(bright upbeat music) - [Announcer] This week, on ARIZONA ILLUSTRATED, Bighorn Sheep, butterflies, Aldo Leopold, and counting giants.

(bright upbeat music) - Welcome to ARIZONA ILLUSTRATED, I'm Tom McNamara.

On this episode, we'll experience the sights, sounds and solace of nature in Arizona.

The Arizona public media crew and I, are surrounded by just that, here in the gardens of Tohono Chul.

But first, an update on the Corona virus.

- [Announcer] Arizona's seven day rolling averages of new cases and deaths struck sharply over the past few weeks.

However, The University of Arizona's detected a more transmissible variant of the virus on campus.

And the symptoms are more severe for those who contract it.

Precautions such as wearing masks, physical distancing, avoiding large gatherings and washing your hands frequently is urged.

And vaccinations continue to rise, as the state announced, it would vaccinate anyone over the age of 16 at its vaccine pods, including the one at The University of Arizona.

For information regarding vaccinations, visit azdhs.gov - For 49 days last summer, The Bighorn Fire burned in the Santa Catalina Mountains, North of Tucson.

It scorched nearly 120,000 acres.

Much of it habitat to a vast array of wildlife, including mountain lions, deer and a native sheep that shares the fire's name, THE BIGHORN.

(bright upbeat music) - [Mark] Here on the Santa Catalina Mountains, we have desert Bighorn sheep.

So they're adapted to this environment.

Particularly the lack of water.

But they have been here for centuries.

The herd in the Santa Catalina is numbered about a hundred, but declined until they disappeared in the late 1990s.

For reasons not fully understood by scientists.

Many theories have been speculated on.

It was not about overhunting.

It may have had something to do with development.

That's a species quite vulnerable to disease.

Particularly respiratory infections like Pneumonia.

There's also a school of thought that, the vegetation, particularly in the Pusch Ridge Wilderness, was just too dense for them.

Bighorn sheep need clear line of sight and escape terrain.

They rely on their eyesight to see predators coming.

And when they need to escape, their preferences to climb and they are excellent climbers.

And can climb at great speed.

- Okay, everybody ready?

- [Mark] In 2013, we reintroduced desert Bighorn Sheep to the range.

Releasing 120 over a four year period then.

(claps) I remember in particular one release.

Right at the base of Pusch Ridge, in an area known as Okwuchi.

They went right up to the group that was already there.

They got into sheepy terrain right away, and they knew where to go.

(soft music) - [Mark] As of the count last fall, we had 75.

We probably have 80 or more, because we had lambs on the mountain.

It's a big deal to capture Bighorn Sheep.

That's sung with helicopters and net guns.

(soft music) But we had good luck.

And by large, most have made the arduous journey in good shape.

(helicopter blades whirring) The big curled horns and the rams are all about mating.

And you can hear the sound of them butting heads.

It sounds like a baseball on a bat.

And they'll go at it for hours, for the right to breed with the females.

(soft music) Young rams are ramblers.

We see this a lot with the herds around the Tucson area.

Where the young rams who don't really have a place in the pecking order yet, and aren't strong enough to defeat more dominant ram, will take a walk about.

And they'll go from say, The Catalinas or The Watermans, to other mountain ranges.

But, they always come back around the time of the rut.

Which is August, September.

And they may get some sparring rounds in with their buddies.

So one day they can take their place in the pecking order.

- The initial burning took place in the Bighorn Sheep Management area.

And most of that Bighorn Sheep Management area burnt.

There in the area from roughly Pusch Ridge to below Finger Rock, at relatively low elevation, there below the fire.

But not the parts of the area most used by the sheep historically.

Which is why we're cautiously optimistic, that once the fire is over, the Bighorns will make better use of that area and perhaps expand their territory.

It will be cleared of dense vegetation.

There'll be new growth coming up.

And it will be perfect for them.

Sprouting Prickly pear for example, is a favor.

It's like a Bighorn Sheep salad bar, after a fire.

For sure, it's gonna help them deal with mountain lions.

Mountain lions are all about stealth.

Densely vegetated areas are good places for concealment.

They are classic stalkers, and we'll move slowly and deliberately under concealment toward their prey.

Not all mountain lions eat Bighorn Sheep, but some do.

And they're really good at getting Bighorn Sheep.

(soft music) In most cases, wildfire is a natural process, that improves the overall health of the mountain range over time.

And these animals, for generations, they've survived.

Because it's part of a natural process.

- There are tens of thousands of species of butterflies.

Having inhabited the earth for at least 150 million years.

They vary in size and coloring and lifespan.

But unfortunately, they do have one thing in common.

Their very existence is challenged by climate change.

Entomologists at The University of Arizona, have enlisted the help of Citizen scientists including some right here at Tohono Chul, to better understand, NATURE'S HOTDOG.

(bright upbeat music) - [Katy] Think of butterflies, as an indicator for how well a habitat is doing.

I call them nature's hotdogs a lot of the times, 'cause they move Carbon and Nitrogen through the system.

So it's a Caterpillar, which is often just this little blob of energy.

Eggs with legs that gather nutrients from a plant, and then are usually eaten by a larger animals.

Such as a lizard, a bird or a spider.

Butterflies also have another service which is, pollination.

So they help plants reproduce.

They move pollen from one plant to another.

And fertilize plant eggs to become seeds and hopefully the next generation of plants.

So I study how butterflies make a living.

And how we can help them in a changing world.

My name is Katy Prudic, I'm a professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment.

- [Hank] Just here in Southeastern Arizona.

We have about 250 give or take species of butterflies, that we can see throughout the year.

That's an incredible number of butterflies, in such a small geographic area.

The other really cool thing is their life cycle.

You can go from this really tiny microscopic, almost as big as a piece of lead off your pencil, egg that turns into a Caterpillar.

And then that turns into a cocoon.

And that becomes a butterfly.

That's magic to me.

That's a miracle.

- [Katy] So Hank and I met here at Tohono Chul.

Just talking about butterflies.

- [Hank] I was here looking at butterflies one day, and one of the grounds people said, "Hey there's some woman here, that wants to talk about butterflies."

So I saw that as my chance to impress her with all my butterfly knowledge.

Well, it turns out at to be Dr. Prudic.

And she impressed me with all of her butterfly knowledge.

- [Katy] Hank was already really excited about Monarchs, and it was easy, just sort of to bring him in to all of the butterflies.

So Hank's committed to Citizen Science and being a Citizen scientist.

And there's only one of me, and I can only collect and see so many butterflies, but you start to wonder what happens when more and more people can go out, and collect the data that you've been collecting.

What can you do with that data?

How will that help change, not just the amount of data you analyze, but change the questions you can ask.

So U Butterfly is a Citizen Science collaboration, between a bunch of people who for recreation go out and photograph, watch butterflies, recording what they see and when they see it.

That data is then collected in a way which is uniform enough, that scientists can use it for scientific research.

- [Hank] Years ago when Citizen scientists were first brought into the picture, a lot of professionals, a lot of people with degrees said, how can these people who are untrained, who know nothing about science, contribute anything?

Well over the years and really all across the United States.

It's been proven over and over again that Citizen scientists, if they receive a little bit of training, can actually contribute quite a bit.

Okay, we wanna be really gentle with him, okay?

- I will.

- Okay.

- (indistinct) - Okay, good.

So there you go.

- [Katy] I'm worried about all insects, including butterflies.

And a changing climate or increased temperatures.

Also coupled with unusual precipitation patterns, is leading to butterfly decline.

And those declines are concerning because, so many other members of the ecosystem, depend on butterflies for food.

So it means that like the whole system is going to have to shift.

Like where will, where will birds find food for their nestlings?

Will they move?

That's certainly a possibility.

So these common species that we see around, will they be here and, you know, 20 years from now, 10 years from now.

That's the kind of timeline we're talking about.

Butterflies have been around since dinosaurs.

So they've done this before.

They've been through a fair number of mass extinctions.

They've got this.

Do I think that all of them will make it?

No.

Does that hurt?

Yes.

'Cause they feel like family.

And then also from an ecosystem perspective, some butterflies are better at providing services than others.

And those are the ones that would be particularly harmful for functionality in an ecosystem.

And so part of our research too is identifying, what is sort of the best way to think about restoration and conservation.

- Conservationist, writer and philosopher, Aldo Leopold, started his career with the forest service here in the Southwest.

In his book, A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC, Leopold now considered by many, the father of wildlife ecology.

Would call on people to have a complete appreciation for the profound interconnectedness of the elements in ecosystems by, Thinking Like A Mountain.

(somber music) - [Man] Looking through Aldo Leopold's archives.

I came across these burned items.

(somber music) It turns out they were the contents of Leopold's pockets when he died.

He was fighting a fire on his property and suffered a fatal heart attack.

Leopold is best known for his book, A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC.

It was published in 1949, shortly after his death.

He also proposed the first wilderness area in the country.

It was clear to him, that wild places were becoming endangered by human activity.

And should be set aside.

Some call him the father of wildlife ecology.

But long before that, Leopold was a forest assistant at the Apache National Forest in the Arizona territory.

This was Leopold's first job.

He was stationed in Springerville.

and Arizona wouldn't become a state for another few years.

- [Russel] I love a lot of the essays, in A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC.

I think the one that's probably the deepest for me, is the Land Ethic.

And in this, he talks about humans relationship with a wild environment.

And, how he sees at least.

We're in the middle of a transformation.

We go from feeling that we control environment.

That we own environment.

To the point where we say, no.

We are part of the land.

We are part of the environment.

And that is a radical transformation.

His time here colored the way he viewed things.

It stayed with him forever.

(wolf howls) - [Russel] Every living thing.

And perhaps many a dead one as well.

Pays heed to that call.

To the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh.

To the pine, a forecast of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow.

To the Coyote, a promise of gleanings to come.

To the calm, a thread of red ink at the back.

To the hunter, a challenge of fang against bullet.

Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears, there lies a deeper meaning.

Known only to The Mountain itself.

Only The Mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a Wolf.

- [Man] Leopold wrote this in his essay, Thinking like a Mountain.

Later in the essay Leopold wrote.

- [Russel] We were eating lunch on a high rim rock.

At the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way.

What was literally a pile of wolves rived and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rim rock.

In those days, we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a Wolf.

(gunshots) In a second, we were pumping lead into the pack.

We reached the old Wolf in time to watch a fierce screen fire dying in her eyes.

I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes.

Something known only to her and to The Mountain.

I was young then and full of trigger itch.

I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean Hunter's paradise.

Since then, I have lived to see state after state extirpated wolves.

I have watched the face of many a newly Wolf less mountain.

Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God, a new pruning shears and forbidden Him all other exercise.

The common, who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf's job of trimming the herd, to fit the range.

He has not learned to think like The Mountain.

Hence we have dust bowls and rivers, washing the future into the sea.

(somber music) - [Man] Leopold argued that there's a community of life to which humans belong.

And that we are not intended to dominate their community.

In his essay Land Ethic, he writes.

- [Russel] A thing is right, when it tends to to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.

It is wrong, when it tends otherwise.

- [Man] In his essay, Escudilla, Leopold tells the story of the killing of the last grizzly bear in Arizona.

There's still no grizzly bears here.

But the wolves are finally back.

At the end of his essay, Thinking like a Mountain.

Leopold rights, - [Russel] We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.

The deer strives with his supple legs.

The common, with trap and poison.

The statesmen with pen.

The most of us with machines, votes and dollars.

But it all comes to the same thing.

Peace in our time.

A measure of success in this is all well enough.

And perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking.

But too much safety, seems to yield only danger in the long run.

Perhaps this is behind Thoreau's dictum, In Wilderness Is The Salvation of the World.

Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the Wolf.

Long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.

(wolf howls) - The Saguaro Cactus is a beloved and celebrated symbol of the Sonoran Desert.

It's also a protected species.

Every 10 years, park rangers, conservationists and volunteers gather at Saguaro National Park, to map and measure and collect data on these giants.

Now, we look back on the SAGUARO CENSUS, 2020.

(bright upbeat music) - [Don] Saguaro's are instantly recognizable by most people in the world.

We relate to them, and we impart values like wisdom to Saguaros.

And in some ways we can learn a lot from them.

They survive in the desert for really long periods of time.

And they live with the desert.

Most people, like myself, who've been in Arizona for a long time, just to never get tired of being with them.

(indistinct) - Can I volunteer with the brownies?

(laughs) There you go.

- Thank you.

- Welcome to the SAGUARO CENSUS.

If you've done this before, awesome.

If you've never done it before, you will learn.

- [Don] The Saguaro Census takes place every 10 years.

Which happens to coincide with the US Census.

And I always sort of joked that, that's so we remember to do it every 10 years.

It's a large Citizen Science Project.

So we invite lots of volunteers out here.

To help us count and measure and map, and collect other data on Saguaros.

You know, we've been studying Saguaros for many years actually going back to the 1930s.

So our National park was established as a National monument by President Hoover in 1933.

And in the ending days of his administration.

We added the Tucson Mountain District in the early 1960s, under the administration of President Kennedy.

And then it became a National Park, which was authorized by Congress in the 1990s.

So we're now a National Park, like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, or other great parks in the United States.

National parks aren't just set up for us today, but for people in the future to enjoy.

And so what I do is try to bring knowledge into that.

And use science to understand what's going on in the park.

And kind of get information that allows us to protect it.

Part of the history of this park is that, soon after it was established in the 1930s.

The visitors, the people from Tucson and the staff started to notice that a lot of the large Saguaros in what we call the Cactus Forest Area here near the East end of Broadway, were dying.

And people were really alarmed about that.

And so, that initiated research on the Saguaro to try to understand what the cause was.

There were two things going on there.

The larger ones were dying.

And a lot of that was maybe natural causes.

Including freeze events, very cold winters that we had in the late 1930s.

But also we weren't getting younger Saguaros coming into the population.

And, we now think that a major reason for that might've been the loss of nurse trees.

So Saguaros when they're very young are often protected by trees like Palo Verde and Mesquites that protects them from the cold and the winter.

The heat and the summer provides extra soil moisture.

A lot of the trees in this part of Tucson were cut down for fuel wood, in the late 1800's and early 1900's.

And so when the monument was created, the tree started to slowly come back.

So for the first few decades of the park, we weren't getting very many young Saguaros coming into the population.

But then we had this surge starting in the 1960s.

After the nurseries had become established.

(bright upbeat music) (rainfall pouring) Saguaros take up most of their water during the summer rainy period.

So the seeds are designed to germinate after the summer rains.

And we don't get a crop of saguaros every year.

But when the conditions are just right.

When we have kinda, a series of cooler wetter seasons, the young saguaros will survive.

You know, from their point of view, they need to be able to enough store enough water within the plant to kind of make it through the drought.

And every now and then we get a lot of saguaros coming into the population.

(feet stamping) - A lot of the demographic changes in saguaros, you can't see with your naked eye.

You have to look at data over many years to be able to see that.

Oh, you know maybe there's a gap in establishment, or maybe some of the older ones are dying.

Also you can't always see when you're looking across the landscape, the youngest saguaros.

Because it takes many, many years for them to get tall enough over those grasses.

So that you can actually see them.

So, that's why the data is really important.

18 - [Don] 18 On this growth chart here on average, it would be about 14 years old.

So how old are you?

- 14.

14.

So that saguaro is the same age as you.

- The smallest saguaros grow faster.

Kind of like, a human teenager.

You get saguaros you know, about this high, it's in its teenage years, and they'll do this growth spurt.

They grow very fast.

A big mature saguaro, the height of their main stem, slows down.

But to put a lot of growth into arms.

So they'll add many arms over time.

And those will grow, pretty steadily.

- [Don] We were really fortunate, in that we had a great crop of saguaros that came into the park.

During the 1970s and particularly the 1980s.

We had some wet years and right into the early 1990s.

Since the early 1990s, we haven't been seeing very many new saguaros becoming established in the park.

So we've been in a drought period and we can kinda see that, lesser numbers of saguaros entering the population really being closely tied to drought.

The lack of good establishment in the last 20, 25 years is definitely something that we're concerned about.

I wouldn't say we're alarmed about it, because saguaros are so long lived and can reproduce.

For so many years, maybe more than a hundred years.

But it's something that we're definitely keeping an eye on.

- [Alexis] I'm actually from Tucson, Arizona.

So I'm of the few fortunate people that got to grow up here and just, I keep learning how to appreciate this desert in different ways, every year.

I studied Architecture and I think they are great examples of what buildings should be and what they can be.

And just the way that they protect themselves from the environment, from predators and the way that they're able to hold water and store their energy.

They're just fascinating specimens.

- [Dale] I realized that living in Tucson for many years.

I kind of stopped seeing saguaros as individuals.

Just kind of like I have this image.

I know what a saguaro looks like.

But being forced to slow down and look at individuals, count the arms, see how many holes birds have pecked in them, see how they've grown.

It really sort of changed my relationship with saguaros.

So, I'm here just to rediscover that appreciation for their individual beauty.

- Yeah.

You can see the red map.

You can see the red flag there?

- Yeah.

- That's the little lines coming down.

(indistinct) - If we gonna live here sustainably for a long period of time, we wanna live with the desert.

We wanna be resilient.

We wanna be wise in our use of water.

And those are things that saguaros have to be in order to survive in this place.

And then ultimately we have to be as well.

- Thank you for joining us here on ARIZONA ILLUSTRATED.

I'm Tom McNamara.

See you next week.

(bright upbeat music)