Thursday the 25th

Today we had our earliest morning yet, the only other time I’ve woken up before 6am this year was for cherry harvest! We had to get up early to meet with Marlo Fisher, the US Forest Service District Botanist for the Bend-Fort Rock ranger district. She manages around one million acres (wow!!!) of which around 20% is wilderness. She has been doing botany for over 15 years, and originally started out as a wildland firefighter out of Cle Elum. Our job today was to survey for Botrychium Pumicola, known as Pumice Moonwort, but we referred to it as Bopu (combines the 1st two letters from each scientific name).


Bopu is endemic to central Oregon, with some outliers to the north and south by Crater Lake and Mt. Jefferson. Bopu loves the pumice soil found in these areas, which came from the Mt. Mazama and Newberry explosions. We were in the Pine Mountain area to see if there is habitat the Bopu are occupying that scientists do not know about. It took us a while to find our first few, which we needed so everyone could get a good visual of what they look like, but after a while it started ramping up. In the first area we went to, we surveyed around a 500m length with around a 50ft width. After getting further away from the road near us and farther from the lodgepole pines we noticed they like this habitat more and we ended up spotting over 300 in that section. We then drove to another area where there had been no sightings, but Marlo thought it would be good habitat. After a very short search, we were able to find over 100 Bopu in this small area alone! We then crossed the road to see if they were on the other side too, and luckily enough they were. We ended up spotting over 500 Bopu on this day, which is a great count and apparently one of the higher ones the Heritage teams have gotten! It was great to be able to help Marlo out with this survey and just to get to learn from her in general. She had some great advice for us and emphasized just how many options there are for us out there! After the surveying was over we got another soil sample and headed home. We got it prepped for tomorrow and are just waiting for sediment to settle. Monette made some great quesadillas for dinner and we called it a night pretty early.

I thought this sage habitat was beautiful, had to include it!

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