Autumnal Bucolic Zephyr

November-hot Tucson sun
oasis in the desert
date palms and pomegranates
laundry detergent and fried food
stars, lapping waves of high cirrus clouds

It was a good time of year and I came down out of the hills and lived in the city, going for walks along concrete roads, drinking beer, in the pool, fruit juice at my writing desk, watching. Friday night at the edge of the universe...front row seats.

Planning my next voyage -- through the mountain passes South of the Whetstones and Dragoons, North along the Chiricahua towards Wilcox and their fresh fruit stands. Then West to the secret Nature Conservancy hotsprings on the south of the Galiuro mountains. Then...back to Tucson? Its almost too warm in the city; I ride in shirtsleeves, warm, through the night. I confuse this place with Jerusalem, within this light I go about my daily business, smoking, turning wide circles. Diving in aquamarine waters; the gym, sunbathing, wine and cheese and fresh fruit in this desert city, white like icecream.

Wide Arizona beckons.

Wildlife Tracking Workshop at El Aribabi, Sonora, Mexico

Sky Island Alliance leverages a small but dedicated staff with a tiny budget to marshal a large network of grassroots volunteers who influence a wide range of public policy decisions. For example, their Wildlife Linkages program trains citizen scientists to track keystone mammalian predators in the Southwest. The GPS data are used to assemble up-to-date maps of existing wildlife linkage corridors and influence decisions ranging from urban planning of new subdivisions to the construction of wildlife access tunnels under interstate highways.

The training took place at the El Aribabi wildlife ranch in Sonora, Mexico. The instructors were professional scientists and wildlife trackers specializing in wolves, mountain lion, jaguar, coyote, and bobcat, and coati. This is a great program and more people should take advantage of this opportunity to "get to know the neighbors"; it should be expanded so that everyone has the opportunity to feel at home in the wilderness. It should be a key component of the Leave No Child Inside movement. For more information about citizen science wildlife tracking programs
see keepingtrack.org.


See: Winter Wildlife Tracking

Tucson Pride

On the right is an energy bar made locally in Tucson. On the left is a leading-brand energy bar from anywhere else....

Label:

Endangered: Pima Pineapple Cactus

This expedition, led by Patrick Dockens of EcoPlan Associates, traveled beyond the mine tailings of Green Valley and skirted the variegated edge of the beautiful Sonoran Desert to map the homeland of the rare & Endangered Pima Pineapple Cactus (PPAC). The PPAC is named for its shape, not its taste, and is primarily threatened by the voracious appetite of development & accompanying habitat destruction.

This quite large mother is shown carrying a single "pup" (at bottom of photo), a vegetatively propagating bud. The really cool thing about these surveys is that they provide an excuse to thrash around in the prickly heart of the Sonoran desert. Unless science mandates straight-line transects for statistical rigor, few would dare to brave the physical rigors of the desert for days and weeks on end. This labor bore the fruit of knowledge: we located several isolated populations of the Pineapple, and since we had also observed many places without populations of the cactus we began to form an idea of the microclimate and plant associations that the Pima Pineapple Cactus favors. Although it is only a hunch or an intuition, I believe that the members of this field crew are probably now better able to find this cactus than are any other people on Earth.

I wonder if this intuition could be quantified....here is an effort to use non-hypothesis-based factor analysis to do just that in the Colorado Rockies.

Mathematics and Mileages to my House

The trail to my house, as all trails in the Southwest, is a wash (or vise versa). You go along down the dirt road where the BLM rangers lost my tracks. When the tire ruts have begun to meander individually, separate from one another, you have come to the right spot. Now they split and go around trees that are 50 years old.

They tracks have become trails.


But these trails are no longer monotonic, (one-to-one) i.e. for a given distance from the trailhead there are different, yet equivalent, positions on the trail. In other words there are many trails masquerading as one another.

Suddenly, you are at my camp.

"Four hikers go into the canyon with shovels. Three come out..."

Aravaipa is one of the most scenic of Arizona's many beautiful scenic canyons. Unfortunately, like many riparian areas in the southwest it's beauty and ecology are threatened by the invasive species Russian Olive, or tamarisk.

"Tamarisk SHOULD NOT BE in Aravaipa canyon.

We're getting it done, beating the monsters back, yanking them from their dirty little nests - taproots and all - and hanging up on the rocks to die. This is the best way to stop them from re-rooting themselves - but it's also the 21st-century equivalent of nailing owl-skins to the barn wall to ward off witches: begone, ye cursed tamarisks!

We worked the area from just below the Narrows almost to Virgus canyon. In the spring we pulled thousands of seedlings out of this stretch of canyon. The ones we missed grew a lot over the summer, especially their root systems, and these had to be dug and picked and pulled with the extra leverage of a weed-wrench. We estimate that we pulled out 100-150 plants. One was even flowering (the hussy!)."

[this quote is excerpted personal communication, Diana Turner, volunteer leader]

Las Cienegas Grassland Monitoring

Las Cienegas BLM National Conservation Area (NCA) is situated just north of Arizona's "Wine Country" in Elgin. The NCA encompasses most of the valley between the Santa Rita and the Whetstone "Sky Island" mountain ranges. Its verdant, rolling grass hills are a welcome surprise after the stark rock and Saguaro spires of the Sonoran Desert. When travelers see it they invariably exclaim, "Oh, I didn't know Arizona could be like this!". [map]

We identified annual and perennial grasses to evaluate ecosystem recovery after several years with no livestock grazing (there are native Pronghorn antelope). The transects revealed a marked increase in overall ground cover and a succession over the years from annuals to perennials. There were a few invasives, of course, such as Lovegrass, but also many beautiful natives like Sideoats Grama.

Grasses can be quite beautiful: while they lack the showy colors and fragrances of flowers because they are wind pollinated (and hence don't need to attract pollinators), their varying solutions to the architectural problem of arranging the seed head are quite wondrous, especially under magnification.

Source: Vplants.org

The Wildlands Project

"We are ambitious. We live for the day when grizzlies in Chihuaha have an unbroken connection to grizzlies in Alaska, when wolf populations are restored from Mexico to the Yukon to Maine; when vast forests and flowing prairies again thrive and support their full range of native plants and animals; when humans dwell on the land with respect, humility, and affection."

Contrasted with some environmental groups that fight to save "the last great places", the Wildlands Project (TWP) advance a positive vision: Rewilding.

Rewilding means "safeguard biodiversity where it is intact and restore the integrity of wild Nature where it has been compromised." For example, "as a first step toward protecting the extraordinary biological richness of Mexico's northern Sierra Madre Occidental mountains and the adjacent prairies, our Mexican staff identified ecologically significant areas, including critical habitat for jaguars, thick-billed parrots, and black-tailed praire dogs...We intend that Arizona and New Mexico will once again have jaguars in the arroyos and thick-billed parrots feeding on pine cones. But such intentions are only fantasies unless we first protect these animals' habitats in northwestern Mexico."

Note: Even with a positive vision, the best conservation plan needs be defensive in this time of explosive development of mineral resources and degraded agricultural land. Why do they capitalize "Nature"? Restore, rewild, revitalize, renew, rebalance, replenish, regenerate, reconnect.

Sky Island Alliance

"To my mind these live oak-dotted hills fat with side oats grama, these pine-clad mesas spangled with flowers, these lazy trout streams burbling along under great sycamores and cottonwoods, come near to being the cream of creation." Aldo Leopold (1937)


"This landscape that so enthralled Leopold was where the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Madre kiss, where the plants and animals of the Neotropics mingle with those of the Nearctic, where jaguar and grizzly hunted the same ridges, where elk and javelina browsed and rooted cheek to jowl, where northern goshawks took thick-billed parrots on the wing. Arizona, New Mexico, Chihuahua, and Sonora are landscapes of wonder, beauty, and wildness--and of mind-boggling biological diversity. Aldo Leopold saw this landscape as a single ecological region, as do we today. Sky Island Alliance (SIA) hopes to protect it and restore it to ecological health."
[paraphrased, Wild Earth Journal, 2000: The Wildlands Project.]

Sky Island Photos


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Earth Verse

Wide enough to keep you looking
Open enough to keep you moving
Dry enough to keep you honest
Prickly enough to make you tough
Green enough to go on living
Old enough to give you dreams
Gary Snyder

Tea-Time on the Mountain-Top

You are CORDIALLY INVITED to a TEA PARTY on the SUMMIT of Mt. Wrightson, (Santa Rita Mountains, Sky Islands) this SATURDAY and SUNDAY from noon till 4 in OBSERVANCE of the planet MERCURY's greatest visibility on the 29th. Refreshments will be served. Dress will be smart-casual and please be on time. An after-party camp will observe Mercury's peregrinations.
Cheers,
CONOR

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Postscript:
The glare up here is Tremendous, serving tea and talking about imaginary things. I can see smoky haze rolling off the open pit mines. Mines and telescopes, the only things visible of the earth from up here by moonlight. The crickets lie still on the asphalt as autumn starts. I am fatterning up for the Winter;mosquitoes cannot bite me and river rocks are Shiatsu on my back. I'm spending the weekends tracking Jaguars (either melanous or spotted) in the Borderlands. This is where Coronado sought the seven cities of gold. There is only one place in the world with more mammal diversity: the Costa Rican rainforest.