Vegas Boondoggle Part 2: Washes & Swifts

About 100 or so miles later, I followed a rolling dirt road through the desert night until I came to a long steep downhill. I couldn’t see ahead in the dark, but the drop indicated the descent into Beaver Dam Wash. I dropped into the wash, crossed a (surprisingly) fast-running stream, pulled over by some cottonwoods and stopped for the night. I slept under the brightest stars I remembered seeing in years, listening to the rushing water 20 feet away, and watching shooting stars until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. In the morning I woke* a little while before sunrise, and felt- for the first time in a while- like myself.

*In my lazy middle age I’ve taken to camping in the open with stove, lighter, coffee & pot o’ water 3 feet from my head. No middle-aged camper should have to extricate him/herself from a sleeping bag before the first sip of coffee.

Side Note: 2 years ago, during Monocot Week, following my failed attempt on Mormon Peak, I drove backroads for about 2 hours to reconnect with pavement in Utah on the West slope of the Beaver Dam Mtns. It was a long drive, I was tired, and in a let’s-get-this-done mood. But about 10 miles from pavement, the land before me fell away into a deep draw, lined by lush, leafed-out cottonwoods- the first bright green I’d seen in a full day. The road wound down to the bottom, into the trees, and across the running stream in the bottom. As I drove across I leaned my head out the open window and saw dozens of tadpoles scattering away from my rolling tires. I thought about stopping and exploring, but I had a long drive back to Salt Lake and kept going, arriving home late that evening.

The next morning I awoke, thought of the cottonwoods and the tadpoles, and immediately regretted not stopping. I’d been thinking about going back to Beaver Dam Wash ever since.

I spent about an hour exploring and poking around, walking through the little forest of cottonwoods and willows alongside the stream. I’m always struck by 2 things in desert cottonwood groves. The first is how leafy green trees that seem so ordinary and ubiquitous in parks or suburbs or Eastern forests seem so absolutely wonderful and garden-of-eden-like in the desert- each grove a little oasis of coolness and color. The second is how dramatic the division is between the forested riparian zone and the adjacent desert. It’s as if you can walk back and forth between worlds. One moment you’re picking your way through cottonwoods and willows, 20 steps later you’re walking past Joshua trees and creosote.

Side Note: About a year and a half ago I blogged about the 3 levels of the St. George area- Floor, Bench and Mesa. Beaver Dam Wash, and other nearby low areas such as the Virgin River Gorge, are a 4^th level, a weird underworld. And there are really at least 2 more levels going up, either in the Pine Valley Mountains, or onto the Markagunt Plateau behind Zion.

Eventually I loaded back up, drove back across the wash…

and worked my way into St. George, where I caught up on calls and email*, before continuing East and up, through Hurricane, Apple Valley and onto Little Creek Mountain.

*Because yes, I was working. This wasn’t a vacation day. It was a travel day. Remember, it isn’t a boondoggle if you’re taking the day off.

I’ve blogged a couple of times about Little Creek, and I always love riding and exploring there. This time I had the helmet cam with me, so you can get a little feel for the place. This clip is some of the windy singletrack out onto the North rim.

And this clip, while not great biking footage, takes you through the “big trees”- an area where relic ponderosas grow out of cracks and crevices across a weird, wide pink sandstone draw. I’ve never come across any other place quite like this

When I first rode Little Creek I was guided by the trail-builders, who told me only about 20 people had ridden the mesa. Today that’s not the case. Though much less visited than nearby Gooseberry Mesa, Little Creek gets ridden regularly, and this last year actual signs have been placed at a couple of key trail junctions. But there’s about a mile of trail that almost never gets ridden, and which I always ride when I visit.

Originally the Harris brothers intended the trail to go clear to the South Rim* of the mesa. But about a mile from the rim they reached a sandy area that never packed in well. Around this time another local trail-builder** put in a trailhead-rim connector that turned the Harris bros. trail into a loop, and this loop became the main trail. But the loop left off about a mile-long stub of excellent trail that was soon forgotten, and now hardly gets ridden. When I rode it 2 weeks ago, there wasn’t a tire-track on it. When I rode it again this past weekend, there was one, very faint set in spots- mine.

*Years ago I had some time to kill and poked around old 4WD tracks till I found a way to the South Rim. Beautiful views South into Arizona, and a pleasant rim to walk, or possibly bike, in spots.

**The former proprietor of Bike Zion, Dean Whatshisbucket…

The Stub was never well-marked to begin with, and now, with nearly a decade of no traffic, it’s even harder to follow. When I ride it, I do so with my mind fully engaged, looking for present-day clues, and yet drawing connections out of memory at the same time, remembering a particular ramp, or tree, or crevice. You can’t just look for the trail, and you can’t just remember it- you have to look and remember, at the same time.

Looking and remembering- particularly when alone- gives you a weird out-of-time feeling. Am I thinking about now or 10 years ago? Usually we think about one or the other. We’re thinking about say, work, or what we need to pick up for dinner, and then for whatever reason we shift gears and think about last summer’s vacation, or the girl we took to the prom for a bit, before jumping back to the present. We don’t usually think- and think hard- about present and past at the same time, much less ride a semi-technical trail at the same time. That’s why I like the Stub. It breaks the mold of my thinking.

The Stub’s an out-and-back, and when it rejoins the main loop, the trail drops down to, joins, and then follows the rim for a ways. There are a series of open terraces here, where I like to stop for a snack and a view West into the Virgin River Gorge, and the Virgin and Mormon Mountains beyond, my mind cleared from the Stub. I sat down on the warm rock, no one else around… except for- whoosh!- the sudden slicing of wind a dozen feet from my head. If you’ve spent time hiking or climbing in the West, you know what I’m talking about- those crazy, swooping, super-fast “swallows” that always show up out of nowhere when you’re on some exposed peak. Only they’re not swallows; they’re Swifts.

Swifts are a worldwide family (Apodidae) of some 90+ species of birds that look more or less like swallows, but aren’t at all closely-related, and in fact aren’t even Passerines, or perching birds, but are more closely-related to hummingbirds. Their resemblance to swallows is an example of convergent evolution; both make a living by catching and consuming insects in mid-air. The Swifts I watched on Little Creek, and which you’ve almost certainly seen*, were White-Throated Swifts, Aeronautes saxatalis, the most common swift in Western North America.

*Assuming that is that you’ve spent some time on high peaks and exposed ridges in the Western US. And if you haven’t, well really, what are you waiting for?

Side Note: Passerines, order Passeriformes are the “perching birds”, so named for their common foot architecture- 3 toes forward, 1 backward, which allows them to easily perch on branches. They’re sometimes called the “songbirds”, but since they also include things like the corvids- which definitely do not sing- that’s not really accurate. Pigeons, buntings, cardinals, icterids, sparrows, finches, wrens, robins, thrushes and the majority of birds you’re probably familiar with are all passerines, descended from a common ancestor some 55-60 million years ago*. Today they comprise some 6,000 of the world’s >10,000 species of birds.

*Guess where it might have lived? That’s right – Gondwanaland!

Swifts (pic left, not mine) are beautiful flyers, breathtakingly fast and maneuverable. Their boomerang-shaped wings provide strong, quick lift, and their short forked (usually closed) tails enable rapid changes of direction. They can remain aloft not just for hours- but even days (while migrating) and even, apparently, months, in the case of the European Common Swift, Apus apus. Swifts dine on the wing; migrating swifts pick up the food they need while in flight. European Common Swifts migrate annually to North Africa, and it’s believed that they sleep in flight, and possibly never land for as long as 9 months!

Extra detail: Their inner wing feathers produce most of the lift from the wing-stroke, while the outer feathers generate the forward propulsion.

White-throated Swifts (pic rleft, not mine) do land to sleep, but never voluntarily on the ground. Their short weak legs and specialized feet* aren’t suitable for either walking or branch-perching, but rather for hanging/clinging to walls, cliff faces and wires. Because their nesting sites- which are large and communal- are typically in inaccessible cliff-sites, not as much is known about their family lives as is known about many other common birds. Their actual nests are half-cups constructed of twigs and plant matter cemented together and to the cliff-wall by the bird’s saliva, which hardens, epoxy-like, when dry. They’re thought to be the fastest-flying birds in North America, regularly cruising at 30-40 MPH, and hitting top speeds estimated at anywhere from 130-200 MPH.

*4 toes, all facing forward.

Extra Detail: The nests of some Asian species (specifically Swiftlets) are the main ingredient in Bird’s Nest Soup. There are a number of other Swiftlet species- again in Asia- that use echolocation- sonar- to help navigate in the dark, cave-like recesses of their communal nesting sites. And recently it’s been discovered that at least two species hunt insects at dusk using echolocation to hunt insects at night, just like a bats.

Tangent: This brings up something that has always bugged me- why aren’t there more echo-locating, night-flying, insect-hunting birds? There are about 1,100 different species of bats- something like ¼ of all mammal species- the majority (3/4) of which use echolocation to hunt insects. But among birds sonar appears rare and/or limited in use and function. Why? Or let me turn it around another way: Why are there bats at all, anyway?

You may well have heard the standard “reason” why bats don’t fly in the day: Because hawks- and other birds- prey upon them*. This in turn raises the question of why we have birds preying on bats instead of the other way around (on the ground, mammals routinely prey upon birds), to which the answer may be in part that birds just fly a lot better, due maybe to their feathers, superior lungs, different musculature** and/or vision.

*I’m not sure this is the case, BTW Maybe bats haven’t evolved into bat-raptors is because birds filled those niches first. I don’t think there were many (any?) large mammalian carnivores until the dinosaurs disappeared, creating opportunities for entelodonts and such… Maybe, just maybe, if all the birds in the world suddenly dropped dead tomorrow of Killer Bird Flu, in a couple million years the skies would be patrolled by soaring Bat-Eagles. Or maybe not. Just thinking aloud here…

**Bats “flap” like we do; pectoral muscles pull the arm down, and deltoids pull it back up. Birds have 2 different sets of pecs, one for the downstroke, one for the upstroke, and the 2 muscles overlay each other and are both firmly anchored to the keel of the bird’s breastbone. The up-pulling pecs are connected to the back/shoulder of the wind by a tendon routed through a special groove.

Whatever the case, let’s assume birds fly better than mammals/bats. So why aren’t there hundreds of different species, worldwide, of echo-locating, night-flying, insect-eating birds? Birds have evolved into almost every other niche imaginable: waterfowl, raptors, penguins, vultures, loons, hummingbirds- you name it. Why no (or rather so few) bat-lifestyle-birds? And if birds are such better flyers than bats, you’d think they’d totally out-compete them by night as well as day, and there’d be, well, no bats, right?

The obvious explanation would seem to be that, for whatever reason, birds don’t or can’t evolve sonar as readily as mammals. Why not? Can they not make the sounds? That’s hard to imagine. As we’ve already seen, syrinx-equipped birds are far more vocally capable than the vast grunting majority of mammals. Maybe they can’t hear the sounds? At first thought, this idea seems to have a bit more legs. Mammals and bird ears are both evolved in part from “spare” (re-purposed) bones in the reptilian jaw, but they evolved independently and along different architectures. Maybe ours is better? But that doesn’t hold up either; think of owls, and their amazing, directionally-sensitive hearing, capable of detecting a mouse scuffling through the grass…

I even thought of faces. Bats have crazy-ugly faces (pic left, not mine), with all kinds of weird bumps and ridges, that serve to funnel/directionalize ultrasonic peeps. Maybe the face of a bird I less morphologically “plastic” and can’t easily develop the features and contours to optimize sonar performance. But then, when you think about ducks, auks and turkeys, birds do seem to have a fair amount of facial variation. The whole bird-bat/day-night thing just bugs me.

Anyway, here’s another thing about Swifts: they are almost impossible to photograph. They’re always flying, and flying fast; they never sit or perch or hang or pose anyplace you’re likely to see them. Here’s my best shot- lame, I know:

And here’s the only helmet-cam video I managed to catch- watch the top of the screen at 0:05.

I love watching Swifts, and when I do there are always 2 head-scratchers I always wonder about*. The first is- how far ahead do they see the insect they’re trying to catch? Think about it. We know birds have awesome vision, but they’re flying along at maybe 30 – 50 MPH, and the bugs they’re catching are tiny. How far ahead do they see them? 10 feet? 50? 100? And how do they react in time to alter their flight course and catch them?

*Besides the whole tangential bird-bat-sonar thing, I mean.

Which in turn brings me to the second thing: how fast do Swifts think? They move so fast, and react, and change course, speed and direction so quickly, faster than we can practically register that they’re even around. I’m not suggesting they’re thinking about art or literature or anything, but what must it be like to think, decide, react and perceive reality that fast? Usually I feel a bit smug when comparing my mental faculties to those of another animal. But when I think of Swifts I feel slow, dense and heavy, both physically and mentally.

I packed up and rolled on along the rim, through the woodlands, across the slickrock and eventually back to the trailhead for the long drive home. As I loaded up and headed out I found myself thinking wistfully, as I always do when leaving Little Creek, that I’d like to get back down sooner rather than later.

Which, as it turns out, is exactly what I did.

Next up: Oodles of singletrack, slickrock, exposure and helmet-cam video filler!

Vegas Boondoggle Part 1: Daggers & Moths

I only have a few strict rules about work to which I hold myself, but one of them is this: If I am ever offered the opportunity to travel to Las Vegas for work, I take it. I absolutely love Vegas.

On the face of it, this may seem odd. I never gamble. I don’t even like lotteries. I don’t like giant hotels, or strip/sprawl development, or buffets, or Vegas-style shows, or has-been music/comedy stars*.

*Ever wonder what happened to “Carrot Top”? He’s in Vegas, on about 50+ billboards all over town.

But I love the Mojave desert. And Vegas is smack-dab in the middle of, and has wonderfully easy access to, the Mojave. And it’s just a day’s drive away from Salt Lake, and in between the two are St. George and Little Creek and Gooseberry and the Virgin, Pine Valley and Mormon ranges and endless Joshua tree forests and about a zillion other cool places and things I’ve blogged about. So anytime I get invited to Vegas, I load up the car with bike/hike/camping gear and make a boondoggle out of it.

I have 2 tangents here. One is light-hearted and cheerful, the other pissed-off and angry. I can’t decide between the 2, so I’m doing both.

Happy Tangent: There’s a weird-but-cool thing that makes Vegas a great outdoorhead destination: Very Few Outdoorheads. Seriously, you get 30 minutes outside of Vegas, and there’s like hardly anyone hiking/biking. It’ll be 75 degrees, flowers blooming, great trails, no one around, and I think that the reason for this is that Vegas by and large, does not attract outdoor-oriented residents*.

*I know. Shocking. How do I come up with these insights?

Think of Boulder, Colorado. The place is mobbed with outdoorheads. Any official/legal trail within 10 miles of Boulder is packed on a weekend. Outdoorheads are attracted to the wonderful setting, climate, lifestyle and recreational opportunities offered by the Boulder area, and the Colorado Front Range in general, creating a spillover effect such that everyplace from the JeffCo open space parks to Fruita and Moab is packed with Front Range outdoorheads. But Vegas isn’t an outdoor Mecca. You never hear of people moving to Vegas for access to nature and the outdoor lifestyle. As a result, the backcountry around Vegas is often wonderfully and pleasantly “under-populated.” While not exactly empty, it seems to have visitation loads of a metro area maybe 1/10^th the size. You know what? If I had to leave Salt Lake, Vegas would be near the top of my list.

Angry Tangent: I’m not anti-gambling- I just have no interest in it. I get that millions of people enjoy it, even though I don’t understand why, thereby placing it in the same category for me as golf and reality TV shows.

I am however, very much anti-lottery. Not because of the gambling aspect, but in that it represents a fundamental breakdown of democracy. I’m serious. Societies- all societies- work by pooling resources for common benefit. In any society people have arguments about what resources should be pooled and what common benefit should be distributed to whom. Today in our society this manifests itself in everything from defense spending to healthcare reform, but no one except the most extreme whackos disagrees that there should be some common benefit- even it’s just police, defense or prisons- funded by some pooling of resources- be it property, income (progressive or flat), sales, VAT or head taxes, or just user fees.

In a democratic society, the citizens agree that these tough decisions are determined by the voters, or, more often, their elected representatives. And so we have all sorts of political/election struggles to determine who gets what services, who will pay for those services and how.

But a lottery represents the failure of a democracy to determine that mix of revenues and services. A lottery says, “Hey, raising money (i.e. taxes) is too hard. Let’s sell raffle tickets, and hope some people buy them.” And buy them they do. Overwhelmingly, the people who buy the bulk of them are the poor, the uneducated, the desperate, the addicted, or sometimes, just the plain dumb. Lotteries are a perversion of the American Dream- a parasitic feeding upon the weakest, least capable segments of society by a self-interested, self-entitled, lazy electorate.

Nested Tangent: Particularly insidious is when lotteries are promoted specifically for things like schools, or parks. “Oh!” we say, “We need lotteries to help pay for schools!” Give me a break. Think schools are important? Then pay some damn taxes for them. No one holds lotteries to build aircraft carriers.

Oo- good tangents! I feel much better. Hey, speaking of parasitism, that’s one of the themes of today’s post.

The Vegas boondoggle sounded like a little bit better idea before our Mexican vacation; Sunday night when we returned home, the idea of jumping in the car Monday AM sounded a little less appealing. But I’d packed before leaving for Mexico*, and once I was rolling down I-15, it seemed like a good idea again.

*Although I am generally a disorganized slob in most aspects of my life, when it comes to road trip preparation I am the model of planning, efficiency and foresight.

Until I reached Parowan, and the weather changed. Here’s what the view out the windshield looked like just South of Cedar City.

Down, down I drove through the rain, past Toquerville, Leeds and Washington. But a mile or two before St. George, I passed out of the rain, and the roads and trails were dry as a bone. I made pit-stop to ride my old favorite, Barrel Roll, and then another pit stop to make a quick run up & down Bearclaw Poppy trail (which I included a clip of in this post.) A couple of hours later I checked into the weirdness of a Las Vegas mega-hotel, where I worked away till the wee hours on my presentation for the next day.

I wrapped up my work duties the next day by early afternoon, excused myself and headed out toward Blue Diamond. Blue Diamond is a weird-but-charming little hamlet, with a single general store, only about 25 miles from Las Vegas. It sits in a small vale alongside a creek, surrounded by desert hills sprinkled with Joshua Trees, Creosote and Yucca, and consists mainly of modest homes shaded by tall Cottonwoods. It’s historically been home to workers at the nearby gypsum mine, although in recent years a few upscale homes have been built by newcomers around the periphery. Still, the town feels like a modest, unassuming little oasis in the desert, worlds away from the sprawl and lights of the nearby Strip.

Side Note: Unfortunately, the sprawl is working its way closer. When I first started visiting the area in the late 90’s, development ended about a mile or two West of I-15 along US160. Today the development continues for about 10 miles West. The Red Rock conservation area provides a bit of a buffer, but you definitely get the feeling that the wave of sprawl is rolling towards Blue Diamond.

Blue Diamond is the Northern hub of a network of single-track linking into Cottonwood Valley to the South. I parked just outside of town and started working my way counterclockwise around the hills to the South of Blue Diamond. I didn’t have a map, but sort of hunted and pecked my way over to the South side of the hills, where I came across a local rider- let’s call him Fast Fred*. Fast Fred took me for a guided tour of one of his favorite regular loops, of which you can see a quick segment here, rolling through and around Joshua Trees and other Yuccas on fast singletrack.

*Because he smoked my ass on the descent. You know how it is. You run into a local rider and he offers to guide you for a bit, and you wonder if you’ll be able to hang with him. On the climb it was no problem; I kept right up and cleaned everything. “Oh hey,” I thought, “no problem.” Then we started descending and he left me behind like a one-eyed nun driving a Volkswagen bus up Parley’s.

After our lap together, Fast Fred gave me some route recommendations for the ride back to town, sending me up and over the hills on a rocky, technical, slow-but-fun, winding ascent. Up top the lightly-traveled trail rolled along the ridges. Here’s a quick clip:

Apologies for in the in & out of shadow/contrast thing, but I included this clip because I wanted to show something: Yucca. At first glance, there are some taller, branching yuccas that look like Joshua Trees. But when you look more closely, you can see that they’re not. The leaves are too long, and there’s never more than one branch, and they don’t get nearly as tall. They’re a different species of tree-ish Yucca, Spanish Dagger, or Yucca schidegera.

There are some 40 species of Yucca, all native to the New World, mostly to Mexico and the Southwestern US. There’s some debate as to whether some/all yuccas are technically succulent, but like Cacti, they use CAM photosynthesis to thrive in hot, arid climates. But they evolved their CAM-ability completely independently, and the 2 aren’t closely-related. Cacti are dicots, and so more closely related to everything from oaks to roses. Yuccas are monocots, and so more closely-related to things like grasses and palms.

Spanish Dagger fascinates me because it seems an in-between. It’s evolved its way up off the ground, and started to branch. But it’s not that tall, and it never seems to branch more than once. It sort of seems to be following the same evolutionary path, though not yet as far along, as the Joshua Tree. But that’s not the Cool Thing I want to blog about. In fact I have 3 Cool Things I want to blog about, and they all have to do with the relationships between Yuccas and Yucca Moths.

All About Yucca Moths

Two years ago, back during Monocot Week (Man was that a great week or what?), I blogged about the most impressive yucca, the Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia. In that post I mentioned the cool mutualistic relationship between the Joshua tree, and its one pollinator, the Yucca Moth, Tegeticula synthetica. It’s a cool story, in that the Yucca Moth doesn’t just pollinate the flower by accident, but actually makes an apparently deliberate detour to deposit a laboriously-accumulated ball of pollen on the stigma. The tree in turn provides shelter and food to the moth larvae, who consume a modest portion of the plant’s fruit.

But Joshua trees aren’t the only yuccas pollinated by Yucca Moths; all yuccas are. And as I’ve learned more about Yuccas and Yucca Moths, it turns out that their story is even more fascinating and multidimensional than I originally thought. To explain the story, and how totally cool it is, I need to share some info about Yucca Moths. It’s a bit geeky, but stick with it because it winds up somewhere really cool.

Until the late 1990’s, there were believed to be just 3 species of Yucca Moth, all within the genus Tegeticula*. The first was/is T. synthetica, which pollinates Joshua Trees (and nothing else.) The second was/is T. maculata, which pollinates Chaparral Yucca (Y. shipplei). And the third was T. yuccasella, which pollinated all kinds of different yucca species. T. yuccasella seemed to have different forms, or races, that specialized in different species of yucca.

*Just to complicate things, there’s another genus of Yucca Moths, Parategeticula, but I’m leaving those alone for this post.

In the late 1990’s, researchers determined that what had previously been considered T. yuccasella was in fact 13 different species, all descended from a common ancestor species that lived 2 or 3 million years ago. And a number of these species pollinate just a single yucca species. Spanish Dagger for instance, is pollinated by a single species, T. mojavella, which in turn lays its eggs in the flowers of Spanish Dagger, and no other yucca. This in turn leads to a number of interesting things, including Three Really Cool Things. Here’s a quick example of an Interesting Thing, before we get to the First Really Cool Thing:

In the clip above, you also see a number of other yuccas that are stuck firmly on the ground, with no “trunk” to speak of. Many of these are Banana Yucca, Yucca baccata, which is pollinated by its own Yucca Moth, T. baccatella (pic right, not mine). Now sometimes, Spanish Dagger and Banana Yucca (also called Spanish Bayonet- cool name, eh?) hybridize. How is that possible?

T. mojavella (the Spanish Dagger pollinator) has never ever been found in a Banana Yucca flower. But every once in a blue moon, a T. baccatella will be found in a Spanish Dagger Flower, enabling the transfer of pollen between the 2 species.

Tangent: This may sound trivial, but it’s actually pretty cool. For whatever reason, some tiny proportion of Banana Yucca Moths have started visiting Spanish Dagger flowers. Now let’s say that the BY Moths that did so experienced slightly greater reproduction as a result. There could be more and more of these “promiscuous” moths, which could promote widespread hybridization between the two yuccas, and eventually drive both species- which are largely sympatric*- to genotypic extinction.

*Same range.

I’m not saying that’s what’s happening here, but the fact that such crossover does occasionally occur give you a glimpse of a range of possibilities, and makes you wonder how often events like this change the course of species evolution.

First Cool Thing

OK, let’s get to the cool stuff. The First Really Cool Thing is this: Of the 13 “new” species, 2 are cheaters. That is, they lay their eggs in/on yucca fruit, but they don’t pollinate the flowers. They’re closely-related to, and descended from, Yucca Moths that do pollinate the flowers, but at some point in the last couple million years, their ancestors just said, “ah, screw it…”* and started blowing off the little pollination side trip.

*I’m not suggesting they consciously decided to quit pollinating. Rather at some point a genetic change occurred which caused a Yucca Moth not to pollinate a flower, and the moth reproduced successfully and passed that new tendency to its descendants.

When you think about the dynamics at work here, it makes your head spin. From the cheater-species standpoint, the shift to cheating is a winner; less work, but still reap all the benefits. And in fact DNA analysis appears to show that cheating in the 2 cheater species evolved independently, meaning that cheating has evolved multiple times. But there’s a catch. The cheaters are absolutely reliant upon the non-cheaters to propagate the species; without non-cheaters, the host yuccas would die out*. So what balance exists- and how is it maintained- between cheaters and non-cheaters? Why would any one species not cheat? Isn’t it mind-boggling?

*Although this would take quite some time- maybe centuries or longer- as yuccas also reproduce asexually by root-cloning.

Side Note: Cheating also happens in Fig Wasps, BTW.

Second Cool Thing

And this leads us to the Second Really Cool Thing. Yuccas sometimes host other insects beside moths and their larvae, including aphids, and ants. The Soaptree Yucca, Y. eleta, often hosts populations of Wood Ants, one of a number of species belonging to the genus Formica. Soaptree Yuccas are often parasitized by the Cheater Yucca Moth T. corruptrix (pic right, not mine). But Soaptree Yuccas which house/host Wood Ants suffer far lower rates of T. corruptrix parasitism than those without Wood Ants. And yet the presence of Wood Ants doesn’t negatively impact the presence of Soaptree Yucca’s “legitimate”, non-cheating species of Yucca Moth, T. elatella! How can this be?

Extra Detail: “How it can be” isn’t 100% clear, but a likely reason is that non-cheater moths lay eggs in flowers, while cheaters often just lay directly in (already fertilized) fruit. The Wood Ants tend to hang out more in fruit than they do in the flowers.

So the Wood Ant and the Soaptree Yucca are exhibiting another, indirect, layer of mutualism beyond the Moth-Yucca mutualism. The complexity of relationships going in these spiky shrubs is really amazing.

Third Cool Thing

But, as I so often do in these endless run-on posts, I have saved the best for last, which brings us to the Third and Final Really Cool Thing: Sometimes, the yuccas cheat.

Back to our old friend, Banana Yucca. The Yucca Moth benefits from the relationship by laying eggs in the flowers, which develop into larvae that feed on the ovules. The ovules are the larva’s only food source. But some number of Banana Yuccas sprout flowers with large numbers of non-viable ovules, in which the larvae are unable to locate the (relatively few) viable ovules, and starve. In fact, 70% of individual Banana Yucca plants appear to cheat in this way; they receive the pollination benefits of the relationship, but they don’t feed the larvae. That means that only 30% of the plants are producing the pollinators needed by the other 70%!

The same boggling dynamics are at work here as are at play with the cheater moths, but reversed; the Cheater Plants can’t survive without Non-Cheater Plants to propagate the pollinators, but for any given plant, the better deal is to cheat. So, again, what balance exists- and how is it maintained- between cheaters and non-cheaters? And again- isn’t it mind-boggling?

I didn’t know this until later, after I’d gotten curious and researched a bit more about yuccas and moths. On my long run back down into Blue Diamond, I rather thought more about how darn sharp yuccas are, as I repeatedly scratched legs and arms on those encroaching upon the narrow trails. There’s a long-standing maybe-urban myth about a mtn biker some years back around Moab who fell on a yucca, sliced open his jugular and bled to death. The tale in mind, I was a bit more cautious than usual on the gravelly descent.

Back at the car I loaded up, washed up, and drove off in the waning light, North into the desert.

Note about Sources: Big thanks to my friend and fellow nature-blogger KB for help in corralling several of the sources for this post. The information about cheater moths and their relationships to non-cheater species came largely from this paper. The info about indirect mutualism between Wood Ants and Soaptree Yucca came from this paper. And my source for the cheating Banana Yucca was this paper.

Race Camp Part 2: Singletrack Hooky with Tyler2

Four helmet-cam videos in this post. First two are a bit geeky, second two rock.

The days at Race Camp were spent on the road of course, but it’s just too wrong to come down to St. George and not bring the mtn bike, so Thursday AM I snuck out early and hit Barrel Roll. I blogged about this trail over a year ago in my Botany of St. George Series. Here’s a ~5 minute-long helmet-cam clip. Almost all the shrubs on this stretch are Blackbrush or one of 2 species of Mormon Tea- Ephedra Viridis and E. Torreyana. The Viridis is bright green, and broom-like, with the stems all pointed up. The Torreyana is a light blue-green, usually lower to the ground, and the stems stick out at all kinds of angles. If you watch closely, you can easily pick the 2 out.

Or don’t, and just watch the clip for a singletrack fix. I don’t care, it’s just filler. But isn’t it pretty?

Video #1 Notes

The day before it rained, so the air was super-clear on this ride. The snow-dusted mountains in the distance right when the clip starts are the Beaver Dam Mountains. The lower slopes on the far side of the range are studded with Joshua trees. Soon (about 0:10) the Entrada sandstone cliffs of Snow Canyon swing into view to the North/Northwest. Entrada is the smooth, (usually) reddish sandstone layer which occurs above the Navajo formation. The fabulous arches of Arches National Park and the hoodoos of Goblin Valley are carved out of it, and if you’ve ever ridden Bartlett Wash, you’ve pedaled on it. In general it’s not quite as high-traction as Navajo sandstone, but is often smoother.

At about 1:52 you can see the snowy Pine Valley Range to the North come into view on the left side of the screen, and to the right of Snow Canyon. At around 2:30 you’ll see a band of cliffs across the gorge in the low foreground. This is Land Ridge, atop which runs the Tempi’po’op trail, which I blogged about in the petroglyph post. A better view of Land Ridge appears at around 3:20.

On Saturday, after 3 days of hard road-riding, I and one other teammate- Tyler2 from last year’s High Uintas Classic- forsook the road and broke out the mtn bikes for a fast JEM/Hurricane/Gould Rim loop before the weather turned foul.

Tangent: I’m just curious- how many readers besides me played hooky in school? I did, just twice, both in 7th grade. One time we went bowling, the other I can’t remember what we did. The first time, my confederate and I- let’s call him “David Galante”- called in to school as each other’s mothers to excuse ourselves. (Why we didn’t just call in as our own mothers, I’m not sure- maybe at the time it seemed less scary to impersonate someone else’s mom.) Since neither of our voices had changed, the calls went fine.

The second time, I decided to blow off calling in, figuring (correctly) that the bureaucracy was to clumsy to track down a kid with no other (known) behavioral issues. But David called in, and the school secretary didn’t believe him. She hung up and called David’s house, immediately reaching his mother.

Nested Tangent: How does it work these days, what with caller-ID and all? Do kids still fake-call-in-sick as their parents? Where from? Do they have to swipe Mom’s phone?

Fortunately, David’s mother had both a quick mind and perhaps of a bit of criminal free-spirited streak as well, and covered for David, saying oh yes, that was me calling in… Cool mom. I wonder how David turned out…

We rode the loop counterclockwise, and in this first clip are riding South along Hurricane Rim, descending into China Wash.

Tangent: I love switching back and forth between road and mtn bikes. I find that after 3 or 4 days on one, the other feels fantastic- almost liberating. The road bike feels incredibly light and fast and precise after a few days on the mtb, while in the reverse case the mtb feels powerful, smooth and thrilling. I don’t get roadies who never mtb- don’t they get burned out? I’ve a bit more sympathy for mtbers who never road-ride (I was one for many years) but still love switching from one to the other.

Video #2 Notes

I blogged about this ride as the classic “Bench Level” ride in the Botany of St. George series. In that post I mentioned how one of the cool things about this ride is that it dips in and out of the botanical Mojave, as defined by the upper limit of creosote. The descent into China Wash is one of those transitions. At around 10 seconds in, you’ll see creosote- tall spindly shrubs with distinct olive-hued leaves- start to appear alongside the trail. As a reminder, this is the Mojave race of creosote, chromosomally hexaploid, with 78 chromosomes. The snow-covered mesa in the background is Gooseberry Mesa; behind and to the right is Little Creek Mountain.

OK, now for the good stuff. We descended to the Hurricane T/H, crossed highway 59 and picked our way up the jeep road to the Gould Rim trail. Up, up, up. We had to modify our route a bit to avoid some bad clay-mud, but eventually found our way up high on JEM trail, ready for the descent.

Video #3 Notes

The video starts in a small wash draining the cliff-band ringing the base-bench of Gooseberry Mesa. Soon we leave the wash, and at 1:35, as we roll off the end of an earthen “spine”, things get fast. Soils up here are clay, and still had enough moisture from storms earlier in the week to be hard-packed, tacky, and dust-free- pretty much perfect. At around 2:00, the cloud-capped range that appears in the background is the Pine Valley Range, possibly the world’s largest laccolith, as described in this post. We’re several hundred feet higher here than we were in the China Wash video, and you’ll notice there’s not a creosote bush in sight.

Wow! That was fun! We spent the next 15 minutes or so rapidly descending, then rolling, more of the same, until we arrived at the “cherry-stem” of the loop leading back to our vehicle. This stretch hugs the rim of a tributary-of-a-tributary, then the tributary, and finally the Virgin River Gorge itself.

Video #4 Notes

At about 30 seconds we start running along the first of the 3 rims (tributary-of-tributary). I’ve ridden this many times, but this was the first time I’d seen water running in the bottom. At around 2:00, as we start riding the second rim (tributary), I look back and down to the left at a small, muddy waterfall emerging from the mouth of the tributary-of-tributary we were just riding alongside.

The tributary soon joins the Virgin River Gorge proper, and at 3:25- the point of maximum exposure- you can see the rain & snowmelt-swollen Virgin River below.

Well, that was a fun vacation. Spring is around the corner. Can’t wait to get back down to the desert.

Meep! Meep! Everything I Knew About Roadrunners I Learned From the Cartoon

Saturday morning I was biking with the Twins in St. George. No, we weren’t mountain biking; St. George, and neighboring Santa Clara have a wonderful networks of paved bike paths running all over the place. They pass through neighborhoods and pretty open spaces featuring slickrock outcrops, lava fields and shrubland, and are perfect for a parent who wants to bike with his kids while not worrying about traffic.

Here’s a quick clip of a typical stretch of path. Most of the shrubs along here are Thread Snakeweed, Gutierrezia microcephala (also called “Matchweed), Winterfat, Ceratoides lanata (also called “White Sage”), or Spiny Hopsage, Grayia spinosa.

Early on in the ride we spotted this- a Roadrunner* (pic below, right).

*They move fast and don’t sit still for long. As such, only this photo is mine.

We got a good look at him zipping about, and the early wildlife sighting got the ride off to a good start. Now, when we spot wildlife as a family, I always try to tell the kids something interesting about whatever it is we’re seeing. With Bird Whisperer this is getting tough; it’s likely he already knows more about any bird or mammal we see than I do. But with the Twins I can still usually manage to impart a new factoid or two. So I thought about Roadrunners and what I knew about them, and as I did so realized that I knew the following “facts”, all of which I had gleaned from watching ‘Roadrunner” cartoons in my formative years:

1- Roadrunners have 3 toes per foot, 2 facing forward, 1 backward (see pic right).

2- Roadrunner run faster than coyotes.

3- Roadrunners cannot fly.

4- Roadrunners are herbivorous, subsisting primarily on birdseed.

5- Roadrunners say, “Meep! Meep!”

6- Roadrunners inhabit Monument Valley, Canyonlands National Park, and other areas of the Colorado Plateau Semi-Desert, as evidenced by the numerous and frequent sandstone monoliths appearing in the cartoons*.

*And which frequently play a role in the demise of the pursuing coyote.

So as you can see, I knew quite a bit about Roadrunners. Unfortunately, every single one of those “facts” is flat-out wrong.

Tangent: Was anybody else besides me rooting for the coyote? I never sought out the cartoon; it was one of several packed into the “Loony Tunes” hour I watched religiously every Saturday morning growing up. When a Roadrunner segment would come on I’d wince. Because I knew what was going to happen: the coyote would never catch him, and would die- and apparently be reincarnated*- like 10 times while trying, and the roadrunner would never get caught and he would always be all smug and snarky-like about it. And it wasn’t like the coyote wasn’t trying; he’d get some big box delivered from Acme, Inc. and he’d be all excited, the way I am when a box of bike parts shows up in the mail, and he’d come up with some catapult or rocket or giant spring but it just never worked out- usually for no good reason. As a perennial mechanical hack, my sympathies were firmly with the coyote**.

*Really, what was up with that? Was the coyote supposed to be a metaphor for Jesus or something? Or maybe he was just a precursor to Kenny in South Park…

**And still are, despite that biting incident.

But I could never look away. It always turned out the same, but each time, some little voice inside my 10 year-old head would say, “Maybe, just maybe, he’ll catch him this time! I can’t break away to pee or get another bowl of Quisp now- this could be it! I might miss it!” But of course it never turned out any different, and I think another little piece of my fragile 10 year-old soul died with each episode. Man, I hated that f$@#ing bird.

Wow, I started this tangent thinking it would be all light and whimsical, but it turned out kind of Nietzsche-meets-Janis-Joplin. That’s the thing with tangents- when I start them I really have no idea where they’re going.

All About Roadrunners

But I know where this post is going. The Greater Roadrunner, Geococcyx californianus (pic right, not mine), is common to the Southwestern US and Northern Mexico. It’s actually a Cuckoo, or more specifically, one of the 142 species of bird comprising Cuculidae, the Cuckoo Family. There are cuckoos of one sort or another all over the world, on every continent except Antarctica. If you know anything about Cuckoos you probably may be familiar with them as brood parasites, sneakily laying their eggs in the nests of other species, but most of the cuckoos involved in that monkey business are Old World Cuckoos*. Geococcyx is one of 4 genera in the subfamily Neomorphinae, or New World ground-cuckoos, and the Greater Roadrunner is the only member of this subfamily found in the US.

*The common avian brood parasite around here is the Brown-Headed Cowbird, which is not a cuckoo at all and which we checked out during Bird Feeder Week last January.

Side Note: The Lesser Roadrunner, G. velox, looks almost identical but a little smaller. It lives down in Mexico in a couple different areas, including the Yucatan Peninsula. So if you go to Cancun and do a day-trip to Chichen Itza, keep an eye out while driving that (phenomenally boring*) toll road to get there.

*The Northern Yucatan is flat as a pancake and covered in dry, view-obscuring, scrub forest. Driving solo across the peninsula in a VW Bug without radio or CD player- as I did several years ago- is mind-numbingly dull…

This brings us to the first bad “fact”. Roadrunners don’t have 3 toes; they have 4. The inner 2 toes face forward, while the outer 2 face back. This arrangement, called Zygodactly, is common to all members of the Cuckoo family but is not (quite) unique to them. It also occurs in parrots, woodpeckers and owls and seems to be an effective foot-form for grasping trunks, branches and twigs.

With roadrunners it’s been adapted to running, and, true to the cartoon, that’s what roadrunners do, usually preferring a sprint to flying.

Where the cartoon gets it wrong on the running part is around the bird’s relation to coyotes, or predators in general. Roadrunners (pic left, not mine) can sprint up to 18 – 20 MPH, but a sprinting coyote can beat 30MPH. So the scenes you see in the cartoon of the coyote closing in on the roadrunner, then the roadrunner saying “Meep! Meep!” and then kicking in the afterburners and leaving Wile E. behind are bunch of baloney. In the real world, a roadrunner being chased by a coyote will just fly away. Roadrunners aren’t great flyers; they don’t do it well or far, but they can get airborne for a few minutes, which is often all it takes to evade an oncoming canine.

But roadrunners overwhelmingly run (or jump) (vs. fly) to hunt. And this brings us to the fourth bad “fact”: Roadrunners are omnivores, and aggressive, skilled hunters. They routinely hunt small rodents, scorpions, tarantulas and small reptiles, including- get this- rattlesnakes! No, they’re not immune to the venom, just fast. And clever. Roadrunners are usually solitary birds, but they’ll often pair up to take on a rattler. One will feint and distract the snake while the other goes in and nabs it behind the head with its beak.

Once caught, the roadrunner dispatches its prey by repeatedly bashing its head in against a rock. Not quite like the cartoon, eh?

Roadrunners also regularly hunt at or around suburban bird feeders, preying upon smaller birds like swifts and swallows. They’ve even been observed leaping up out of hiding and nabbing low-flying birds in mid-air!

Also unlike the cartoon is their call, which not only is not “Meep! Meep!”, but is not anything remotely like it. It’s a repeated “cooing” on a declining scale, reminiscent of a Mourning Dove, but with a sort of gurgling undertone, like it needs to clear its throat. You can listen to it here if you’re curious.

Side Note: Speaking of Mourning Doves, I got this nice shot of one down in St. George. Someday I’m doing a post on them.

OK, so that’s 5 “facts” down. The last “fact” is its range. I’m pretty sure you will never see a roadrunner zipping through Monument Valley or Arches NP, or pretty much any of the places depicted in the cartoon*. The roadrunner is a bird of hot deserts- the Mojave, Sonoran and Chihuahuan. As I mentioned in last Thanksgiving’s series on the amazing botany of St. George, Southwest Utah is completely unlike the rest of the state in that it dips down into the Northernmost reaches of the Mojave and that’s why it’s full of cool stuff you don’t see anywhere else in the state- stuff like creosote and Joshua trees and desert tortoises and several species of rattlesnake that don’t occur elsewhere in Utah. The Greater Roadrunner is another “Mojave Indicator”; you generally won’t see it outside of this area in the state. Occasionally one will be sighted just a bit out of its typical range; they sometimes show up in or around Cedar City or even Parowan and in 1932 a decomposing one was found outside of Provo(!), but they never breed so far North. Roadrunners are territorial, so it may be territory/population pressure that pushes them Northward every once in a while.

*In fairness, Saguaro cacti also frequently appeared in the cartoon. And though they don’t occur in the Southern-Utah-type canyonlands so often depicted in the cartoon, they are endemic to the Sonoran desert, where roadrunners do in fact live.

Side Note: The first roadrunner I ever saw was down in the Chihuahuan, driving across West Texas in the spring of 1990. It was crossing the highway. Less than 5 minutes later, a coyote ran across the highway, in the same direction. I thought, “Wow- just like the cartoon! I’m in the real West now!”

Yeah, so everything I “knew” about roadrunners was wrong. But if anything, they’re cooler than the cartoon- Roadrunners are fast, mean, clever, bold desert hunters. And there’s another thing that fascinates me about them: they’re an “in-between” thing.

When we think about other animals, we tend to categorize them. We think of animals as herbivores or carnivores, as little timid creatures, or big lumbering ones, or means and scary ones. And certainly we think of birds in different categories: waterfowl, raptors, little brown birds at our feeders, etc. But probably the biggest mental division we make among birds is between those who fly and those who don’t. We’re of course familiar with all sorts of birds that fly, and even if we don’t see them every day, we’re at least conceptually familiar with birds that don’t, such as ostriches and emus. But a roadrunner is in-between. We know of other in-between birds of course- chickens and quail and grouse and pheasants, but we tend to think of them as well, sort of lame. Like they would certainly want to fly, right? They just can’t seem to get it together… But a roadrunner- a fast, resourceful desert killer- clearly has its act together; there’s no way it’s “lame”. It’s not like other birds. It’s an in-between.

We think of in-betweens as transitional because we know that animals who live in environments and ways very different from their ancestral environments must have passed through such in-between stages in their evolutionary past. Here’s an example: whales. We know that whales and hippos shared a common ancestor sometime in the last 50-60 million years. And we know that that common ancestor was a 4-legged mammal that walked around on the land. But in-between that proto-hippo and modern whales there must have been some “in-between” ancestors. What would be an example? Well, maybe something like a seal or a sea lion. And what would be in between a seal and a whale? Well, maybe something like a manatee, or dugong.

What about the other way? What’s in-between a seal and something that walks around on land, like a dog or a cat or a rabbit? Maybe an otter? Or a beaver?

As it turns out, even though you can line them up along a spectrum of in-between-ness, none of these things- whale, seal, otter, manatee, are particularly closely-related to one another. But here they all are in front of us, appearing to fill out an almost continuous march to the sea.

But they’re not a continuum, and from their own perspectives, none of them is in-between anything. Some pinnipeds may someday evolve into more whale/fish-like forms, or maybe they’ll evolve the other way, back toward land-living. Or maybe they’ll keep on living like they do till the end of the world.

The animal world* is full of these kinds of in-betweens, with flying squirrels and loons (which can barely walk on land) and mud-skippers and amphibians. Ostriches descended from birds which evolved flight and then lost it, Vampire bats descended from flying mammals that evolved sonar and then lost the high-frequency component, and apes descended from reptiles who lost color vision and then re-evolved it. Evolution isn’t a continuous line; it’s a meandering, endless soap opera.

*So is the plant world, but that’s another post. So is fungi, a great example being yeast, who’ve apparently “lost” the multi-cellularity their ancestors evolved.

In the big picture, nothing’s really an in-between, because everything is. Certainly we- hairless, giant-headed, crazy-breeding, bipedal chimpanzees- are in no position to call anything an in-between.

Back To The Point I Was Trying To Make But Got Distracted From By Trying To Draw A Seal

So back to the roadrunner. It often strikes people as intuitively odd that birds would ever “give up” flight. If you could fly, why wouldn’t you keep flying? Many examples- most now sadly extinct- come from islands, where birds, lacking land-based predators, no longer needed to fly, resulting in such creatures as the Dodo, Raphus cucullatus, of Mauritius. Dodos (pic left, not mine) were part of Columbidae, the same family as pigeons and doves, and presumably evolved flightless-ness after some number of their flying ancestors wound up on the island. But other examples, such as the ratites- a group which includes ostriches, emus, cassowaries and rheas- apparently evolved flightless-ness on a continental landmass*. For whatever reason, running and greater size worked out to be a better deal for them than retaining flight capability.

*Which would be… yes, that’s right, Gondwanaland! I am telling you, that place was rocking!

Side Note: A bit of a head-scratcher for me are “island ratites”, such as the kiwi and now extinct moas of New Zealand and Elephant birds of Madagascar. These are/were ratites, and so presumably evolved flightless-ness prior to the break-up of Gondwanaland. (It’s pretty certain, from both fossil and modern physiological evidence*, that ratites were already flightless before the Southern supercontinent broke up.) But you have to wonder if, having wound up on island-sized Gondwanan fragments with an absence of predators, was the Dodo-effect then also at play in their continued evolution?

*Specifically, ratites lack a keel on their sternum upon which to anchor large wing muscles. So even if somehow an ostrich or an emu was endowed with giant wings and wing-muscles, its skeleton couldn’t support them.

Ratites are impressive birds, but none of the living species in the group are anywhere near carnivorous as roadrunners. And it makes you wonder, if we do think of the roadrunner as an in-between, what exactly is it in between? On one end of the spectrum are its cuckoo-cousins, but what lies on the other end of the spectrum of possibilities for a running avian carnivore?

Just a couple million- and maybe as recently as 15,000*- years ago, a 300+ lb carnivorous flightless running bird, Titanis walleri, roamed North America (drawing right, not mine). At 8’ tall, this was a top of the line carnivore- no coyote was chasing him around on rocket roller-skates. And T. Walleri wasn’t the first time a bird of that form and scale appeared. ~50 million years earlier, several Diatryma species (genus = Gastornis), at 6’ tall, appears to have led a similar lifestyle.

*How recently it became extinct is debatable.

Side Note: I mentioned both these birds back last January during Bird Feeder Week. (Man, was that a great week or what?)

So we know that 6’+ flightless avian carnivores evolved at least twice in North America. Though not at all closely-related to either of these prehistoric horrors, G. californianius is, to the best of my knowledge, the modern day North American bird closest in form and lifestyle to them. Makes you think twice about that cute little fella in the cartoon. Now maybe I know why I was rooting for the coyote.