Category Archives: Natural History

Visible Changes

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Arizona, Arizona Photos, Geology, Natural History, New Attitude to Nature

 

 

 

There is no doubt about it, the Grand Canyon is grand. It is one of the most beautiful places on earth. I is also fascinating because it makes long history visible before your eyes. We did not visit it this  year when we were in Arizona, but we have visited it many times. Some places brag about being worth the trip even though the claims are dubious. The Grand Canyon has a right to brag.

You can see some of the history of such astounding changes in places like the Grand Canyon of Arizona. The geological history of the American Southwest revealed there makes visible what has happened in the last 1.7 billion or so years. That is long before there was any human life on the planet.

Each layer of rock is displayed in different colours. It may be the best record of the earth’s formation anywhere in the world. Almost 2 billion years of history are recorded there although the most dramatic changes occurred recently about 5-6 million years ago when the mighty Colorado River began to carve its astonishing path through the canyon walls. Even that  relatively recent history, includes no history of human life, because there was none.

The fossils found in each layer tell the story of the development of life on earth. The Vishnu Schist which is one of the oldest layers, near the bottom of the canyon, was formed when the first life on the planet, bacteria like creatures and algae first emerged.

Many of the other layers were created by billions of small marine animals, when this area was submerged by ocean. Their shells eventually accumulated to such an extent over hundreds of millions of years that they built up into thick layers of limestone that we can see today from the top of the canyon, looking a mile down. I am always amazed to think that a sea covered this incredible land.

 

 

As far as plant life goes, since I self-identify as a flower guy, they have been around for at least a 125 million years or so.  During that time, they evolved astonishingly from tiny barely visible flowers to glorious huge dahlias, from nearly inconspicuous grasses to majestic Redwood trees. All of those are flowering plants!

Life really is grand.  We must learn to appreciate all life. Not just human life. That is part of what I call a new attitude to nature.

 

A Flower Child arrives in Heaven

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Arizona Photos, Natural History, photography, Wild Flowers, Wild Flowers of Southwest USA

 

 

 

When I was a young lad going to University, it was the time of hippies and flower children. I always considered myself as on the fringes of this group. The term we liked to refer to ourselves was “freaks.”  But I always liked the expression “flower children.”  It called to mind these crazy kids at the Kent State  University Vietnam War Protest, and other places, who stood in front of the national guard members that were pointing their rifles at them and they smiled at the guards and placed flowers in the barrels of the gun.  How crazy is that?   Much to my surprise I actually became a flower child of sorts many years later when as an adult of sorts I became interested in wildflowers. I remember my mother was amazed. How could this happen?  Well, my answer to her was, “How could it not happen?” What is there not to like about wildflowers?

It was a very windy day, so I gave up on trying to freeze images of flowering blowing in the breeze.

One afternoon this winter in Arizona Christiane and I went for a jaunt on Red Mountain Road and Saguaro Lake and then headed south to complete a loop to Busch Highway and then Usery Pass Road.  We saw many wildflowers along the way. But we were really shocked at Usery Pass Road  where there was a long line of cars parked beside the road. What was happening we wondered? It was the wildflower children going crazy photographing flowers. My sport has been turned over to the rabble! And there was good reason for that. The flowers were outstanding.

 

There was a traffic jam of sorts in the countryside where we saw these wild flowers. Everyone, it seemed wanted to see these gems. Who can blame them?

 

Super Bloom

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Arizona Photos, desert, Natural History, Wild Flowers, Wild Flowers of Southwest USA

 

 

Everyone in Arizona this year, as in many other places in the southern USA, complained a lot about the bad weather. I admit it—I was one of them.  Everyone complained. Some told me it was the worst winter in 40 years.  It was awful. But it was also great!

 

From the perspective of a wildflower guy—like me—it was fantastic. Conditions were great.  I learned from Ranger B an interpreter at the Maricopa Parks where we often attended his talks, that the ideal conditions for wildflower growth were a wet autumn followed by consistent occasional rain from January to March. This is exactly what happened this past year. He said it happened about once every 11 years. Well it happened this year. Life is good.

 

I had been hoping to experience one of those years ever since I heard about it.  Ranger B says it was fantastic to see. He was right.

 

The result of these ideal conditions is called by local “a Super Bloom.”  And that was what we experienced this year. Now I say it was the best weather ever in Arizona.  Though, I admit, I also complained about it. Some of us are never happy and are never satisfied.

 

 

Manitoba’s Cactuses

Natural History, Nature, Wild flowers of Manitoba

 

 

In June 2016 I went on one of my most spectacular botany trips ever. That is saying a lot since I have on some outstanding trips. This was truly one of the best.

Normally I am a bog guy. I love bogs. I love the orchids and other plants that inhabit our wetlands. Most of my flower hunting has been in these wetlands.  Today I felt a bit like a faithless lover because I wandered a near desert in search of cacti. I have come to love cacti as much as orchids. Both are pretty close to divine.

 

I love deserts. I just never thought I would experience one in Manitoba. Actually, I did not experience one that day. It is not really a desert but it is as close as we get in Manitoba. Spruce Woods gets about twice the amount that is the limit for what is considered a desert. The annual moisture received there is 300-500 millimetres per year-nearly twice the amount received in a true desert region. This rainfall enables plants to colonize the sand dunes, hiding most of the sand. In fact as I walked along the trail I was struck by the great variety of vegetation. For a plant guy like me that was fantastic.

 

Of the original 6,500 square kilometres of delta sand, only four square kilometres remain open today. The balance is now covered with vegetation that is gradually covering the sands. Most of the sands are now covered with a rich variety of plants and wildlife. The Spirit Sands had their origin more than 15,000 years ago when the ancestral Assiniboine River, was much larger than it is today and it created a huge delta as it carried glacial meltwaters into ancient Lake Agassiz.

The origins of the Spruce Woods require one to consider the massive continental ice sheets that covered Manitoba and much of the northern part of North America.  About 20,000 years ago, all of Manitoba was covered by an enormous ice sheet that in many places was up to 2 km. deep.  There was an awful lot of water locked up in that  ice.

When that fantastic ice sheet started to melt, a wide melt stream flowed into the recently created Lake Agassiz.  It was the largest lake the world has ever seen! As the water flowed in it dropped silt, sand, and gravel into many parts of Manitoba including a pathway that was centred roughly on what is now the Assinboine River.  This created a huge river valley.

The sand deposits thus created were vast and deep. In places they were up to 200 feet deep and covered approximately 6,500 square km. These deposits spread out in a fan shape that reached as far as Portage la Prairie. Winds created heaps of sand that we call dunes. Large dunes were built up in this area. Those dunes are still active today.

When the great continental ice sheets finally melted away, about 12,000 years ago, the Assinboine River was a mighty river, about 1.5 km wide. The modern descendant is a puny shadow of that.  The river drained into huge Lake Agassiz just south of present day Brandon Manitoba. As the glacier continued to retreat northwards Lake Agassiz drained south—opposite of today. The massive ice sheets blocked northward flow. This south flow of the river exposed massive sand from the river delta.

 

To the aboriginal people the Spirit Sands were a spiritual place close to the Great Spirit or Kiche Manitou. The present name—Spirit Sands acknowledges the religious importance of the dunes to indigenous people.

Today Spirit Sands is a fragile sand dune about 4 km2.  The rest of what is left is covered with vegetation. The dunes are moved along the prevailing northwesterly winds and like so many dunes, cover anything that stands in their way.

 

Cactuses or cacti  are magnificent. I have spent  a few winters now in Arizona looking at cacti and have come to love them nearly as much as orchids, as heretical as that might sound.  Our Manitoba cacti are small low plants but the flowers are extraordinary and can hold their heads up high to any Arizona cacti.  And they love sandy conditions.

Many people are surprised to learn that cacti can be found in Canada. After all, are cacti not a plant of the southwestern deserts? Yes and no. Certainly they can be found in the southwest of the US and are in fact famous for that. Yet they can survive in the north as well.

There are actually 4 species of cacti native to Canada. These are Escobaria vivipara, Opuntia fragilis, O. polyacanthaand O. humifusa. None of these species are found farther north than their locations in Canada.

There is another species of cactus in Manitoba that I have not seen yet. That is prickly pear and it can be found from BC to Whiteshell Provincial Park in Manitoba. There are as well a few sites in northwestern Ontario. I have seen this cactus in Manitoba but not when it was in bloom. A nature group of which I am a part, Native Orchid Conservation Inc. went to see it but I had to miss that field trip. Sometimes life sucks.  Next year for sure!

Sky Islands

2019 Trip to Southwest United States, Arizona, Arizona Photos, Bio-Diversity, Birds, desert, Natural History

There are many sky islands in Arizona.  Madera Canyon was one of them. Madera Canyon is located on a sky island. We went there after the debacle of Tucson’s Festival of Books. Sky islands are  incredible mountain ranges that rose up abruptly out of the desert lowlands without  foothills.  The mountains seemed to be  emerging out of the earth as if by magic.

Later I learned more about this phenomenon.  I learned that such mountains usually had an elevation of between 6,000 and 8,000 feet. I also learned that these mountains which looked like islands in a sea of grass or sea of desert scrub actually had an abundance of wild life.  These islands include most of Arizona’s biotic communities. They are among the most bio-diverse ecosystems on the planet. They are often the meeting place between desert and forest and everything in between. It is precisely that diversity that attracts wild life, especially birds. That is why these sky islands contain well over half the bird species in all of North America.  Not just Arizona. They also contain 29 bat species, more than 3,000 species of plants, and 104 species of mammals.

 

Sky Islands are havens of biodiversity. That is really their most important feature.  When you move into these “islands” in the desert there is an astounding range of biodiversity.  As Gary Paul Nabhan said, “In fact the “sky islands” of southeastern Arizona and adjacent Sonora are now recognized by the national Union for the Conservation of Nature as one of the great centers of plant diversity north of the tropics.”

The reason for that diversity is of course the great variety of topography in the state. That produces a wonderful variety of life, both flora and fauna. As Nabhan said, “When we compare our desert with others, the contrast is striking. Overall, the Sonoran Desert has the greatest diversity of plant growth forms–architectural strategies for dealing with heat and drought–of any desert in the world.”

The Sonoran Desert is certainly not the bleak and barren place that many expect–and sky islands are the apexes of diversity.

What makes Madera Canyon so special is the creek at the bottom. It traverses  4 life zones and many habitats between the desert floor and the mountain tops.  It has become world famous for its diverse flora and fauna. According to the Friends of Madera Canyon, “the variety of climates within 10 miles is similar to that found in driving from Arizona to Canada!”

Southwestern Arizona and this canyon are spectacular places for people who love wildlife and wild plants. This area is ranked the third best birding area in the US!  It contains some 400 birds species and especially 14 of Arizona’s 15 hummingbird species. That is more hummingbirds than any where else in the United States. But today we saw none at all.

It was interesting that the more we gained in altitude the more deciduous trees appeared and the less cactuses.   I have learned that usually in Arizona the higher the altitude the higher the precipitation so the more diverse the vegetation. Trees need the added the moisture on the higher elevations. Of course, if the mountain is too high, as in the San Francisco Peaks then there are no trees at all. Just snow. Trees, like all life is finicky.  Like Goldilocks, things have to be just right.

The landscape of southern Arizona seems dry—it is dry.  But it does get rain. In fact this region gets about 11 inches (280 mm) of rain per years. This is enough rain to allow a surprising amount of vegetation to flourish. Even wild flowers abound.  That seems impossible. It looks so dry and nearly barren. But the land is not barren—far from it.

On the day we were there an enthusiastic birder showed me a photograph of an Elegant Trogon (Trogon elegans) one of the rarest birds in the United States. A couple of years ago my brother-in-law Harv and I went in search of it but did not find. He has seen it a few times. Me never. Darn! The birder showed me a photograph he had taken of it. I was really jealous.  Later I went in search of it. I found another birder who had found it and he told me exactly where to go, but I missed it. I am an incompetent fledgling birder.    We spent some time sitting on a bench with camera and binoculars in hand. We saw a lot of birds of different species, but surprisingly no hummingbirds. Usually in the past we saw a large variety of hummingbirds here. I was puzzled by their absence.

House Finches are interesting birds because they were released in the eastern part of North America by people who brought them from Europe in the 1940s and now they have spread over most of North America including Arizona and Manitoba.

 

Acorn Woodpeckers often drill small holes in trees in the autumn to insert their acorns. Often their “granary trees” are used over and over again and contain thousands of acorns. Aren’t birds weird?

Mexican jays have co-operative breeding where the young from previous years help the parents to raise the new young.  Nature is not just competition, sometimes it involves cooperation.

 

The oldest plant in the Sonoran Desert–maybe the world

2019 Trip to Southwest United States, desert, Natural History, Plants

 

 

Creosote Bush (Larrea tridentata.)

 You would have to be a much better photographer than I am, to make this inconspicuous plant look interesting. But it is interesting. Very interesting. It is probably the most interesting plant in the Sonoran Desert. They are very common. Ubiquitous I would say.

It isa shrub or  bush. But, it is a perennial bush that has some amazing properties. It can live for up to 2 years without rain. Today it did not have its tiny yellow flowers. They have already turned into tiny fruit.  These plants are believed to be among the oldest living plants. Some are as old as 11,000 years old! That is older than the Old Testament was written. That is older than the pyramids. Archaeologists believe Egypt’s large pyramids are the work of the Old Kingdom society that rose to prominence in the Nile Valley after 3000 B.C. Historical analysis tells us that the Egyptians built the Giza Pyramids in a span of 85 years between 2589 and 2504 BC. Is it possible that a creosote bush is twice as old as that? At least one such plant was carbon dated to be more than 11,000 years old.

Creosote is the probably the most drought resistant perennial plant in North America. It must be to survive in a desert for that long.  And we humans think we are smart? As humans we naturally value what we do. Does anything we do compare with this? This was an old friend worth cherishing. I tried to show I appreciated it.

Is Arizona the “Sweet Spot” of Nature?

2019 Trip to Southwest United States, Arizona, Natural History

This is the Colorado River before it reaches the Grand Canyon in Northern Arizona

 

Sean, our extremely young and extravagantly enthusiastic “banker,” at least for today, asked us if we realized that Arizona was nature’s sweet spot. By that he meant that the rest of North America suffered recurring natural disasters. But not Arizona. The west coast has frequent tsunamis. The east coast has hurricanes.  The mid-west has tornados. The north of course has bone-chilling cold and blizzards. Arizona escapes all these calamities. Hence it is in the sweet spot. He admitted they have infrequent dust storms and heat stroke victims, but nothing serious. That may be true but the future effects of climate change may make these events more frequent and more serious.

Of course, even more importantly, he ignored the fact that Arizona is DRY. It is so dry here that it is really unlivable. Phoenix gets 40% of its water from the Colorado River, which is being depleted. It no longer reaches the Pacific Ocean as historically it did. It is dry long before it reaches the coast. Too many straws are slurping that water. The States and Indigenous groups and municipal governments  draw from the Colorado River  pursuant to an anachronistic formula set out by a complex agreement made with all those organizations. In fact the federal regulator has given notice that unless the parties are able to successfully renegotiate that agreement by agreeing to reductions, it will impose a new formula upon them. The deadline for renegotiation just passed and a near agreement was reached. It is likely that a temporary solution will be reached, but it also appears further painful reductions will have to be renegotiated again within a year because of the historic 19 year drought in this area.

The rest of the water is obtained by drawing from aquifers that are also being depleted and  recycling captured water.

The real problem is that there is not enough water for all the people and livestock in this region. And the population and livestock numbers keep rising. This region, I suspect is in for a much bigger problems than the occasional blizzard.  It may not be the “sweet spot” for long.

Hummingbirds: How Smart are they?

2019 Trip to Southwest United States, Birds, Hummingbirds, Natural History

 

 

After our adventures on the highways we did make it safely to our rented home in San Tan Valley Arizona. Our first Arizona friends to visit us were the hummingbirds. They arrived the first day we were here and went directly to the same spot we had our feeder last year before we had time to set it up.  How smart is that? I don’t think anyone has fed them here for 9 months!

As we were reading in the backyard, we saw an intense aerial display that could match any of the dogfights in either of our World Wars. Two Anna’s Hummingbirds conducted this military exercise. They flew after each other for so long that mostly they had no time to dine on the nectar we provided. That is not very smart! I did get a couple of photos of one of them in one of the few moments when he stopped to drink, including the image above.

Humans have a strong tendency to think they are better and smarter than everything else. Many of us believe that God made this world for humans to rule. The world is subordinate to us. Sometimes however, humans should learn a little humility.

I have watched a few astonishing nature shows on television about hummingbirds. One of them was about  Andy Hurley and his research partner Sue Healy who study hummingbirds. In particular, they study rufous humming birds, astonishing little birds with brains the size of a grain of rice. Yet even these birds are smart–very smart. Their hearts can beat at more than a 1,000 beats per minute! Their wings beat at more than 70 times per second! All of that requires the expenditure of an enormous amount of energy. How do they get that energy? Well they need to be smart to find it.

         Hurley and Healy found that in the lab birds like this do surprising things, but not nearly as surprising as the things that the birds do in their environment. That is where their intelligence really shines. They set up a number of fake flowers for the real birds. Each a different colour. They created a pattern of cardboard disks on top of sticks or poles stuck into the ground to resemble flowers. These were artificial flowers filled with a sucrose solution that resembles nectar.  The birds were actually offered slightly better food than they would get in the wild, in order to keep them interested. “Being smart birds they recognized a good thing when they saw it.” They kept coming back for the nectar of the gods. “Not only do they see it; they remember it,” Hurley said.

Because male rufous hummingbirds are so territorial, the same bird comes back to the cafeteria over and over again. As Hurley said, “A Male rufous hummingbirds has hundreds if not thousands of flowers in its territory. As a result, he has to remember where good food is, and where he has just visited.” That takes serious smarts! As Healy said, “they seem to know where a flower is after one visit. One visit! And we are still asking ourselves how do they do it?” Remember that is one visit among hundreds or even thousands of flowers! That also takes serious smarts. No doubt this is far beyond my capacity. But that is not all. They are even smarter than that!

As David Suzuki, who presented the show, said, “Its not just bird brain power, its biology. Hummingbirds have such a high metabolism they cannot afford to waste precious energy looking for food.”

People need a meal every 3 or 4 or 5 hours. “Hummingbirds are thinking I need a meal every 10 minutes! They have to make decisions that are really important, and if they don’t do it well they die. ” If we miss MacDonald’s we can always go to Wendy’s down the street. It doesn’t much matter to us. We have the time to make mistakes and correct them. Hummingbirds don’t have the luxury of much time. They cannot make a lot of mistakes.

Hummingbirds have another big problem–that is biodiversity. Normally that is a good thing for all of us, but for hummingbirds in the wild that can be a serious obstacle. In the wild, unlike the nectar Café the scientists could create, flowers replenish their nectar at different rates. In the experiment the scientists mimicked this diversity. The question then became can the hummingbird figure out which fake flowers are empty and which are filled with sucrose solution? The scientists were shocked at how well these tiny birds with their tiny brains did in the wild.

For half the flowers, after a bird visited, the scientists waited 10 minutes before replenishing. The other half of the flowers were refilled after 20 minutes. So a bird came in, visited 3 or 4 flowers, then went away and came back 10 or 15 minutes later, and then the bird must decide which flowers have not yet given up nectar and which ones will have it already. That is no an easy test. I would not want to take this examination, particularly if my life depended on it. Hummingbirds have no choice. They take such tests every day, over and over again. As a result the scientists  saw a hummingbird that had already sipped from 2 flowers. Then when it returned it headed straight for a new one. After a day of doing this, the hummingbird had a remarkable ability to separate out the 10 minute and 20 minute flowers. The bird must treat them differently.

Scientists call this episodic memory. I am glad I heard this expression. That is because I know I will forget it. That’s because I have so little of it. “They have to remember not just the what, and the where, but the when.” As Suzuki said, “this is a cognitive skill once thought to belong only to humans.” How wrong can we get?  How stupid are we? At least in comparison to these little birds with their minute brains.

Hurley described this well, when he said, “I would need a clipboard and pencil and 8 different stop watches for hours and hours and hours. Yet the birds are able to do this, seemingly without effort. They are smarter than me.” They are astonishing creatures and we have underestimated them–forever. As Healy said, “These birds have extraordinarily small brains and yet they do things that we find phenomenal.”

Naturally, that brings up an important question, ‘when it comes to brains does size matter?’  Humans are a good example of species where the size of brains does matter. Humans have very large brains for the size of their bodies and humans have an astounding capacity thanks to their brains. Well some of us at least.

The question was, ‘can a hummingbird outsmart a human?’  It seems unlikely. Andy Hurley is still amazed by hummingbirds after studying them for more than 25 years. Hurley said, “I’ve been humbled by these birds.” That was a lesson he wanted to pass on to his students. Humility is good.

Hurley did an experiment that required his students–smart University students–to forage like a hummingbird at the University of Lethbridge. He set up a memory test with candy instead of nectar. This one was to test the students. He had 8 paper cups.  4 of the paper cups were visited by students earlier. He asked the students to go to the cups that they had not yet visited to determine if they had candy hidden underneath them or not. One would think humans could do this easily. After all, humans have huge brains, and university students are thought to be the best of the best. The Students did pretty good. They got it right 75% of the time. This was the same as hummingbirds!

This made Professor Hurley say to his students, “You have brains that are 7,000 times larger than hummingbirds. My question is what are you doing with all those neurons? Why are you not scoring better than an animal that has a tiny, tiny brain?” The students chuckled. They chuckled at themselves that is.

Why are hummingbirds so smart? According to Professor Hurley, “the answer is that there is intense natural selection of hummingbirds to get this right because if they don’t they die.” Now humans have figured this out. They are pretty smart too.