Joint Base Lewis-McChord: Signs and Biodiversity You Don't See Everyday

JBLM Speed Limits, July 2011.

A speed limit sign for non-civilian vehicles -- trucks and tanks -- dictates the rules of the road at Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM), near Tacoma, Washington. I would have loved to have seen a tank driving 60 MPH down the road.

My good friend and nature enthusiast Brian worked there two years ago, when this photo was taken. As an employee of The Nature Conservancy there, he spent hours on tractors mowing broom -- and that's not all. Read the full account below.

Meadow deathcamas, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, July 2011.

Death-camas grows in many forms across the US (see my previous post about the San Francisco population on Bernal Hill), and this is one of them. From what I can tell, this is meadow deathcamas, Zigadenus (now Toxicoscordion) venenosus var. venenosus. The species name means "venomous," as if the common name and genus (Toxicoscordion "toxic plant that smells like garlic") didn't already tell you that this plant can kill you.

Right now, death-camas is flowering abundantly on grassy ridges on Angel Island (especially in the burn area from October 2008) and in the Marin Headlands.

This is one of the plants that thrives at JBLM thanks to regular fires, I presume. Some of these fires are conducted by field resource managers like Brian, but much of the acreage that burns there is a result of explosions from Army training operations on base.  

 

Training operations have also been the cause of odd-seeming location signs placed on base that bring a bit of confusion to the civilian. This sign stood near a small false group of buildings used for training. Seeing these signs made the overseas military operations seem far more real to me than news reports. It brought home the degree of culture shock that must exist for the young adults who train in places like this before going into such a foreign place to follow such unpleasant orders.

This huge tract of land (91,000 acres) was originally set aside for military operations, but like the national park where I currently work, this is open space that is set aside from development and pavement. Pockets of open space that still have intact plant communities, and management thereof, are vital to native biodiversity. In a uniquely American dichotomy of aggressive force and pacifistic preservation, areas like these will continue to be vital in the face of seemingly inevitable urban sprawl.

Here are some of the special-status (rare, threatened, or endangered) species that are found today at JBLM: 

Indian paintbrush (Castelleja levisecta)

Mardon skipper butterfly

Taylor's checkerspot butterfly 

Oregon spotted frog

Western gray squirrel 

Mazama pocket gopher

First-hand from Brian, here is an idea of what it takes to maintain and restore healthy natural ecosystems over the course of one year at JBLM. 

Starting in early spring I applied herbicide to early spring weeds, sometimes over large areas where valued natives had yet to appear. For that we used tractor-boom spraying and ATV spot spraying and boom-spraying.  This would be performed in conjunction with mapping populations with GPS.

During my final spring with this NFP, I assisted with collecting data regarding the remaining breeding populations of the Streaked Horned Lark on the installation.

As the season progressed we moved to backpack spraying to gain a more targeted application.  We (sometimes used) a contractor as a labor source, of which I would manage, mix, and designate areas and weeds to treat.  These populations would also be mapped via GPS points or polygons.

Before flowering of weeds, we spent time brushcutting and spraying regrowth of Reed Canary Grass in ephemeral stream corridors to open potential spawning grounds for salmon that swim up from Puget Sound during the next rainy season in winter.

as flowering of missed weedy plants began to reveal themselves we would "dead-head" them by hand-pulling and bagging all viable weed seed that we could find.  This is often done with a contract labor crew ...that I would often lead bilingually.  

Flowering and seeding would end as drying continued and at this point I would determine locations and tractor-mow and brushcut burn breaks for upcoming Rx-Fire.  

Preparing equipment (pumps, drip-fuel, etc) for Rx-Fire would also be needed prior to the burn season began.  We used multiple ATVs with 25 gal pump sprayers, and multiple "engines" fully stocked to hold fire-lines.  These were pickup trucks with 200-300gal tanks or an F-450 flatbed equipped with a 500gal tank and all the bells n' whistles.  Staging water-storage tanks and equipment for upcoming burns would also be necessary.

Burning would continue as possible.  Burning some 2-3K acres in +/- 25 burn units each summer (July-October) When not able to burn we would continue spraying, mapping or dead-heading invasive-weeds, and also prepping future burn units and equipment.

Burning would end with rains and more weeds to treat.  Natives were dormant and new growth of weeds would be sprayed.

Into the winter we would mow scotchbroom to prepare areas for future burning by reducing fuels, allowing a safer, more manageable burn.

 

Planting trees and shrubs along river corridors to assist in shading out invasive Reed Canary Grass can all be done in the dormant season.

Drill-seeding native species over large areas would be done after late winter as day-lengths become longer.

Soon early weeds would show themselves and the cycle starts all over again...

 

Thanks, Brian!

Super Cold / Ice

Seeing a Baltimore Ravens player doing a "snow" angel out of confetti on the artificial turf after the game a few hours ago (on artificial turf) inspired me to do a post about snow. Rather than snow, how about ice? I've been wanting to share these pictures since I had them developed by my friends at Photoworks a few weeks ago.

Over this past holiday break Catey and I were in Wisconsin. We took a day trip with Dad to Port Washington one day (December 30), and the three of us chanced to witness a miraculous display of ice formed on the  breakwater and everything nearby. We wandered slowly down this frozen pier, beholden to this frozen spectacle.  Part of our slow pace was the treachery of walking down a breakwater with a railing in the middle (none on the sides), walking on snow-covered ice, with the unfrozen yet seemingly deathly cold waters of Lake Michigan below us. The breakwater stands about 12 feet above the surface of the water and there are not many rungs for one to use to climb out, if one should fall in.

 

Precarious breakwater path, Port Washington WI, December 2012.

Mostly, though, our slow pace was the result of astonishment, at every step, of the beauty and impossibility of this ice. It surrounded thin branches of shrubs, ten times the diameter of each pencil-sized branch. How did it manage to extend this far vertically without a branch -- or the ice -- something -- breaking? What caused this? Even Dad, who has spent a lifetime near frozen water in frigid winters, remarked he'd never seen anything like it in his life.

Frozen cable and icicles, Port Washington WI, December 2012.

I researched weather leading up to our foray to see what chain of events caused this phenomenon. At first I thought it could have been: 

• Several days of daytime highs around 32° and nighttime lows below freezing. Precipitation each day of less than an inch, of rain that coated the ever-thickening branches during the day, then remaining frozen. Practically no wind, any day.

But it was 44° on Dec. 15. No way, this would have melted it all. So, maybe:

• The steam from the waters of the adjacent Port Washington harbor, coming from wave action creating airborne water droplets from slightly warmer waters (perhaps from the coal power plant nearby), coated the branches, day by day, with fine amounts of airborne mist, that gradually created the thick layer that we see. This was done under the calmest of conditions, with winds of less than 5mph, over about 10 days of temperatures remaining constant, highs at 32° and nighttime lows of 25° or so.

Then came Dec. 20: Daytime highs of 35°, 0.84 inches of precipitation (rain/snow) fell, it was quite windy (12 mph sustained, gusts to 28mph. The Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel reported a nasty storm. [Reading the comments to this article, by the way, is pretty amusing. 2logical1 posted: "Its been snowing in WI for how many years now? How much? when?, any thing out of the ordinary we need to know? ENOUGH jeeeeeeeeeez". Haha. This sounds like something  Dad might say, and I'd laughingly agree.] At any rate, the lake effect must have warmed the precipitation enough to make it lose its crystals in the liquid form, and the wind chill froze it into form. This is my final hypothesis, although it's still only a hypothesis.


And it remained below freezing until the day we were there. So, from what I can tell, these perfect plant popsicles were formed during a traffic-halting snowstorm and thankfully remained for us to see them, with clear roads and crisp blue skies.

For the full set of photos, click here. 

Icy aster stalk, Port Washington WI, December 2012.