Sagehen Summer Speaker Series to begin in June.

The popular Sagehen Summer Science Speaker Series is set to begin this season on June 14. This year, the events will run every other Thursday evening, alternating with Truckee Town Council meetings. We've begun to post information about the scheduled speakers & topics on our Events page.

Sagehen K-12 programs continue

We continue to expand our K-12 programs here at Sagehen to support science education in the community. Today we hosted 96 junior high & high school students from Loyalton & Downieville. This was our first opportunity to work with kids from Sierra County schools. Part of the Sagehen basin lies in Sierra County.

The program was put together as the education component of a large research initiative in the area that is looking at animal-vehicle interaction on the Hwy-89 corridor. This area contains both the highest incident of animal-vehicle collisions in the state, & a valuable CalTrans road-kill database going back to the 1960's. The students rotated through stations focussing on topics related to this research & related mitigation efforts: habitat assessment, motion sensing cameras, GPS & telemetry technology, weather & stream data collection, animal tracking, macroinvertebrates & vernal pools, museum collections.

Wildflower update

The spring wildflower season is in full swing. The dense snow of two weeks ago kind of put the kaibosh on the Camas Lilies this year & flattened the Steersheads, but there are starting to be lots of other flowers showing up, including Squawbrush, Suncups, Ranunculus, Dandelion & my favorite: the insane Western Peony.

Masters Thesis Completed

Sagehen researcher Carie Sears has completed her Masters thesis: "Assessing distribution, habitat suitability, & site occupancy of Great Gray Owls (Strix nebulosa) in California". Besides being a fantastic look at one of the forest's most mysterious & compelling creatures, this is a milestone paper for Sagehen, marking our 80th thesis [the 9th since our arrival in 2001].

Al Grigarick updates plant photos

The awesome flowering plant photo collection built & maintained by Al Grigarick was updated this week. There are new flower images, corrected taxonomy & a new section devoted to conifers.

The photos are great for learning botany & cross referencing common & scientific names. There's also a spreadsheet & information sheet about the collection.

Campus surplus donates laptops

Berkeley Campus Excess, Surplus & Salvage--Cal Overstock & Surplus Den--has generously donated used laptops to Sagehen for use in our Adventure-Risk-Challenge Summer Literacy program.

This is a fantastic help to the kids & to the station. The machines allow the students to learn how to use computers while working on writing & science interp assignments. Meanwhile, Sagehen can free up it's lab computers for other users & reuse work space while the kids are in the field, since the laptops can be stowed out of the way until their return. And without this donation, the new Sedgewick ARC program would have no computers at all.

Thanks!

Spring arrives with a vengeance

This spring has been crazy busy. Usually, all the early-season reservations cancel because there's still snow on the road & they don't want to deal with access issues. This year is so dry that the road is already dusty & everyone decided to come.

Meanwhile, Jeff spent a few days in D.C. talking to representatives & staffers about science with a delegation from OBFS. The Upper Camp bathhouse is torn apart for renovations (we found a penny in the concrete from the original construction). The ARC program is winding up for an expanded season both here & at Sedgwick Reserve in Santa Barbara.

So much for our gentle break in to the summer field season...