Hello Everyone!

Spring has come, and nearly gone, from my corner of the desert. It’s been a little while since you heard from me, but that is because it has been a very busy spring of work here in Needles. I’ve been helping with sensitive plant monitoring, making native seed collections, and collecting plant tissue for genetic analysis. It has been a wonderful couple months of wildflowers, comfortable temperatures, and active wildlife. But now the spring bloom has passed in all but the northern portion of our field office, and we are regularly reaching triple digits. Sounds like a good time for me to move north…which is something I get to do very soon! In a couple weeks I’ll be moving up to the Bishop BLM Office on the eastern edge of the Sierra’s in California to take another CLM internship. That should be fantastic. But I’m not there yet, and first I get to share with y’all some of the awesome plants that have graced the Mojave lately.

These flowers belong to a species of Phacelia, but I can’t tell you which one. They grew all over the desert this spring, but I must confess that I didn’t try too hard to identify most of them, because they are covered in little hairs that can be irritating to the touch. Would you touch a plant called “scorpion weed”?

Throughout January and February we received occasional winter rain, enjoyed cool daytime temperatures in the 70’s, and saw the small shoots and rosettes of new annual plants starting to come up in our field office. For a while these new species were all a mystery to me, because I’ve never been here for spring before, and just a few leaves isn’t much to go on when trying to ID an unknown plant. But when the annuals finally started to open up, at the end of February and beginning of March, the flurry of botanical activity was exciting and beautiful! In my area we don’t quite get the dense carpeting of wildflowers that coastal California enjoys, but the desert ground is still full of variety and color.

Here’s a fun desert plant. This odd one is Orobanche cooperi (desert broomrape). Did you notice that this plant isn’t green? Well that’s because it is a parasite, and doesn’t perform photosynthesis on its own. Its roots have structures that steal nutrients from the roots of other plants.

Many of the spring flowers belong to small annual plants that sprouted in response to winter rain. The moisture and cooler weather of winter doesn’t last very long though, so the annuals have to move through their life cycle quickly. These plants sprout up leaves, display their showy flowers, then produce and disperse their seeds in just a month or two before they dry up in the heat of the oncoming summer. Springtime is also when many of the perennial shrubs are blooming. In many cases, these widely dispersed shrubs add a hue of color (often yellow) that covers entire landscapes here in the desert. Larrea tridentata (creosote bush) and Encelia farinosa (brittlebush) were especially common and colorful across the desert valleys and washes.

Here’s what I mean about those yellow-flowering desert shrubs. These Encelia farinosa (brittlebush) turned some desert washes into rivers of golden color this spring.

Spring has also been a great time to see wildlife in the Mojave, as the animals have been out and moving around in order to take advantage of the comfortable weather and the abundance of food made available by new plant growth. Accompanying the appearance of showy flowers has been a diverse host of pollinators: bees, wasps, beetles, lots of butterflies, and the always charming hummingbirds. Reptiles have been out in full force as well. In the last month I’ve seen four desert tortoises, hundreds of lizards, and my first two snakes of the year (including the first rattlesnake that has actually rattled at me, after five previous encounters with silent rattlers). And, of course, it is always fun to see mammals. Young ground squirrels, cottontails, and jackrabbits have been scampering around everywhere, and we’ve seen the occasional coyote hoping to make a meal of the slower youngsters. Last week I spotted a group of desert bighorn sheep, including one small lamb. That’s only the second time I’ve been able to see these secretive animals, though I suspect that on many more occasions they have watched me silently and suspiciously from high up on the mountain slopes they call home.

Speaking of wildlife, do you know what this is!? This is a red-spotted toad! I like amphibians a lot, they are great animals. There are toads that can make it out here in the desert, near seasonal springs, by hibernating underground during the dry season (which is pretty much all year). I really wanted to see one of these guys, and this spring I finally did!

And now, I’ll just throw more pictures of cool wildflowers at you:

Recognize this one? There were lots of lupines that bloomed this spring, along roadsides, near washes, and all over the desert. This particular species is Lupinus arizonicus (Arizona lupine).

And here’s a different lupine. I love these plants. They have great flowers.

Alright, here’s a test. Who knows what this plant is? I wrote a whole blog about it a few months ago. I promised pictures of flowers when they showed up…

…and now that they’ve finally showed up, aren’t these flowers fantastic! The answer is, of course, Fouquieria splendens (ocotillo). This is one of the classic plants of the Sonoran Desert to the south.

This one is a pretty little plant. Mimulus bigelovii (Bigelow’s monkeyflower). I think of monkeyflowers as a plant of wet, moist places. But here, they grow in washes that are dry most of the year. Such is the hardiness of desert plants.

One more unique, little, annual flower. This one belongs to Eremalche rotundifolia (desert fivespot).

It doesn’t last long, but the spring here is wonderful. If you are ever near a desert in springtime, you should make the effort to go out and see it. The life that can spring forth from this typically dry and forbidding place is amazing!

But if you’re living in the desert, you better enjoy the spring while it lasts! Because summer is following close behind, and if you’re not careful, you could end up like this.

Thanks for reading! Until next time!

-Steve

Needles Field Office, BLM