Explorer Article about the Institute of Desert Ecology--Tucson Audubon Society

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Tucson Audubon Society
Explorer Article about the Institute of Desert Ecology

Coming to begrudging respect for the desert
Field Trips
By Laura Marble March 5, 2008

Four years ago, I stuffed my belongings into a Geo Metro and set out on a cross-country journey bound for Tucson .

Brimming with dreams of a charmed future, I pulled over at a rest stop on Interstate 10 to touch Arizona soil and met with an odd kind of welcome sign posted at the perimeter: “Poisonous snakes and insects inhabit the area.”

It took me about two minutes to figure out that antisocial life-forms have the right of way in the Sonoran Desert . A scorpion might have all the markings of a pest — short stature, obnoxious sting — but when thousands get together and hide under rocks, their law prevails. The cacti, I found, were no nicer, even with names like “teddy bear cholla.”

Being a polite Midwesterner at heart, I took the high road in choosing how to deal with the prickly types in my new environment. My peaceful, if somewhat purse-lipped, message to them was this: I will follow your rules so you don't hurt me, but that doesn't mean I approve.

My personal ethic had no space for creatures with everyone-for-himself attitudes. I saw them as alien and mildly despicable — certainly not beautiful. That changed when I attended the Institute for Desert Ecology.

The institute, a four-day spring campout in Catalina State Park , educates people about the varied ways life-forms in the Sonoran Desert have adapted to cope with their harsh landscape. Scientists and professors teach such skills as tracking critters and lassoing lizards with a 10-foot pole attached to a tiny noose. They also teach respect.

I must admit I felt a bit giddy during my institute experience three years ago when a herpetology professor held a rattlesnake in a headlock and let me toy with its tail. It seemed fitting revenge for the little scoundrels' reign of terror.

But my horticulture class on Day 3 found me in a different frame of mind. My classmates and I were crouched in a thin strip of shade with a thicket of cacti at our backs, intensely aware of the hazards of desert life, when our instructor pointed out a funny-looking grove of mesquite trees in the process of exercising a desert adaptation. Their inner branches burst with green, while their outer branches looked dead.

My classmates offered guesses about what the trees were up to before our instructor revealed their secret. They are rugged survivalists. When drought sets in, they pare down to keep thriving. They self-prune entire branches.

The trees' admirable trait gave me pause — I'd never known a tree in Missouri to cut its losses with such surrender — but I barely had time to pause before the instructor drew our attention to a prickly pear cactus.

That plant, he said, is “the epitome” of resourcefulness during times of drought. After other plants slow down their photosynthesizing for the summer or shut down entirely, cacti keep plugging away. Their secret is in how they ration their vulnerability. In the cool of night, they open up to take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen. When day breaks, they became impermeable.

I gazed at the prickly pear cactus in my midst and let its story blend with stories I'd heard about other life-forms during the past few days — jackrabbits that cool off via heat-radiating ears, kangaroo rats so adapted to drought that they don't drink water even if you offer it to them, and desert tortoises that hold their pee until the rainy season.

The ingenuity in my desert surroundings dazzled me. Suddenly, these creatures that had turned me off by their hurtful practices and their tough exteriors epitomized the persistence of life itself, the dazzling way it won't give up. Maybe, I thought, this is what they mean when they say the desert has its own beauty.

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This page was updated on 12/28/05