A Collaboration Piece by Spring 2021 Sky Island Borderland Students: Olivia Sena (UVM), Perrin Milliken (Bowdoin College), Bethany Holland (Ithaca College), Walt Emann (Oberlin College), Benjamin Felser (Bowdoin College), and Wren Garrison (newly graduated from UVM!)
Tomorrow we will all leave Ruby, AZ – our basecamp for the semester. Morton house will be packed up, cleaned out, and cried in. The six of us will be on our way home or off on our next adventures. But before we get emotional… what the heck have we been up to the last few weeks?
The answer is – SO much! The day after finishing up the Dark Sky data collection along the border, we all piled into Ballena and went to get vaccinated! Most of us had signed up for the drive through option, and it was quite a sight to see Ballena’s large, dented, rusted frame chug through the row of white tents, pristine lawns, and impeccably organized University of Arizona vaccination line. Needless to say, we all stopped at The Screamery to consume copious amounts of ice cream as a celebratory post-vaccination treat. #vaccineandicecream
The next day we shoved our stuff in our bags and set off for our last backpacking trip of the semester – to the Chiricahua mountains. The Chiricahuas are in the very southeastern corner of Arizona and you can see New Mexico from the 9,000 ft tall ridgeline – the highest elevation we had been. The high elevation winded us, but also allowed us to experience an entirely new ecosystem. Instead of the mesquite desert and endless thorny mimosa shrub, we marveled at the 4-foot-thick ponderosa pine trunks rising up in their columns of sweet-smelling, golden-colored magnificence (the height of these made hanging bear bags quite the challenge).
Fist-sized pinecones littered the shaded conifer forest floors, and when we reached the more exposed saddles and slopes that had been ravaged by fire, quaking aspen groves rose up out of the ashes by the thousands. Despite the many trunks, each aspen grove is a single organism—an extensive conglomerate of interwoven roots emerging as many trees over acres of forest! To add to the magic of this mountain range, we found quartz crystal geodes scattered along the trails that looked like something you would see in a rock shop. In the evenings we walked up to the saddles in the ridgelines to watch the sunsets glow the colors of strawberries and peaches while the blackened skeletons of scorched trees silhouetted against the sky, and the mesquite-scrub “seas” surrounding the mountains filled with night.
We returned to Ruby for our last two weeks. During the first week we got well acquainted with the inside of Morton house as we tapped away at our computers, pushing steadily towards completing our final research papers. It was exciting to see the hours of field work that we had spent the semester collecting turn into pretty GIS maps, excel and R graphs, and final conservation recommendations.
We all practiced our final presentations in a circle on the floor of Morton house, and then woke up early to go present them on the Sky Island Alliance Zoom Coffee Break. We sat outside the Arivaca Library and used their public Wi-Fi to present our research analyses to Sky Island staff/volunteers, our families, and other community members that tuned into the virtual coffee talk. After nervously practicing for two days, it was gratifying to show our findings to a group of interested and engaged people, even while the wind and cars on the nearby highway were zooming by. Everyone did a wonderful, dare I say flawless, job of presenting! To watch a recording of the SIA Zoom Coffee Break, click this link: https://skyislandalliance.org/coffee-breaks/sky-island-coffee-break-a-semester-with-round-river-conservation-studies/. The presentations had been a success, and Sky Island invited us afterwards for a celebratory swim where we met Monsoon the tortoise!
With our presentations and research papers finally complete, we decided to spend the day taking a long-anticipated hike through Sycamore Canyon. This special spot is just 6 miles down Ruby road and we had been planning on exploring it since the first week of the program. At last we were here, and we were not disappointed. We followed the trail into the canyon, and immediately were transported into a different world – a world of ample water! Lush green grass grew along a babbling stream, and flowers we had never seen were sprinkled like bursts of paint everywhere we looked. Columbine seemed to spring from the verdant bushes, their yellow blossoms with tails protruding behind them gracing us with their presence in shaded turns in the river.
The azure sky which makes all others seem pale, contrasted against the rosy cliffs and rock spires which looked down on our crew of people (puny by comparison) as we explored its contours and many beautiful details. Behind a 20-foot outcropping of jutting rock, a gentle pool gathered with a sandy beach contouring the side facing a small waterfall of decadent water and mosses. Home to the Sonoran chub, a fish found only in this canyon and nowhere else in the entire United States, our feet were graced with many tiny manicurists chomping on our foot debris. Splashing around, we were greeted by whizzing dragon and damselflies arching forward to lay eggs in the river (most of which were consumed by the chubs). As our first celebratory adventure, we leaned and loafed to our heart’s content, making it back to Ruby before dark to prepare some food to nourish our sun-kissed bodies. We promptly melted into the couches, dreaming food-coma dreams of the cliffs smiling down and the river gurgling its joy.
The next day we got up with the sun and set off to our second Fun in the Sun adventure: birding and mist netting with Kathy! We met Kathy outside the Arivaca Library on one of the days we were there using the WiFi to work on our final project, and we started chatting after she saw us observing some of the birds that were visiting a feeder nearby. We soon found out that she was an ornithologist and retired professor at the University of Arizona with a special interest in pests borne by birds, especially ticks. When we told her we were college students on a semester ecology program and were amateur birders, she invited us over to her property outside Arivaca to learn how to mist net birds. Thus, we found ourselves in her gorgeous yard early on Sunday morning. She first taught us the basics of mist netting, which is a method of catching birds in order to band, measure, and study them, and then we set up the fine netting and stepped away to see if we could catch any. Within 15 minutes, we had caught two birds: a female Northern Cardinal and a male Black-headed Grosbeak! Neither were happy to be caught up in a mesh net, and both squawked their protest as we disentangled them and learned how to hold them in such a way that calmed them down and prevented them from being able to nip us with their sharp beaks.
With the birds securely in our hands, we banded them with a metal cuff containing a unique ID number and took their wing, tail, beak, and leg measurements. It was an incredible experience to be able to hold a live bird in your hands and feel their tiny heart beating so fast! We were able to see just how beautiful, colorful, and sparse their plumage was, for if you gently blew onto their stomachs, you could see their bare skin showing through quite easily. After releasing those two, we caught two more birds: a female Gila Woodpecker and a male Lazuli Bunting. The woodpecker squawked especially loud as we disentangled her, but surprisingly, the lazuli bunting was so chill he didn’t even chirrup once. Both birds were measured and banded before being released, at which time we took down the mist nets, for it had gotten too windy to have them up.
Over cups of coffee and juice, Kathy and her husband Frank told us more about their love for the southern Arizona area, where they have lived for the past 15 years. What they brought up next was an opportunity we knew we could not pass up: a rock with 1000+ year old petroglyphs from the Hohokam people located a short walk away from their house. During our week in Tucson at the beginning of March, a group of us had visited a canyon near the Desert Museum where there were hundreds of petroglyphs carved into the surrounding walls of rock, and ever since we had been hoping for another opportunity to see more evidence of the Hohokam people, the indigenous group that predated the present day Tohono O’odham people. Kathy and Frank graciously agreed to show us the rock, so we hiked up through a dry wash surrounded by mesquite and wildflowers to a small hillside where a large, flat-topped boulder lay. The rock had been worn down considerably, but the petroglyphs were still easily distinguishable as spirals, animals, and possible hand or animal paw prints. We stood there in silence for a moment, taking in the fact that people hundreds of years ago had walked through this same area, perhaps using this rock as a way to leave messages to other travelers. After such an eventful morning out in the sun with Kathy and Frank, we said our thank yous and goodbyes, piled back into our truck, and headed back to Ruby to take a nap in the heat of the afternoon.
Back in Ruby, Bethany had one of the most exciting moments of her semester – the following paragraph is her account of the event:
After nearly three months, I finally saw what I had been waiting to see the whole semester, since even before the semester started. Sitting around the campfire in crazy creeks, Walt sitting beside me pointed out a scuttling movement on the ground. At first glance it looked like a scorpion, walking with arm-like appendages out in front of it. But a closer look revealed that it was a sun spider! Also known as a camel spider, wind scorpion, or a solifuge. They aren’t true spiders, or scorpions, but their own arachnid order found in tropic and desert regions. It’s such a cool and weird looking organism, with five pairs of long appendages, four of which are actually legs. I scrambled for my phone and empty parmesan jar and guided the small creature into the container. It ran back and forth with great speed, and up close we could see its pair of jaw-like mouthparts and cute little pair of black eyes. After several minutes of excited screams and chatter, I opened the lid of the jar and released it back into the night, watching it crawl back into the dark.
The next afternoon, one of the owners of Ruby, Howard Frederick, gave us a talk about cattle use in the area. He was a cattle rancher consultant for many years in the area and had valuable information about how the amount of cattle currently using the land was unsustainable. After that, we made dinner and ate it around the campfire with the caretaker of Ruby, L.J. She made us feel welcome here from day one, and we wanted to thank her for all of the time and energy she had given us. In addition to her friendship, hospitality, and stories, she has a corgi named Hatch that became a dear (although mischievous) member of our community. Perrin and Wren made a thank you card featuring ole Hatch to give to L.J., which she accepted with a laugh and genuine surprise. We are so grateful for our memorable time here at Ruby and everyone, including Pat, Howard, and L.J., who made our three months here as wonderful as they were.
We sauntered down to the tailings for a few rounds of moonlit tag, tackling each other, rolling in the sand, and soaking up the excitement of being done and on our way out.
And now we sit behind a screen once more to type this final blog post and recount our final weeks in the Sky Island Borderlands. Tomorrow we will watch through the plastic windows of Morton house as the golden Arizona sunrise –the beginning of our final cozy morning in Ruby– washes over Montana peak. Packing up our sleeping pads and preparing one last bowl of oatmeal for ourselves will inevitably bring tears to our faces. If we could stay, we would. It’s been an unforgettable three months; of forging a new family, of endless breathtaking views of the sprawling and diverse landscapes, of catching bugs and lizards and birds, of seeking springs and surveying camera sites, and of so much more. Although all of our adventures and stories may not fit into one (or even eight) blog posts, this semester will live on in our memories and in the way we tell our families and friends. We’ll miss this. Until next time.
