Guest Post by Bachelors of Applied Science in Sustainable Practices senior Drew Riggles

“Craters of the Moon is a vast ocean of lava flows with scattered islands of cinder cones and sagebrush.” –From the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Reserve website, Idaho.

A view in Craters of the Moon National Monument and Reserve. Photo by Drew Riggles.

Americorps, in conjunction with Idaho Conservation Corps and the National Park service, hosts interns at Craters of the Moon (CRMO) National Park and surrounding parks each summer, to work with the vegetation program in wildlife and vegetation monitoring, insect monitoring, and exotic plant management. I was lucky to be chosen in the summer of 2019, and spent my time doing field work all summer.

In my first week of the internship, I did bird surveys/identification, labeling bird calls in the area and checking on populations of nesting birds. We found quite a few nesting birds making calls: the Western Meadow Lark, the North American Blue Bird and one bird call I recognized as the call of a Dark Eyed Junco; a lot of this work was very similar to the tree survey work that I did with one of my Cascadia biology classes, as these surveys have a very similar format of writing down the things that you see or hear in a certain designated GPS location during set time intervals, then moving to the next point. The trail we went on was in the north end of the park and is an entirely different climate and atmosphere than at headquarters or the visitor center, which is crazy because they are so close. The north end is home to all the trees that have less stressed growth rates in Craters. The snow melt that’s near the peak of the park’s north end border is where the fresh water is collected from and makes a nice stream year-round, which means the area around the stream is covered in Aspens and Cottonwoods.

The following days I went to the sites in the national park, Minidoka, which was an internment camp site for Japanese American citizens during WWII.

photo by Drew Riggles

At Minidoka we pulled vegetation, primarily rush skeleton weed and tumble mustard which has taken over this area. At this location on this day the wind was at or above 40 mph, which meant using the normal treatment measures of chemical spray via backpack sprayers was not possible due to the windy conditions as part of my internship was weed control and pest management. As you can guess spraying in high winds is very dangerous for both the person spraying and the land – where both invasive and native species of plants can grow. While working at Minidoka, I was able to work with the animal biologist Todd to identify a bird through pictures and describing the call: it was a native night hawk. This is a bird that hangs out in all the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and private farmlands. The unfortunate thing that Todd and I discussed is how bird strikes on the highway are brought on by how BLM and private farms managing the land. Increased fencing in the area, to impede deer crossing, increases roadkill counts which then also ends up killing birds trying to recover the roadkill. Roadkill kills more birds than other natural causes and a lot of this is being discussed by the intern crew. I got to discuss solutions and why we would like to see less roadkill for the Craters’ highway, which is a very dangerous road to drive on at night.

photo by Drew Riggles

In my second week we headed over to the Carey Flow, an extinct lava flow which is a part of the park that is so close to BLM land that we had to drive through it to get to there. We ended up spraying on the BLM land as a preventative measure for noxious weeds to not enter the park land, and the cattle farmers know exactly where we are spraying beforehand to avoid affecting farmers that are trying to keep their cattle and land “USDA organic certified”. We went out and sprayed target areas in this ARC GIS map that is set up for herbicide treatment. We utilize GPS units called “Junos” to reach the exact GPS coordinates of last year’s target area; if we found more of the target weed on the way we would spray it and mark a new location in the mapping system. For Carey Flow, our target weeds are Spotted or Diffuse Knapweed, Rush Skeleton Weed, and Leafy Spurge. Leafy Spurge (Euphorbiaceae) is a perennial plant which grows up to 3 feet tall. Leafy Spurge reproduces through rhizomes (roots) and seeds. Leaves appear needle like and always come a few inches off the ground. Root systems often have offshoots and have been known to reach 14 feet deep, which makes removal through mechanical process nearly impossible. When leaves are plucked and the plant is exposed to air it produces latex as a defense mechanism; which marks it as Leafy Spurge if you are ever unsure of its identity. Leafy spurge was brought over from Eurasia and is a very good reproducer, if cattle eat it they have been said to get irritated throats and even possibly die. Leafy Spurge seed pods explode when dry and shoot up to 15 feet in the air, contributing to its massive spread. Our team utilized spray only when dealing with Leafy Spurge at this site because of the deep root system, which if pulled would only propagate this noxious weed. Since the Idaho State Agriculture Department names this weed one of its top three invasive that need to be controlled with an effort, our crew biologist has made sure that controlling the outbreaks of this pest was one of our top priorities.

Leafy Spurge – photo from the University of Idaho

some areas of CRMO are covered by lava flows!

In week three we drove up to Ketcham Forest to meet Gilbert and his National Forest team to spray Spotted Knapweed up on a trail in the National Forest territory. We were greeted by many curious visitors to the park, and later we learned that the forest service was dealing with a lawsuit related to this spraying claiming that ‘we were “blanket spraying” and that it was going to hurt the owner’s dog’. As you can guess we were only ‘spot spraying’ and the lawsuit was baseless, but it did teach me that the Forest Service in this area deals with lawsuits all the time for things mostly out of their control. We finished up the week by learning about Aspen Stands in Idaho and how they are dying off. The trees are measured in health by random quadrats, exactly like what we did in Biology back at Cascadia.

Horned Lizard, photo by Drew Riggles

Week four was super cool since I got to work with the biology control expert for Idaho as well as the etymologist for Idaho Conservation. We were doing a moth check to see if the previous year’s moth release took. The moths are one of four biological controls to handle Rush Skeleton Weed. In another project, called the ‘highway project’, we noticed many kinds of dangers that will affect vegetation in the future. These include: the hay trucks speeding down the highway which spread invasive species, Downy Brome (Bromus tectorum) presents significant fire damage potential, and because lightning-caused-fires presented themselves in the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) land during our project, this became even more of a concern. Future controls for the invasive grasses were discussed with our crew lead Gilbert, regarding how next year the grasses would be handled.

We finalized every project in weeks nine and ten. When we finalized each project, we also wrote reports for all the stakeholders. I was able to write two of them, the Highways Project report and the Leafy Spurge project report. I learned so many practical skills from this internship and cannot wait to refine my education on conservation efforts with the BASSP program and beyond.