152 – August Jackson – Steens (in English)

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:00:00] As many of you know; from listening to the podcast, Oregon has some really remarkable bio-diverse rich parts of the state when it comes to pollinators. Trouble is, some of these areas are not that well known. They're not marked; they're not on the main highway; they're a little difficult to find. And so I've welcomed back onto the show August Jackson. 

Now, if you remember from previous episode, August is an Interpretation Coordinator at the Mount Pisgah Arboretum in Eugene, Oregon. He's also an instructor for the Master Melittologist program here. He is an avid photographer of native bees. He knows his native plants. He also has a really wonderful book that he self-published on The Bees of the Willamette Valley.

So, I thought from our last episode, one of the jewels that he outlined was the Steens Mountains. So in this episode, we're going to hear a little bit about where the Steens Mountains are located, what makes them such a wonderful place for bee bio diversity, and some of the bees that you'll encounter if you make your way out to the Steens. 

I'm also so thrilled to announce a mailing out two packages this week to two of our listeners, Mark in Middleton, Wisconsin and Laura in Canby, Oregon. Thanks for filling out the PolliNation podcast survey. And you, our other listeners, can also get one of these packages, which includes an Oregon Bee Project ball cap, one of our bee guides, a lot of the material we produce here in Oregon, just by filling out the survey. Just go to our website at pollinationpodcast.oregonstate.edu, and fill out the survey and you will enter in to win one of these wonderful packages from the Oregon Bee Project. Thanks for listening and without further ado, here's August Jackson on the Steens Mountains this week on PolliNation. 

Okay. We are here with August Jackson. Welcome back to PolliNation. 

August Jackson: [00:01:52] Thanks for having me back. 

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:01:53] Well, you know, it's a real pleasure; everybody loves hearing from you. In the last episode we did with you, you gave us a whirlwind tour of some of the wonderful places for bees in Oregon.

And, I keep hearing people who are in the Master Melittologist program, and also other people who are trying to get a handle on the bees of Oregon, always point to this funny mountain range in the Southeast corner, the Steens. So tell us a little bit about these mountains. What do they look like if you were driving towards, that area?

August Jackson: [00:02:31] Yeah, it's actually a really interesting experience to drive out there because the Steens mountain is just this fault block mountain. It's really kind of characteristic of a lot of the great basin once you move into Southeastern Oregon and then further South and East, into Nevada and Idaho.

But this is just this massive fault block that is about 50 miles long, and it rises to a height of about a full mile above the Valley floor on the East side.  

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:03:05] When you say fault block, this means like the earth just kind of like somehow in this whole...

August Jackson: [00:03:11] You have both rising and then dropping on the other side.

So, on the Western side, it's this super gradual rise and it doesn't look like there's a mountain there at all. You can just kind of see a bit of a cliff in the distance and if you're driving up it and you can drive to the top of this mountain, that's the other thing that's pretty remarkable about it.

So the summit is at almost 10,000 feet, so you're starting down around Burns as you're  approaching it at around, I believe it's around 4,000, 4,500 feet. And it's such a gradual rise, you don't really even realize you're on a mountain until all of a sudden you've reached a point at which you're peering down into these glacially carved valleys, and you realize you've come up about a mile, and then it drops straight down about a mile on the other side, into the Alvord desert. 

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:04:07] So is this... I'm used to the mountains further West where you've got trees and then you sort of break out of the trees and you're sort of in the Alpine; is it the same kind of thing in the Steens?

August Jackson: [00:04:24] Not exactly. I mean, there's some similarities still, but it's almost like you're just still in the high desert. So think of the Bend/Central Oregon area where you've gotten a mix of Juniper, bunchgrasses, and sagebrush. And you're just kind of climbing through that a little bit.

Then you hit a band of Aspen, particularly in the wet areas. and that continues up to, you know, 7,000 feet, 7,500 feet or so, but then after that you just kind of reached this point where you're in a weird mix of still that kind of high desert sagebrush fauna, but it's a sagebrush sub-alpine area, and then that grades out to where you have no sagebrush and you're just in, what some botanists have described as an Alpine Tundra at the top of Steen's mountain. It's completely  treeless, and all you have is bunchgrasses and some really low, usually pretty scrubby, wildflowers that can resist the really high winds that are often roaring across the summit. 

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:05:31] And I guess the other part of it is, on the other side there's like a salt desert. 

August Jackson: [00:05:39] Yeah. The Alvord desert on the other side. So as the Steens lifted up the basin below actually dropped down. So you have this incredible desert that collects a bit of water in the winter and then dries out completely in the summer, and that's the Alvord desert. And nothing grows in it centrally, but you have some growth along the sides. And I think some Bee Atlas volunteers that found some pretty interesting bees in the Alvord desert. 

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:06:12] Yeah, I think we had a Linc on a couple of weeks ago and they found one of the alkali bees. There was a lone alkali bee caught out there. You could find them in managed areas in densities, but not sort of on their own. 

Okay. So tell us a little bit about the bees in this vast area. Are they all, is it kind of uniformly the same kind of bees or does this gradient kind of lead to some little pockets and interesting things?

August Jackson: [00:06:43] Well, there's just some incredible diversity on the mountain and that's what makes it such a special place. And I think I kind of blew the secret there in the first year of the bee school, and that's why everybody started heading out that way. Thankfully, I can still find a spot to camp out there, but got a lot of people heading out there.

The diversity is incredible, and the abundance too is incredible. Last year my partner and I were out there and, we happened to hit it at a time where new Nevada bumblebee Queens were coming out and foraging to get ready for overwintering, and there were probably 200 Queens within about a quarter mile of road.

It's just incredible abundance on top of diversity. There are absolutely pockets where you'll find certain things. There's so many specialist bees out there too, where you're going to find them on their host plants. You know, phacelia hastata, and some of the penstemons you'll find some of the atoposmia. And then there's an endemic Steen's mountain thistle, cirsium peckii, which only grows there and in a couple of ranges nearby, that you'll find some thistle specialist's on as well. 

So, the pockets are defined in part by the plants that are growing. But then I imagine, since it's such a vast space that you're also going to have some pockets of bees hiding out in places that are kind of less accessible. You know, if you go down into these glacially carved, gorges, or go also at different times of the year, you're going to be exposed to a completely different fauna.

And based on what I've found out there in, we usually go about the same week every year. I find a hundred plus species. So, I estimate probably more than 300 species on that mountain or maybe 300 or 400, if you include the Alvord desert too. Just kind of an estimate based on what I've found.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:08:58] That is nuts. That's crazy. So this is, yeah. So this is one of the jewels for bee bio-diversity in the state. 

August Jackson: [00:09:06] Yeah, absolutely. Cause you get, you know, deserts, as we know are really excellent environments for bees. And so you get this desert that also then grades into an alpine tundra, and so you get a kind of diversity that you're not going to find elsewhere in the state, except, you know, maybe places like Hart mountain, and some others out in the Southeast Oregon, but pretty spectacular.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:09:35] Okay. So tell us about your last few trips out there and what you were specifically looking for and what did you find. 

August Jackson: [00:09:41] Yeah. I mean, not looking for anything exactly in particular. You know, bumblebee fauna out there is really impressive. So that's something that I'm always taking a close look at. I found about 15 species out there, which is over half of what is in Oregon.

So the bumblebees are really well-represented and there's some really interesting ones out there. So, two years ago I found a couple queen Morrison bumblebees, and we know those to be pretty rare in Oregon. Actually somewhat rare maybe throughout their range. And the last time they had been recorded there was about 80 years ago.

So it was nice to catch them again, reconfirm their existence there, and then the same with the Western bumblebee Bombus occidentalis; the last time that had been recorded was a hundred years ago. My partner Amy caught one on the Steens mountain thistle. A male actually in July. And that was the first record in a hundred years.

And then she caught another one this year. She's always the one who catches these for some reason. She caught another one this year, while we were out, in a completely different place. So, it seems like they're there on the mountain, with reasonable enough populations that you can see them in different places on the mountain at different times of the year. Possibly a reasonably healthy population. 

And then the other one that's fairly interesting is the yellow face bumblebee, which is of course our most common bee in Western Oregon and kind of up and down the West coast; it's super abundant. It's a bee that at a certain point, you tell people to stop catching. And it's not really recorded, far East of the Cascades, but here's this disjunct population out on Steens mountain. And actually, if you look in the excellent book The Guide to North American Bumblebees, they don't have any records of that bee out there in that part of Oregon. So it's kind of been hiding out there, this disjunct population of a super common species, but really cool to see it out there and out there it's not super common.

It's one of the ones you'll encounter less frequently, so that's neat. Always out there looking for bumblebees and then just some of the specialists bees. Specialists on phacelia; there's so much phacelia out there. So you get a lot of interesting, you get kelistoma phacelii, which is this tiny little Mason bee, about five  millimeters. So very small, pollen specialist on phacelia. You get some other small Mason bees and the genius ashmeadiella. Just some really, really neat species. And then a couple of my favorites are the two really bright metallic green hoplitis, I guess.

So hoplitis fulgida, and hoplitis louisae are both found out there and that's the only place in Oregon where I've encountered both of those together, and they're, they're pretty rarely encountered but they're just abundant out there. 

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:13:18] You know, it does, it does sort of raise the question. We were talking about this before we started recording the show. With these great basin kind of mountain ranges, you were talking about the yellow face bumblebee being kind of a little almost like a stranded population. It is kind of curious how these bees get there. And I guess once they're there there's enough forage to really kind of allow them to have healthy populations and grow.

August Jackson: [00:13:41] Yeah, it's interesting. It's hard to know when these species first arrived and how it happened, but part of what's so great for bees about Steens mountain is that you have  a really incredible flora there, and you have an interesting mix of Rocky mountain flora and Sierra Nevada flora converging, mixed in with some of our, of course, just regular Oregon and cascades flora converging on this mountain, just based on its locality. So you also get some of those same bees that you tend to find more in great basin or, a little further East. So just really interesting combinations and it may have been sort of refugia for these bee species when the climate shifted. And they are doing fantastically up there. Again, the abundance is just extraordinary.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:14:38] So, and I know there's always a temptation of evolutionary storytelling, but it could be something along the lines that they may have been down on the floor with some climate shifting and changing, they could sort of like, whatever that fauna was on the floor, sort of thinned out and it really exists on the mountain or something.

August Jackson: [00:14:59] Right. And there had to be some of that at some point, because it was so heavily glaciated too. The Steens mountain. And it's always surprising when you're going into the desert in Eastern Oregon and there's still snow on these mountains in late July, and there's, just evidence of some pretty incredible glaciation or these classic U shaped valleys that are a thousand to 1500 feet deep and, just a gorgeous landscape too. 

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:15:29] So tell us a little bit about when's the best times to go there when you see like a lot of wild flowers. Is there multiple times because of that altitude gradient? 

August Jackson: [00:15:39] Yeah. There are multiple times of year, because of the altitude gradients.

So, it really begins probably around June... really late May/early June at some of the lower elevations. Because again, we have to remember we're still at the bottom at around 4,500 feet. So spring comes late and then it progresses super rapidly, because it heats up there really fast. So from June through late July is probably really the peak in a lot of the areas.

And then of course you get some of your later summer bees too, that are found throughout the state, and those will be coming on even later at those higher elevations. So, through August, but from my experience that peak diversity is really probably around July. Mid July at least at those higher elevations talking 7,000 feet and upward, where you're going to have a lot of wild flowers in bloom, at the same times and so you just have an explosion of life up there. 

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:16:54] Wow. Wow. Wow. This sounds amazing. So, I'm sure many of our listeners are wondering, and they're kind of, opening up Google maps and looking for this place. Like how do you get to the Steens Mountains?

August Jackson: [00:17:06] It's actually a really easy place to get to if you're willing to drive a lot. So unless you live close by, it's the far corner of Oregon. So from where I live in the Eugene area, it's about a six hour drive. But you can see the entirety of the mountain. Well, the entirety of that elevational gradient at least on the Steens mountain loop road that takes you from the bottom to the top of the mountain and back down.

So you can, you can really travel a lot of the ecosystem there without doing much hiking, which is excellent if you're trying to spend as much time as you can looking for bees and catching bees, and you don't have to worry about hiking five miles in to get to a good spot. 

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:18:01] Fantastic. Well, let's take a quick break.

I'm sure many of the listeners have the same questions in my mind. I want to hear more about some of the bees in the Steens, but also maybe some of the efforts that are going on to preserve the Steans so that this biodiversity is maintained into the future. So let's take a quick break and we'll come back to both of those. 

August Jackson: [00:18:23] That sounds great. 

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:18:25] Okay, we're back. So our tour of the Steens continues here with August Jackson and at the break you were telling us one of the other bee groups, that are really remarkable out there in addition to the bumblebees are the bees in the family megachilidae. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the bees that you would see in this family in the Steens Mountains? 

August Jackson: [00:18:49] Yeah. Well, it's, I think in some ways a little surprising that the megachilidae would be so well-represented on this mountain that doesn't have many trees. 

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:19:00] Oh, right. Cause we think of them as STEM nesters. 

August Jackson: [00:19:02] Yeah. You tend to think of them as cavity nesters, you know nesting in holes, beetle holes in deadwood, or in twigs and all that.

And so it's really fascinating and I haven't still figured out all of what's going on there, but you know, again, there are trees kind of climbing up; Aspen climbs up through some of these gorges. You have Juniper lower down, then you have sagebrush, which provides plenty of opportunities for stem nesting, for example.

But then in the Alpine Tundra where things are just completely treeless, you have a ton of really interesting megachilids, including a lot of osmia; a huge diversity of osmia species on the mountain. And then you have a lot of really fascinating, hoplitis as I mentioned, you have, ton of anthidium species that are really interesting.

So where are they all nesting? Well, part of the problem is that a lot of these megachilid bees are characterized as cavity nesters, and that's largely true, but it's not always true. So there's a good diversity of nesting habits as well, but the other thing is this is a really volcanic mountain with some really large volcanic boulders, and so what I've observed is there's a lot of nesting in those porous holes, organic rocks when the rocks cooled. So I don't know yet how many of these species are, are using the holes in the rocks. And if it includes a bunch of those that typically nest and wood or not; I would guess probably not, but includes those that are known and willing to be a little more flexible.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:20:46] Tell us a little bit about some of these genera, just some quick snippets on their life history for people who are new to all, new to these bees. 

August Jackson: [00:20:54] Yeah. So the osmia are the Mason bees. So, the ones that we tend to think of as using either leaf pulp or mud to seal off their nest entrances and, and to create the partitions in their nests. Osmia are pretty abundant and Oregon, and we have a pretty broad diversity. 

I think up on the mountain and... Joe Engler, who's another instructor with the Oregon Bee Atlas, has done a good amount of work in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and on Steens. And I think he recorded over 25 species or so which, which comports well with what I've foundvand I think there probably more to be found on the mountains. 

So, that's a big chunk of that fauna, and then you have some of the smaller ones or, usually smaller ones like the hoplitis. And a lot of these are our specialists. For example, myself and I think a couple other OBA volunteers have found hoplitis plagiostoma on the mountain, which is a really interesting tiny little bee that is a specialist on borage family members, usually cryptantha and plagiobothrys.

And then you've got the anthidiums, which are pretty interesting, kind of wildly colored bees that, have a lot of waspish coloration on them. And some interesting species up there. It's the only place in Oregon I've found, anthidium formosum, which is a really, really large anthidium and, pretty recognizable because the males have their penis valves so elongated that they're actually sticking out all the time, which is unusual for a bee.  

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:22:42] I'd say. They're out in Eastern Oregon; they could do whatever they want I guess. 

August Jackson: [00:22:48] Nobody's watching. 

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:22:51] Well, so this is the same genus of the introduced European wool carder bee that people are familiar with.

August Jackson: [00:22:59] That's right. Yeah. So same genus. We have several native species and they're usually much better represented in mountain environments that subalpine level, and even though they're not often kind of strict specialists, you tend to find them pretty readily around phacelia. They're one of those I like to think of as sort of preferentialists, where if you're looking for them, you know, look on phaceilia.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:23:31] You know, there's places in Oregon I've gone where you find a few stems and it's kind of patchy. Are there, does the phacelia, and the different, I guess there's multiple species of phacelia, does it come in, in fairly good chunks in the Steens? 

August Jackson: [00:23:48] Yeah, it does. particularly phacelia hastata, it's a pretty disturbance loving plant, so you actually tend to find it a lot on just on the roadsides and it grows really well along the roadsides.

And then you have a much more attractive species, phacelia sericea, the silky phacelia with these stocks of bright blue flowers and that grows pretty well at the high elevations, that one's a little less popular with a lot of the phacelia specialists for whatever reason. 

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:24:23] Okay. So, tell us a little bit about, you know, is there any protection of this area; it's such a wonderful place for bees and for plant biodiversity?

Tell us a little bit about, what you know about, sort of the attempts to preserve it. 

August Jackson: [00:24:41] Yes. It's an interesting story. It was considered as being declared a national monument, I believe back in the late 1990s, early two thousands. And there was some resistance to that. And so the, the compromise was to come up with a Steens mountain advisory committee, which consists of diverse interests, of both ranchers, with inholdings on the mountain, the native tribes, so the burns Paiute, and then various types of users and environmental groups. And the idea is that they'll work together to kind of manage this mountain. So parts of it are wilderness and then parts of it are still private property, still ranched, and this kind of cooperative management has been met with a lot of challenges, a lot of successes as well.

But, above and beyond, it has worked to preserve, up to this point, a really spectacular landscape, that's not just spectacular in that part of the state, but, as you know, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. 

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:26:07] Well, thank you so much for taking us on this virtual road trip of the Steens Mountains.

And we'll have to get you on again to give us another tour of one of the other jewels of pollinator biodiversity in the state. Thank you so much for all that you do as an instructor of the Master Melittologists. And you've been training people right across the state on bee biodiversity and really making it accessible to regular people.

So thank you so much for being on the episode and thanks for everything that you do August. 

August Jackson: [00:26:38] Yeah. Thank you.