Endangered, to be or not to be?

January 13, 2015January 25, 2015 / rachaelb / Leave a comment

Would you visit a National Monument if the most foreign thing you saw was people on ladders painting the flowers with pollen?

On our recent visit to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument we could not help to be taken aback at just how lush, green and full of life this desert forest is. As most know, or think of, the desert as a dry dusty place where there is abundant sun, little rain and is short on bio-diversity. The Sonoran is the exception, especially within the park. In just a short walk we saw saguaro, organ pipe, hedgehog, and coleville’s cactus, desert ironwood, palo verde trees, quail, flickers, gila woodpeckers, cactus wren, jack rabbits, cottontails and much to my surprise deer! This is a desert rich in variety. One can only imagine that this continues to the south since this park is at the northern range of many of these plants and trees.

After only spending a couple of days there it seemed incredible that this little pocket has even survived all that has been thrown at it over the last 200 years. At a time when ranching was just about the only way to make a living in the west a few tough souls attempted to do just that however failed due to lack of year round water sources. Not surprisingly the cattle severely damaged the natural eco system. Over the years since grazing the desert has had a nice bounce back. Driving in from the north west we passed a large mine outside of the town of Ajo, AZ. This mine was so large the tailings create their own mountain plateau. Shortly after passing the mine driving towards Why, AZ you start to pass signs for the Barry Goldwater air force bombing range. The American military bombs the desert because there is “nothing out there”. It was not unusual to hear the jets flying past the park even in just our short visit. To the south, about 7 miles from the entrance to the park, is the Mexican/American border. I’m not going to cover the politics here but, due to several factors this means that the open desert is an opportunistic place for those seeking better pay or good money trafficking into America. Human and vehicle traffic through the park created roads and damaged the eco system in several places. Fairly recently the park put in a 30 mile stretch of vehicle barricades that still allows for animals, including the endangered Sonoran Pronghorn to still pass through. Due to these immigration attempts and trafficking the presence of border patrol is to be expected. Within the park there is border patrol unit with horses, ATVs, drones and a helicopter to patrol the park itself. All of this is just to give you an idea of what this little plot of land is up against.

It’s easy to put all that out of your mind when you look at this beautiful place, especially the pictures of the desert in full bloom. A majority of the plants take the monsoon rains of the summer to blossom. This includes the namesake Organ Pipe Cactus. These cacti can live up to 150 years and their first blossom shows up at around 35 years of age. This has been an interesting fact to mull over because I myself am 35 years old. The organ pipe cactus has white flowers and blooms only at night giving off a sweet scent. Come mid morning the next day and the flower is closing up its pollen shop. The lesser long nose bat uses this time in the summer to travel north to have and grow their babies at a roost in the park. Feeding on the pollen and fruit of both the Saguaro and the Organ Pipe cactus while cross pollinating the plants. There is an excellent graph showing this relationship found in the park newspaper here: http://www.nps.gov/orpi/planyourvisit/upload/http___imrcms-nps-doi-net_orpi_planyourvisit_loader.pdf . The Organ Pipe is not listed as endangered but the bat is. Like the good and wise John Muir is quoted “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”. If there is no bat to do the heavy lifting of pollinating the cactus how long will it take the cactus to die off? I heard a story about an apple growing region in China where they use such toxic pesticides it killed all the bees. No bees, no apples? Nope, instead there are people who are now employed to take to the trees with cups filled with pollen and paint brushes to do the pollinating the bees did for free. In true Chinese diligence they pollinate all the flowers of every tree. The human pollination process is said to have increased the production of apples by 30%. Can the trees sustain that heavy of production? What if there are subtleties that the bees and bats can smell that makes them skip over less ideal flowers? Just like a female bird selects for health and vitality in her male suitors perhaps the bats select the best flowers. The fact is that these plants and bats co evolved and most likely need each other to survive. Human interference might temporarily improve upon nature but, will alter it in ways that we cannot foresee. This is a common story throughout the world and this is only one example. However, I can’t help feel that my take away from this particular story is the connection between our bombing practice just north and the desperation of our neighbors to the south. It’s hard for me to decide who causes more damage to this sensitive desert eco-system. It’s important to remember that nature is not something that happens “over there” while we lives our lives “over here”. Our tax dollars both own the open land of the federal government and the military that is tasked to protect it. Americans have bought the gift that is large tracks of land set aside for our enjoyment but, nature does not begin and end at their borders.

Chaparral – Hidden in plain view

January 5, 2015 / rachaelb / Leave a comment

Growing up in Southern California the word “chaparral” was just simply part of the vernacular. Chaparral, the miniature forest, was seemingly everywhere. Chaparral is a shrub community made of many different plants. You will commonly see manzanitas, chamise, ceanothus and sages. I never gave it too much thought other than it was a very dusty, earthy green that was my childhood. I traded it for the coastal redwoods. The richer dank green to the north. I poo pooed the dusty green of Southern California. That is until several ecology classes and nine years later I learned to understand that this hardy shrub ecology was really quite sensitive, special and endangered. This is especially true of the Coastal Sage and Chaparral community. On December 30th I was given the opportunity to do a little exploring of Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego. When my friend mentioned that in San Diego the coastal chaparral is roughly only 1.5% of it’s size before development I felt inspired to look a little harder into the subject. Indeed from Santa Barbara down into Baja the coastal chaparral and sage community is a meager 15% of what it once was. Several of these species are endemic to not just in California but to San Diego itself. All chaparral, not just maritime chaparral, is important habit for many species of birds and small mammals. That sometimes impenetrable pokey shrub is exactly what keeps them safe as well as fed. There are really only a few good pockets of coastal sage and chaparral left in San Diego county; Camp Pendelton, Torrey Pines State Park and Cabrillo National Monument. There were several signs and some ropes asking folks to stay on the trail. I don’t remember any ropes from when I was a kid and my hope is that folks will start to appreciate how sensitive this community is just like I have.

Several plants had bloomed with the recent rains. I snapped a few pics not really knowing what plants I was looking at but, I’m a sucker for flowers. A couple were relatively easy to look up. First was the lemonadeberry (Rhus Integrifolia), a taller shrub with clusters of pretty pink flowers and leaves that look almost like an oak. The Coastal Agave (Agave Shawii) caught my eye with it’s tall flowers protruding from the typical agave base. These flowers had long past bloomed and were brown and dried yet still striking in form. The lemonadeberry almost exclusively grows in southern CA and northern Baja and the Coastal agave only grows in two small locations within San Diego, Cabrillo National Monument and Border Field State Park. Although it grows quite well in northern Baja along the coast the recent development there is quickly degrading it’s habitat.

The California Boxthorn (Lycium Californicum), in the flowering portion of the nightshade family, was interesting to me because it seemed a plant between taxonomy. It has strong woody stems with small plump leaves reminiscent of a succulent and small white flowers. I had taken a picture of another flowering shrub that gave me quite a chase as to figuring out what it is. I happened upon this very useful website (http://www.sdplantatlas.org/Ecoregions.aspx) that has all the plants listed in San Diego by ecoregion. As luck would have it’s in the Euphorbiaceae family and so my search didn’t take me too far down the rabbit hole. I clicked on a name that could fit and there is was! Euphorbia Misera or commonly known as Cliff Spurge isn’t necessarily special but the flowers are quite pretty and it was worth the search.

All in all Chaparral while, at first glance, might seem a dull green is worth looking a little closer at and seeing it for the incredibly hardy, fire and drought adaptive, bird and mammal protecting plant community that it is. I’m glad that in my visit to San Diego I was able to give Chaparral a look with new eyes and take the time to read up on it for my first official post to Vagabond Naturalists.