For most of my time here in Dos Palmas, I’ve been working in the desert scrubland surrounding the oasis: lots of creosote, saltbush, mesquites, and a few small trees like the smoke trees I gushed over last month. But in the last week, we’ve been working on a new project, placing new transects for future vegetation surveys in the dense marsh near the area’s main outflow. I have to say, seeing grasses again is a big change, and wading into trackless stands of reeds, saw grass, and cattails, chasing after a point on a GPS unit – well, thats something I didn’t think I’d be doing in the desert. But as someone whose nature experiences begin with playing in cattails (if you hit your little brother with the ripe ones they’ll burst), getting back into a marsh is always good.

Of course, there have been other projects, some of them less fun. My boss (and his boss) are involved in a tense negotiation with the organization that owns the nearby canal: they are required by NEPA to feed water into the oasis for to preserve habitat for its endangered species, but parts of the oasis are drying up dramatically. My part in this process is mostly data management, making sure that our conclusions are based on the best possible research. Its great work, and it is exciting to know that your data work helps support local conservation policy, but its less fun than hiking through the marsh.

And in “sorry I don’t have pictures” news, this month I was lucky enough to see a ringtail cat (imagine a cross between a lemur and a raccoon), and more excitingly a yuma clapper rail: one of the very rare endangered species that make Dos Palmas home. The rest of my field team doesn’t believe me about that last one, or rather they don’t want to believe that the one day I was out on my own a clapper rail showed up.

See you all in Chicago next week,
Joe