Another Week of My Life as a Sponge!

Gah!!!!  I feel like I don't have enough receptors to take in all the knowledge that is being given to me lately!!  This a great problem to have, let me tell you :)
So, this week, I got out in the field for two days, which I was really happy about.  On Tuesday, Denis took us out on a new part of the Carrizo, the south end, where we proceeded to spend the whole day looking for potential seed-collecting populations.  Since I finished my training recently for Seeds of Success, Denis really wants to start collecting, that is, if anything decided it could grow with the little quantity of precipitation we've had this season.  Anyway, this scouting consisted of driving and looking for good quantities of plants.  Our populations have to consist of at least 50 plants remember.  So when we saw some potential, we'd stop, hop out and start looking around for good numbers, blooms and seeds.  We would check quantities of seeds per flower or per pod to see what kinds of numbers we were working with and how much we'd need to collect to get to our (at least) 10,000 mark.  If it looked like a good site, we'd GPS the location and then take field notes to later transcribe into our data sheets for each plant, as well as collect and press some samples to preserve as herbarium specimens.  There was nothing that was ready to be collected currently, but there were some plants blooming - Eastwoodia elegans, a Delphinium., Lupinus albifrons, Ericameria. - as well as some grasses getting close to seed - Stipa. and a Bromus.  All in all, a lot of getting in and out of the car lol but also a lot of great future collecting sites!!  AND we found a site of my favorite, thistle sage (Salvia carduacea); it wasn't big enough for an SOS, but I think we'll def. be back to it to collect seed for local use! :)  Our "sights" for the day included a gopher snake, barn owls and our resident pronghorn antelope!!!  It was so awesome because the WHOLE DAY, we had literally been talking about the pronghorn - are they still here, have they moved on, when's the last time you saw them, they're probably gone, etc... and then we're driving down a road and I'm like 'omg, what are those?!'  And sure enough, our pronghorn had come out to show us they were still hanging around!!  It was super, super cool :)

Delphinium! (won't be sure which species it is until it goes to seed)

Lupine! (Lupinus albifrons)

a gopher snake, about 25 seconds before it bit Denis (non-venomous)

"Here we are!!" (Pronghorn antelope)

"And here we go!!"

Then on Thursday I got to go out to another S & G; spent the day tromping around Curtis Mountain, near Visalia, CA, about 1.5 hours N-NE of Bfield.  We left the office in the morn and headed up north, getting there around 10? to our site, which was conveniently placed right next to an orange grove. (No, we did not pick any!)  We were gonna just walk up this mountain (I use this word loosely, mountain; after living in Oregon, my baseline has changed lol).  Anyway, you can see from pics, but it's a steep slope, about 1100 feet high, mostly grassy, but with a lot of rocks and boulders.  Anyway, an adjacent landowner who is permitted to use this parcel for grazing gave us a ride up the mountain so we didn't have to hoof it, awesome!!  We would have been there so much longer, if not for his offer.  So we get to the top, see the cows lazing under the blue oaks, and get to work after being warned to be on high alert for rattle snakes (we didn't see any, boo).  We spent the next four hours meandering all over the front and back side of the mountain, doing our respective botany, wildlife bio, archeology and grazing surveys.  This place was a gold mine for plants in my opinion!  A bit wetter up here obviously for all the plants it held, and being so high up, things were not yet past bloom :)  We saw Calochortus (maraposa lily), Mimulus (monkey flower), Clarkia, Chloragalum (soap plant), 2 species of Lupinus, oh, some Brodiaea - 2 species, and one little gold back fern that was on a moist, shady rock :) a milkweed (in bloom!!), a Scrophularia (that I didn't get a picture of) and much more.  This particular site consisting of 40 acres, is only supposed to have 8 cows on it, but the fencing was not up to par and many more cows were coming in, leading to a site that was much more impacted by grazing that we had hoped :-/

Anyway, after scouring the part of the mountain that contained our parcel, we had to get down!  So we just tucked and rolled!  No, but boy were my legs wobbly after I had finally hiked down to the bottom! Wish I had brought my clinometer to catch the slope on this thing.  So we all managed to make it down to the base and back to our cars, just two of them for seven of us, yay for carpooling!  It was about 2 pm by then; we all piled in and made our drive back to Bakersfield to complete the report for the site.  This site was definitely noticeably impacted by the grazing occurring, most likely due to the quantity that were accessing it, not due to the way the rancher was rotating the animals between grazing sites.  

Our site in the background; oranges in the fore

See why it's called a 'gold back' fern??  :)

The breath-taking Mariposa Lily (Calochortus)

One of the Brodiaea's we saw

A beautiful milkweed!! (Asclepias)

If it ain't a mountain it's agriculture!  Crops as far as you can see.

Today (Friday), I continued to have my mind stuffed with information as Larry, our GIS guy, proceeded to fill me with a 3 hour session of ArcMap9 (a program that makes maps and utilizes points you take out in the field with your GPS).  It was GREAT information, but it just makes me realize how little I know about so many things!  This internship in general has made me realize how very little I know about a variety of topics that I enjoy lol  Seems off right??  It just makes me very grateful for all the knowledge I am gaining, and I am trying to soak it up like a sponge!  (with some success)  Which makes this experience all the more "tugging" - I am so happy and grateful to be getting more out of this internship, but the longer I'm away from Scott, the worse I feel in the hours that I'm not occupied with work... we'll see how things progress.

Thanks so much for reading about my week; next week I have more ArcMap training, and then next Friday-Sunday is my first Bioblitz!  And I'm excited to be visiting Scott and Oklahoma in less than three weeks!!  Yayyy!  Hope you all have a wonderful weekend, full of happiness and laughter. 

Love & velvet,

Rachel