all over K and I to make sure that we stayed in touch with them lol  (mini PSA):  It really is sad though to see only elder people at these events - Sierra Club, Native Plant Societies, etc... What will happen when these people step down or retire from the group?  With our youth step up?.. (end PSA)

Anywhoo, this first week wasn't without huge flaws and frustrations at work, they really don't seem to have their stuff together at times and it seems like maybe the've never had interns before...? which leaves me frustrated when I have nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs at work.. we'll see what this week holds though!  I miss Scott terribly, and don't see that changing anytime soon, but am excited that I will be going back to OK for a visit towards the end of May :)

Thanks all, for reading such a long blog, I'll try to update more often so these entries are shorter!  Have a great week!

Love & velvet,

Rach

Commence Next Chapter!!

Well, things are finally happening!!  I got to Bakersfield, California from Stillwater, Oklahoma on Wednesday, and Kathleen and I drove through these beautiful, huge rolling hills/mountain ranges in the Angeles and Los Padres National Forests, to get to Bakersfield.  Wednesday night we stayed with a great family we found on couchsurfing.org and then finally made a decision on housing the next day, after weeks of searching.  By now, we are all settled in and are enjoying the bounties of our new house and Bakersfield in general!  I think I will get along just find in terms of things to do around here.  Between our co-work Denis and our couch surfing host Julie, I already have a list of places to check out.  So far, I've been to the Farmers' Market on F Street, I rode the bus and transferred buses very successfully (the best bus system I've rode so far!), I went and visited my office on Friday for a visit, I went to this great store called Lassen's, where I will probably do most of my shopping; it's right up my alley!!  I'm looking forward to checking out more of the city as I settle in and time prevails.

Bienvenidos a Bakersfield!

Looking past the grapevines to see the sunset at my new place 

I am elated, yet disbelieving of the fact that I am actually starting work again tomorrow, and with the BLM!!.. this will be my first day of work in more than 8 months; I haven't been unemployed since I started working when I was 14.  Even though this last year of Korea b.s. took its toll on me, I have slowly been getting back on track with the help of family, friends, new locations and the love of my life.  Since January, things have really started looking up for me, and I am very, VERY excited to see where this new chapter continues to lead me, as I shed the past and start anew.  Thank you for your support, and for joining me on my adventure by frequenting this blog  :)

Love and velvet,
Rach