Um, you saw a what? Yeah, I know!!

So, came right off a three day weekend at the Bioblitz and back into work!  My body is like what?? lol anyway, Monday I had a bit of down time in the office, processing things from the weekend and such.  Tuesday, we headed out to a new site called Keyesville Special Recreation Management Area.  This gorgeous but sad parcel is located a little over an hour NE of Bakersfield, up in the Kern River Canyon.  I say 'gorgeous' because it is this really beautiful piece of property right on a pretty rigorous portion of the Kern River.  It is a pretty open space with gorgeous gray pines (Pinus sabiniana), really peaceful, serene and beautiful, but I say ‘sad’ because people have just TRASHED this poor place.  Just trashed it.  There are no fees charged here, and it is unmanned because we don’t have a large enough staff to have someone out here full-time, part-time or even much more than once a week.  It has been over-taken by OHV use (off-road vehicles, quads, dirt bikes, etc.), and people just camp here indefinitely, using it without care.  It really is just the saddest thing to explain.  And this place, while we want it to be multi-use, also needs care and to be kept in tact as it is a historically important archeological site.  Keyesville was one of the first towns to be settled in this area, and there are many mines around here, leading to the settlement, which now act as habitat for birds and bats, and in general are just a great piece of history to have in our possession for public safe-keeping.  So anyway, the OHVs are compacting the soil which basically suffocates and kills trees; they also don’t stay on the trails, but instead just make their own, adding to habitat degradation and flora loss; the campers (most of them, not all) are just carelessly trashing the place, using it for what they need and then tossing what they don’t.

The Kern River

So anyway.. we headed out there on this day to scout for plants and just get acquainted with a new site.  We saw couple species of milkweed, an Ericameria that was ready for harvesting and so we collected from; a species of gooseberry (Ribes) with the most beautiful fruits, in my opinion; a native thistle with just gorgeous flowers; oh, and a bunch of other stuff lol I could list plants forever.  For those of your more interested in the fauna, we also so a few cottontail rabbits – they are pretty common in the area of CA, we see a ton of them at the Carrizo too.

A gorgeous native thistle

The entrance to and old mining cave

This turned out to be a short field day, but a good one.  It was really nice to check out a new parcel of ours and to find more opportunities for seed collecting, since the Carrizo Plain is getting pretty spent.  Speaking of the Carrizo, Kathleen and I spent the next two days, Weds and Thurs, out there grabbing as much seed as we could.  We made an overnight trip of it so we didn’t have the make the long drive twice, and were able to spend more time out in the field this way.  There is a house on the property, an old rancher’s house, that now lends itself to housing those who come out to do work or research on the Carrizo.  While there, I was housed with the intern who works at the visitor’s center; some folks from Berkley who were doing antelope squirrel work and some other SCA interns who were studying blunt nose leopard lizards (federally endangered).  Anyway, finished up on Wednesday with a pretty good loot and then headed in for the night.  I camped outside with just my sleeping bag, next to a cute Western Spadefoot Toad.  The stars were amazing, and the next morning, the birds were quite the alarm clock!  The sunrise was spectacular and added to the beautiful ambience of one of the most peaceful places still in existence in this area.  So anyway, up at 530 am, ready by 6 and out for more collecting before the heat becomes too much.  We finished up around 12 or so, and decided to check out Painted Rock, a local attraction if you will.  This huge rock contains very old petroglyphs from Native Americans who lived on these lands for thousands of years.  This is part of the reason why the Carrizo is a National Monument.  So anyway, we stop at the visitor’s center to say hi to Adam and Jackie, and they tell us to keep an eye out for hawks, a barn owl and of course rattle snakes.  We have our eyes mostly trained to the ground looking for snakes as we make the ¾ mile jaunt to the rock.  So I come up on it and there’s kind of this circular trail around the house-sized rock and I start to make my way around.  The rock is just gorgeous with holes and crevices carved out by the wind and sand mostly.  I’m just coming around the corner and inadvertently startle the gorgeous barn owl out of one of the holes and he flies away around the corner. 

Painted Rock

Pictographs at Painted Rock

Darn, I thought, no picture, but at least I got to see the lovely creature!  Sooo beautiful, white in color and graceful as owls are.. I keep walking around the rock, admiring the nooks and crannies, looking for these darn petroglyphs but honestly being more interested in the plants on the ground.  Still walking and I come upon this ledge, that I can only see part of, from my distance and I’m like, oh cool!  What a neat carving out!  It makes a nice ledge and it – OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT??  I stop breathing as I have come upon a sleeping bobcat.  I literally stop breathing.  I have never in my life seen a creature so magnificent and my brain, my body, my diaphragm; they don’t know what to do.  I become unfrozen enough to capture a hazy photo of him (her?) sleeping and then instantly look around, searching for Kathleen.  I don’t want to leave this spot and finally she comes around the corner and I am motioning like a crazy mime.  By now the bobcat has heard my movements and awoken ( I was wondering how long it would take him.) but has now just raised his head and is looking at us with the littlest of emotions.  Not fearful, not aggressive, not even inquisitive.  If I may speak for the beautiful creature, it seems he was only a bit disturbed by us interrupting his nap, if anything.  I continue to stare in awe, screaming internally and still completely devoid of voluntary movement.  I snap to attention just enough to take several photos, hoping, praying that ONE will turn out decently.  I continue to gaze for a few more moments and then decide to bid him farewell, grateful that he gave me the minutes he did to marinate in his amazing presence.  He continued to stare lazily as I continued on, and I looked back every so often to see if his demeanor had at all changed.  It hadn’t. 
I glanced momentarily and the petroglyphs, already having viewed my treasure, and then floated back to the head of the trail, in utter disbelief.  Not only to have come upon this creature, but to find him in the most vulnerable state, taking a cooling afternoon nap, I can’t explain how much this experience means to me.  I still look at the pictures I took and have to almost convince myself that yes, you saw that, with your own eyes, from a mere 20 feet away.  My heart is racing just from recounting it.  To come upon such beauty in nature, is oh so rare, and moreover, to be able to relish in the moment, to watch it continuously without it attacking or fleeing is even more rare.  This was one of the best days of my life thus far, and I am grateful beyond words to have this experience in my eyes, in my mind and in my heart.  Thank you so much for letting me share it with you.

Love & velvet,

Rachel

You can't spell 'gorgeous' without 'gorge'!!!

Ok!  Updates!  Where, oh where to begin?!
Last weekend was my first ever Bioblitz!!  First, here are some pictures from the trip.  It was a very cool weekend.  We packed up the car with everything we'd need for three days and headed up north for the San Joaquin (pronounced 'wa-keen') River Gorge, about 2 and a half hours north of Bakersfield.   I, Denis and my co-worker Kathleen, left early on Friday morning.  Upon arriving, we set up all our equipment - microscopes, tables, got out all our plant books, viles, etc. and then headed out to do some recon. work, before the others showed up in the evening.   We visited our fellow BLM-ers at the Visitor's Center and then hiked over to where Denis thought there was some Asclepias fascicularis (narrow-leaf milkweed) and ended up finding a bunch of monarch caterpillars chomping away on them.  This little ecosystem was very unique because it was sponsored by a nearby tunnel that leads to the river that is collected here for hydroelectric use.  This tunnel holds very cool, moist air, owing to the ferns and the Mimulus (monkey flower) who both love these conditions.
We spent the rest of the day hiking around, collecting plants to key out and press for the herbarium; collecting butterflies, ants and bugs to be id-ed or photographed or preserved for science collections.  In the evening, I set up my tent but was so used to Bakersfield night-time heat that I didn't pack a blanket or sleeping bag.  So I ended shivering under my rainfly lol After it got down to the low 50s, I decided to head to the car, where, unbeknown to me, the windows were down.. no wonder it wasn't any warmer in that blasted car!!
But anyway, that day, Saturday, the rest of the gang showed up; our photonaturalist, the beetle specialist and a community member who is a part of the Sierra Foothill Conservancy.  The six of us set up traps, collected bugs and flowers, hiked through poison oak looking for new species, for literally the whole day - sun up to sun down.  At night, we strung up a white bed sheet and put a bright light near it to attract more bugs for collection.  It was great!
The gorge was so beautiful and peaceful and serene.. Sunday we were supposed to leave around 10 but ended up staying til about 2 to help sort the collected bug species from the pit traps.  Needless to say, when I got home around 5pm I was pooped!!!  And my body was very confused when the next day wasn't a weekend-day lol All in all though, it was great experience.  I learned a lot of new things and got to see a new BLM parcel that was just so wonderful!  The only bad side was that some scotch broom is creeeeping in on the gorge.. better bet I'll be taking care of that though!!  :)

Entrance to the San Joaquin River Gorge Recreation Management Area

Clarkia dudleyana

A happy girl on the San Joaquin River!

Our photonaturalist, David Hunter, positioning a butterfly for it's photo shoot

Separating bugs and insects, by order, from the pit traps

I'll post more about the other events of last week, but just wanted to get this one finally out the door!!  As always, thanks for reading!

Love & velvet,

Rachel

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

I Feel Compelled to Tell You

I have to be completely honest with you all.  I'm very new to this whole blogging thing, and most of my posts have been very work-centric.  I guess that's what I was hoping it would be, mostly.  I wasn't expecting to have thoughts or emotions that I would have to decide whether or not to withhold.  With that said, I have made my posts all pretty positive regarding this new experience and I have tried to be thankful and gracious for this opportunity that I have been afforded.  And when I mention the love of my life, Scott, it is usually with as little sadness or negativity as possible, and just in passing, with a "I miss him" or "wish he was here" type blurb.. but I've been dealing with a lot more emotion than I've been sharing on here.  For those of you who don't know the whole story, I'm sorry for any confusion; and for those of you who do, I thank you for your support.
I have been here for just over a month now, and throughout this time, it has not gotten any easier being away from Scott.  I still find myself tearing up out of no where and falling asleep with his t-shirt in my clutches and wishing the days and weeks would pass faster so I could just get back home..  The weekends are the hardest to get through, not having a full eight hours of work to keep me distracted.  It's just not an experience that I can say that I am fully committed to (mentally) like I wish I could be.
Like I said, I don't expect all of you to understand, but I feel like I just left Oklahoma before I was emotionally ready to.  This experience, I think, would have been a lot better under different circumstances, if I were in a different place in my life.  But at this point in time, I feel like it was a good-intentioned decision that has had less-than-positive outcomes.  I thought I would be ok with this move and although he and I were both hesitant, we both came to the same conclusion for me to come out here.  Professionally, I was very ready for this change, but personally, I was not at all.
Therefore, I have begun looking for and applying to jobs back in Oklahoma.  I'm not sure how long I will stay in California, maybe just a month, maybe two or three.  The deciding factor will be when I find a job in OK.  I don't want to go back home just to sit on my thumbs and revert back to the lack of productivity I've had for the last 8 months prior to this job.  I am trying to act smartly and take all factors into consideration - professional, emotional, monetary, personal, my passions..
I will continue to blog about my experiences through this internship until it ceases to continue.  I'll also of course keep you informed on my transpiring events regarding my return to Oklahoma.  Again, I thank you all for your support, love and understanding as I figure out what is best for me.  And thank you for allowing me to be so open with you.

As always,

Love & velvet,

Rachel