Fieldwork in the Borderlands

by Benjamin Felser, of Bowdoin College

Returning to Ruby after our suburban sojourn was like that first breath when you walk outside in the morning. Meeting the familiar face of Montana Peak rising over Ruby Ghost Town, I let the cozy feeling of home settle before remembering how harsh the pale light and the bare, scrubby mesquites, thorny mats of mimosa bushes (not related to the orange drink) and cacti felt to my coastal California eyes and skin. The native people on whose land Ruby sits, the Tohono O’odham (people of the desert) call the desert Tohono, meaning “a bright and shining place.” My unconditioned eyes took time to move beyond the “bright” part.

Bellies full with pupusas and quesadillas from the Tucson farmer’s market, we settled into our conservation genetics class before diving full into cataloguing the species we’d been recording observations on since mid-February. These species accounts allow us to key in on two or three Sonoran animals and/or plants to develop a more intimate relationship with their ecology: where do we see them? What trees are there around them? What are they doing? What do they do when they see our monster of a truck (his name is Tiburón or shark). 

These accounts encouraged me to look deeply at the aptly named shin-dagger agave, Montezuma quail and scorpions which I have been tasked with observing. The agave grow in conditions that would kill the hardiest tree, forming blankets of mid-leg peril concentrated under the alien tentacle-esque ocotillo which also favor those rocky hilltops. 

The Montezuma quail flock around mixed oak forests, hiding in the spiny brush or golden grasses when a threat (i.e. Tiburón) happens upon them—the males calls resounding like “ethereal space sounds” (direct quote from our guidebook.) The baby scorpions I’ve seen all have been dormant under rocks in or by river drainages, sucking up the moisture and maybe their cohabiting critters until the air is warm enough for their cold-blooded bodies to meander around in the desert nights. A different part of the resting brain gets turned on to notice all of these underlying patterns, and it fills the desert with shimmering impressions of all the intricate webs which connect our cohabitants (and us) in Ruby and the greater Sonoran Desert. Settling into the desert, you get a better full sense of this “bright and shining place.” We participate in sharing some of those patterns with the broader scientific community through meticulous vegetation surveys in the borderlands, the last of which we finished this week.

That next morning we woke before the birds to complete our last round of border vegetation surveys in southeastern Arizona’s Huachuca mountain range. For the past month and a half, we’ve made the 3-5 hour drives to camera trap sites set up by our partner, Sky Island Alliance (SIA), along the border. The study began last year when border wall construction across the mountains was immanent and no one seemed to be looking at the local ecology. Enter us: walking 50 m (160 ft) lines called transects, stopping every half meter (1.5 ft) to dictate to our paired note-taker what the tallest plant was (spoiler alert: it’s mainly grass under 1 m but sometimes it gets groovy and you have cacti or *gasp* mixed oak-juniper canopies; 

The purpose of our work is to characterize the habitats on the ground surrounding the cameras to get a better sense of which settings are most integral to animal survival and movement.

It’s easy to get lost in the slow rhythm of dictating “under one meter, grass, still grass, over two meters, oak” to your partner, eyes glued to the vegetation, settling into the land but forgetting about the wall which scars the land we’re studying. The 30 foot tall behemoth already stretches across 440 miles of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, primarily around urban centers and areas with less rugged terrain. 

While intended to deter Latin American migrants by funneling them to the most inhospitable regions of the desert, it also restricts the movement of threatened animal species like jaguars, pronghorn and ocelots in addition to destroying canyons, draining springs and blocking waterways through the construction of supporting roads. In the shadows of the 9,000 foot Huachucas, we could look up to see a mountainside blasted apart to pave the way for wall construction.

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Whose security is it when most people immigrate illegally to the US by overstaying their visas not crossing the border? Whose security is it when deterrence policy has killed 3,000 people in Arizona alone since 2000?

From the top of Montezuma Pass, after a long day of vegetation surveys we looked down on the borderlands. To the east, we could see America’s Great Wall stretching into the indefinite distance. To the west, absolutely nothing distinguishes the Mexican landscape from “America the free.” 

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Please look and tell me where you think the border lies. One our fellow students, Walt, wrote this in a booklet left at the lookout for spectators: “Whole landscapes blurred into… textures that leave me breathless and with a great feeling of love, respect, and connection to this place and the endless history… It’s a shame to see this steel scar of a wall razing its way across the landscape. Let it fall…” 

It’s hard to believe in the ethics of the militarized Mexico-US border when everywhere we walk we see evidence of migrant passing juxtaposed with border patrol helicopters circling our base camp in Ruby like hawks and the water bottles placed by humanitarian groups slashed. To be clear: our scientific work is not to cherry pick the data we need to shut down the wall, we’re participating in landscape-scale work to observe trends in wildlife presence and habitat composition around this sensitive region in the face of potential wall construction. That said, my personal hope is that the project convinces our government what most already know: the wall is a threat to one of the most biodiverse regions of the nation, and all of the many creatures (human and non-human) which inhabit or seek to cross it. 

Coming down from the mountain pass, we settle into golden-tinted grasses as the sun sets. Our last day of transects ahead of us, we feast on rice, bell peppers, chickpeas and onions to stoke our bodies’ furnaces for the 20 degree night. Saying goodbye to the Huachucas and our vegetation surveys the next day had us rolling around in nostalgia: remembering our first day with Bryon and Zoe from SIA, feeling overwhelmed by the mountain of information pushed into our heads, the stress stemming from the gravity of the work we were participating in, and the hope that this project is able to contribute to the ongoing effort to advocate for the many inhabitants and crossers of the borderlands region. 50 days later, we complete in one hour what took four. Riding around the grassy hills smiling at the beauty we get to help document and protect we continue to settle into the complex space and histories we ongoingly engage with. Driving back the next day, we permit ourselves some groovy tunes and dance our way across the Patagonias right back on home to the Ruby home. And as we settle in to sleep, we prepare for a week putting in writing the information we have been gathering about this beautiful, threatened space.