Strange Skies

I awoke early one morning at the end of May to lots of squawking from the Magpies that built a nest in one of the Utah Juniper trees near the house. I glanced up to see a huge turkey vulture glaring down from the cottonwood tree, but that was not what was upsetting the magpies. Instead, one of the chicks had died. One by one, each of the dozen magpies in the yard would fly up to the next and cry loudly for a minute, and then fly away. Magpies are one of the few species that have documented behavior of a funeral (although many species have been shown to display grieving behaviors).

For a few windy days, we've also experienced strange, smoggy skies from the Wallow Fire in Arizona. Most of the southwest has been very dry this year, so wildfire is a big concern. Over the Memorial Day weekend, gusts of up to 50mph were stirring up dust and sand across the Four Corners. We had decided to visit the canyons of Utah to explore some ancient publeoan ruins. As we hiked Mule Canyon and Butler Wash, the sky was a salmon-grey color and occasionaly sand would sting the eyes and a hat would careeen down the canyon. It seemed fitting weather for exploring 1000 year old cliff dwellings.

The morning we hiked the northern reaches of Grand Gulch, the skies were clear blue and wonderfully cool. We saw several interesting ruins, some with kivas that had views of an arch, and another with a turkey-pen still intact. Everywhere there were sherds of pottery, corn husks, and charcoal fragments. A few ghostly handprints and other art were drawn on many of the cave walls.

The mountains are still too snowy for hiking above 9000 feet, but that didnt stop us from trying. We hiked to the base of Lizard Head in drifts still as much as 4 feet deep! The whole mountain side was flowing with meltwater, so it'll be muddy for a few more weeks. Any suggestions for next weekend?

This Wednesday, June 15th, will be a great chance to see a total lunar eclipse, and get ready for a Vesta Fiesta soon as Dawn releases its first images of Vesta.

Mesa Verde National Park

Here's my Top Ten list of things you may not know about Mesa Verde National Park:

1. Identified as an IBA (Important Bird Area) by the Colorado Audubon Society

2. Designated by UNESCO as a World Hertitage Site for it's nature and history.

3. Under the Clean Air Act, it was designated as a Class I Air Shed, which means the air quality is supposed to be as good as it gets, and is protected by law.

4. Part of the Nature Conservancy's southern Rockies Network of Conservation Areas.

5. A component of the Park Mesa Research Natural Area.

6. Recognized as a Colorado Outstanding Waters due to the Mancos River forming the eastern edge of the park's borders.

7. Considered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to be in the top 25 National Parks most vulnerable to climate change, with a climate monitoring station established at Far View.

8. A member of the SCPN (Southern Colorado Plateau Inventory and Monitoring Network), which conducts surveys of Long Term Monitoring Plots inside the park.

9. the Colorado Plateau is considered by the International Dark-Sky Association to be one of the best night skies in the country.

10. In the top 28 Places to See Before You Die, a bucket list published by Smithsonian Magazine.

Meanwhile, my crew-leader's boss's boss has established a reward to the person who reports the most interesting (from the general public's perspective) wildlife sightings during the summer season. The list is weighted towards the classic charismatic megafauna, with Big Foot topping the list at 100 points! Wish me luck!

May Daze

Work is progressing swiftly. The wildland firefighter red-card refresher course was held last week, along with the dreaded pack test. Fortunately, my flat-lander feet could keep up the pace and finished in plenty of time. Whew! While I was off doing that, my coworkers were assisting a botanist from the University of Colorado's state Natural Heritage Program. They visited several pre-existing study sites and inventoried the plants they found. The exciting news is they may have found a new species of Astragalus to add to Mesa Verde's species list. It's preliminary, but if they are positive in their identification, they hope to submit a voucher for it.

I suppose to counter a possible first, I should include a photo of a definite last. This skull is the last known Desert Bighorn to have lived in Mesa Verde. The wildlife biologists are still hard at work to attempt a reintroduction, and perhaps soon the bighorn will be seen once again along the cliffs of Mesa Verde.

This year, there is much more emphasis in qualitatively analyzing the native flora, as well as accurately mapping out weed infestations. Dare I say, I have been blind-sided by science. The new crew is well versed in botany, so I need to catch up so that I can contribute what I can.

To help me gain some traction, I attended a field trip this past Friday to Narraguinnep Canyon Natural Area. In a rare moment of political precognition, these natural areas were set aside to serve as reference types for a particular ecosystem. Therefore, Narraguinnep can be studied to understand what a "natural" (as natural as humanely possible) Ponderosa ecosystem should look like. Of particular interest in this area is the realization that old growth Ponderosa forests are the best defense against forest fires, much like a mangrove hammock resists the destruction of a hurricane.

I'm slowly learning my plants, so be prepared for more latin words and a "Plant of the Week". Today's plant of the week is Lithophragma parviflorum the Woodland Star. It is common saxifrage upon the mesa tops, and blooming now. It also highlights why I need to learn the real names of plants, because another common plant Lithophragma glabrum, also called Woodland Star, is a different species, which can be distinguished by tiny, red buds along the infloresence. There will be a quiz later!

For a weekend reprise from plant ID, we went to see the mountains still buried in snow and hunt down a few geocaches. The highlight was seeing Cornet Falls breaking free of its icy prison.

Happy Arbor Day!

It's good to be back in the four corners once again. The mountains are still sleepy with snow on their shoulders, and it snowed on my first day of work! On the day we arrived, it was very windy and "Arizona came to visit", which is how the locals describe the dust storm that accompanies the strong southwest winds.

This season, there are only 4 members on the vegetation crew, but we have a new ecologist to help direct the program. Our immediate goals are focused on surveying for rare plants, especially in areas where the public may visit. We hiked the Petroglyph Trail to view some Wild Parsley and Cliff Palace Milkvetch. A short trail to an overlook of Cliff Palace may also be created, and we will consult the trail crew on how to route the overloook trail to prevent Cliff Palace Milkvetch and Townsend Daisies from being lost.

Especially exciting was our hike down to Square Tower Ruin. It is an iconic ruin, but previously only visible from an overlook. This year, archeologists are considering opening up a trail for the public to tour it this summer. There are many rare plants along the trail, including an endemic variety of stickseed (Aletis MacDougalli) and Schmoll's Milkvetch. Our goal is to monitor those populations, since it is inevitable some will become trampled.

Visiting Square Tower ruin from below was a real treat, since it is still so much intact without restoration. A kiva with its roof still intact and some plaster on the walls can be seen. Rock art and sherds are still present, and some of the rooms are painted. The enigmatic Crow's Nest ruin can also be seen much better from below, perched above the tower. I found a Packrat's nest underneath a boulder who had smuggled out an ancient corn cob. Ironically, it's a raven that nests in an alcove above Crow's Nest.

So this first week has been a great start to the season, and it looks like I'll learn a LOT more plants this year -- the good ones, not the bad ones.

Lionfish: the other white meat!

Just 10 years ago, researchers noted the presence of about 10 lionfish scattered across the east coast of the United States. There was concern that the lionfish would become invasive, and within a few years, hundreds were being seen along the coast of the Carolinas and northern Florida. While I was living in the Florida Keys in 2007-2008, there was alarm the lionfish was coming, but I never saw them in my dives around Big Pine and Key West.

This past March, my Dad invited me along on a diving trip to Little Cayman Island, and I saw first hand the power of of the sigmoid curve of unchecked population growth. We saw several lionfish on every dive, so clearly the population is thriving. The good news is that lionfish are a beautiful addition to the reef: it is their exotic and striking looks that made them a hit with the aquarium trade, which likely resulted in the contamination of the east coast by dumping unwanted adult fish.

The bad news: they are voracious predators, especially of juvenile fish. They will clearly have economic impacts to the grouper and snapper fisheries, and ecological impacts could be more devastating if they can exploit coral reefs in preferential ways. The immediate problem is that there are no predators that view them as a food source, except people brave enough to avoid their poisonous spines and fry em up.

Researchers have been looking into training reef sharks in the Atlantic to prey on lionfish, since sharks are their natural predators in the Pacific. This is proving difficult, apparently because sharks make crappy students. The dive team at Little Cayman Beach Resort have found some willing students: the friendly, and sometimes lovable, Nassau Grouper. Some of the grouper are excited to see scuba divers enter the water. They swim over to greet the divers and follow them around like a puppy dog. Some are so friendly, they have been given names, such as Benji and MiniMe. When the dive masters encounter a lion fish, they point it out to the grouper, which then chomps it down in one bite! Hopefully, the grouper will learn that lionfish are prey and help balance out the current unchecked population growth.

One problem with this scenario is the Nassau Grouper is often overfished. For the past 7 years in the Caymans, the Nassau has been under limited protection on Little Cayman due to devastating overfishing, but those protections are set to expire. Please sign this petition to inform the Cayman Island government that protecting the Nassau Grouper from over-exploitation is in the best interest of everyone: including the fisherman... and ultimately even the lionfish. If anything exploits a resource to the point of an ecosystem crash, everyone loses.

We had a great time in the Caymans, and saw many wonderful sights. We saw so many hawksbill sea turtles, we became acclimatized to swimming along an endangered species. Coral reefs are just a riot of strange colors and shapes, but with some practice we began seeing more and more each dive. The island itself had its own set of rare animals, such as island tree snails, lion-tail lizards, and rare rock iguanas. I was also lucky enough to add two birds to my lifelist: the largest colony of Red Footed Boobies in the Caribbean and a Bananaquit in need of voice lessons. On unrelated news: I'm returning to Mesa Verde National Park for another season!

Happy Columbus Day!

Ok, maybe it feels a little weird to be observing Columbus Day when I'm surrounded by Native American tribal lands, so I guess I'll smoothly segue into another topic sentence...

I'm unemployed once again! The season is over, and we're all wondering what we'll do next summer. It's nice to know I'm welcome back at Mesa Verde, and it looks like there will be a three person crew next year. Unless another adventure lands at my doorstep(s), mooring buoy, tent flap, etc... then it's great to know I can return here. Of course, as a wise hobbit once noted, "Adventures make one late for dinner. "

We've a few short weeks left to explore the Four Corners. Autumn has come, with snows reappearing on the mountain tops, quaking aspens turning gold, sincere pumpkin patches burgeoning with treasure, and little pika scurrying to harvest their haystacks for the winter. Folks familiar with my amazing hiking techniques will not be surprised I wore out the bottom of my pants on a glissade down Centennial Peak yesterday. Fortunately, that adventure did not make us late for dinner at the Absolute Bakery. Yum!

M is for Moose-atat

Tempus fugit, eh pardo?

The news from the Natural Resources department of Mesa Verde is a little stranger than normal. It begins with the reports of 6 stray cows ( 3 cows and 3 calves) found within the boundary of the Park. Since the cattle have been hanging around the fence at the southern border, there's suspicion that they snuck across. The biologist thought that we could get 4 members of the veg-crew to sweep down from the top of Navajo canyon, chase the cattle before us, and then be joined at the confluence of Spruce and Wickiup canyon by a posse of Rangers and the remaining veg crew.

Being a Texan, I felt it was my duty to join the vanguard. We swept down the top of the canyon, and after a few miles began seeing cattle tracks, but no cows. With hopes that we were driving the cattle before us, we kept moving down canyon, with 2 of us climbing up on the canyon slopes periodically to ensure cows weren't hiding up on the benches of some of the canyons. The long story short is that we were outwitted by the cows, who probably smelled a trap in the making and ran up the west fork of Navajo canyon. We never saw them that day, but did shore up the fencing. I think plan-B is to find some real cowboys.

For recreation, we took the 4 day holiday weekend to backpack into Vallecito canyon. Before reaching the trailhead, we drove by Vallecito reservoir, which was site of the 2002 Mission Ridge wildfire that burned the same year Mesa Verde had its worst fire season. The fire burned so intensly that embers spotted new fires on the opposite side of the lake. It doesn't take a genius to realize that if a lake doesn't work as a firebreak, then there's not much one can do to stop it. Just like the Boulder blaze that's currently burning, it is likely that the fire was human error. The fire is commemorated in a Trail of Carvings.

We had a great backpacking trip, with the weather nice enough to just rain while we slept. We saw waterfalls and many new peaks, such as The Guardian, and Mt. Silex, and hardly saw a soul in the backcountry. While hiking up the river, we mentioned how it was perfect habitat for a moose... Mooseatat! We were really thrilled when hiking back to camp, there was a bull moose staring back at us. He didn't trust people, so he's a smart moose.

Work continued with a few other intersting activites, such as UTV safety training, the last day of the hummingbird project (thanks to the volunteers of the Hummingbird Monitoring Network!), and the release of Roundtail Chubs into the Mancos River canyon. The Colorado Division of Wildlife is raising the chubs from stock saved from Mesa Verde during a severe drought when irrigation had depleted the river so much that it no longer flowed. Hopefully, these efforts will restore the species back to healthy levels.

We celebrated the release by going on an overnight rafting trip down the Colorado, right along the boundaries of Arches National Park in Utah. Floating down the majestic canyons was great, seeing the Fisher Towers and Red-necked Phalaropes was sweet, but the icing on the cake was seeing a family of river otters swim and scamper along the shoreline.