2025 Summer Intern Report

My name is Ian Camacho; I’m a multicultural science major at the University of Oregon going with hopes of becoming a botanist. Over this summer, I had an internship with the University of California Cooperative Extension. They gave me the opportunity to undertake many different roles around the office and field. In the field I did a wide variety of tasks. Some involved physical activity while others were more about gathering specific information on the environment or what impacts it. While in the office, I was able to learn plenty of things concerning how to organize and input data as well as organizing different portions of the office.

While working here, I have had many different offers to do jobs across the public land that surrounds our Modoc communities. One of these jobs was working with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to make some beaver dam analogs (BDAs). I went out to Fitzhugh Creek with two other members from the forest service to help make what is essentially an artificial beaver dam. It was fun working on this project because we could see the results of our labor quickly. The water would rise quickly from the floor to the rim of the dam and the surrounding grass already looked healthy and green.

The main project that I worked on while on the field was on a virtual fencing project that took place in on the Doublehead Ranger District between Tulelake and Canby. What I did on this project was going out into the area where the cattle were to take a variety of different surveys.

The main survey I would do was body condition scores (BCS) for the cattle. I would rate how large they are from a scale from one to ten. A cow that scores a one on this scale looks like they are just skin and bone while a cow that scores a ten is too obese to move. The best place for the cattle to score was somewhere between four and six. And lucky for us the average score for the cows in our sites were around five.

Another survey was looking at samples of grass that the cows were grazing on and seeing how much of the sample was grazed. I would mark individual plants while doing these surveys and identify what kind of grass I was looking at. I would mark perennial if the grass was in a bunch and tall comparative to the ground, and annual if the grass was more spread out and short. While surveying the highest utilization score we had was 30% grazed while having an average grazing percent of 16%. The maximum annual utilization rate on this range is 50%.

These two surveys would let us know how well the area the cows were grazing was doing. It would tell us if the area was being over grazed or not, if the cows were getting sufficient nutrients from the range, and whether we should move the cattle to a new location for better grazing. I would put all of the results that I have gathered as well as some information that was given to me by peers that were also surveying the site into a spreadsheet that would be sent to the person managing the virtual fence and other people whom are working closely with them.

From my experience while working with virtual fencing as a new way of helping the cattle stay in specified areas and getting needed information, I thought that it was greatly helpful in those regards. When I was needed to go out into the field and find the areas that the cows were. All I would have to do is look at where the boundaries were set and look in designated areas where the cows were being herded to, and they would be right there, making my job much easier. It was also seems like a great tool to make sure that the cows were not able to get stuck, caught in traffic, or get too far from a water source.