I have made several trips to one of my favorite haunts, after the Chiricahua Mountains, Sycamore Canyon in the Pajarito Mountains of Arizona. I mentioned one of my trips there in an earlier diary (www.dailykos.com/...), but I went back several times during my career, including twice as part of an organized field trip during a national meeting of museum and zoo curators in Rio Rico and Tucson. I never was disappointed by my visits to this biodiverse part of the arid Southwest. The existence of permanent water in the creek flowing south into Mexico made this area a mecca for all sorts of biota, including 95 species of nesting birds (See: aziba.org/...)
In the trip I mentioned, I (probably rather inadvisedly) hiked the canyon alone as far south toward Mexico as I could go. It was a beautiful, if warm, summer day and the canyon beckoned me on into deep wilderness. As I walked along the creek I occasionally heard the plop of frogs and sometimes saw them. These were the rare Tarahumara frogs (Lithobates tarahumarae) and possibly a few local leopard frogs. This was in the early 1970s and after 1984 Tarahumara frogs were not seen in the canyon for decades. This actually remained the case until 2014 when over 285 were released into the creek by the Arizona Game and Fish Department.
I was on an arachnological collecting trip and so looked under rocks (which I carefully replaced) and used my sweep net to find spiders especially. My rock turning turned up a nice fat western black widow (Latrodectus hesperus), as I recall, and my sweepnetting produced new records for the eastern US ant-mimicking jumping spider Sarinda hentzi and the Mexican jumping spider Phidippus tux, the latter being the first found in the United States. However the creek finally narrowed into a sheet of water over bare rock and I felt that could go no farther. As I said in my earlier post it was easy to became a part of the landscape in this canyon. No sound save birds, frogs, insects and my own footfalls interrupted my hike. Years later the wife of one of my instructors for a short course in parasitic Hymenoptera at The University of Maryland got lost in the maze of side canyons and although she eventually emerged, by the time she did so the authorities were searching for her. It is a remote canyon.
Later I joined several field trips during Invertebrates in Captivity conferences (gatherings of zoo and museum people who use invertebrates in their outreach programs) and revisited the canyon. One time it was flooded by recent rains and our group had to wade in the water to get very far down the canyon. The other time the canyon was dryer and we went some distance down it. During these trips I found the jumping spider Zygoballus rufipes (another eastern species) and we were attacked by no-see-ums (biting midges in the family Ceratopogonidae). On the way to the canyon on the last trip we spotted a vine snake (Oxyobelis aeneus) crossing the road and found a Sonoran mud turtle (Kinosternon sonoriense) in a deeper part of the creek. Near Peña Blanca Lake on the road to the canyon I was scolded by a pair of common black hawks (Buteogallus anthracinus), a bird that I did not hear or see again until I visited the Northern Range on the Caribbean island of Trinidad.
The vegetation of Sycamore Canyon is also quite fascinating as it includes such rarities outside the tropics or subtropics as ball moss (Tillandsia recurvata), an epiphytic bromeliad. I never found a specimen, but then I really was not looking for them. I did get a photo of the beautiful Firecrackerbush (Bouvardia ternifolia.) The surrounding rolling hills and the canyon itself are among the most diverse in terms of flora with over 600 species of vascular plants according to Laurence J. Toolin, Thomas R. Van Devender and Jack M. Kaiser (The Flora of Sycamore Canyon, Pajarito Mountains, Santa Cruz County, Arizona, published in 1979.) I might note that Tom Van Devender was an associate of mine during my University of Arizona days.
Still, I now think it best to just stay out of such areas, except perhaps on very rare occasions. I am with E. O. Wilson on this. Half the earth should be consigned to the wild, but I well know that it won’t be. A large number of humans, by their nature, cannot leave things alone. Still some areas, such as the Camino del Diablo, may resist colonization by being totally resistant to human habitation, but all will be affected by climate change and pollution, as well as any ill-conceived border wall that might be erected there.
Unfortunately I have few photographs from my time spent in the vast areas of the Borderlands, other than the Chiricahua Mountains, but I will always remember my time there and consider it very well spent.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins