Survival in the Grasslands

Bobwhite Quail, Pronghorn Antelope and Their Grassland Habitat Struggle Bravely for Life

Stood irresolute before the locked gate in the dark of a monsoon night. With the gate lock's keypad unaccountably missing, I wondered if Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge Manager Wayne Shifflett was messing with me.

I'd already spent a storm-tossed day on the grassy 118,000-acre refuge-established 60 miles southwest of Tucson to preserve the habitat of the masked bobwhite quail, the pronghorn antelope and other grasslanddependent species. I marveled at the profuse summer poppies, the wealth of birds and the undulating grass.

In 18 years, this federal refuge has salvaged a remnant of the glorious grasslands that covered much of southeast Arizona before a century of intense grazing, invading nonnative grasses and suppressed wildfires left the ground nearly bare. Oak and sycamore trees grace Brown Canyon, which is located at the northern end of the refuge. Grasslands dominate the refuge, but the area also includes the bird-thronged solace of Arivaca Creek and Arivaca Cienega. Brown Canyon cuts toward Baboquivari Peak, which the Tohono O'odham Indians believe forms the broken umbilical cord between heaven and Earth and where the Creator, l'itoi, still lives.

At day's end, photographer Jack Dykinga and I had stood staring at the stormy sunset reflected in the pond where Shifflett plans to establish threatened Chiricahua leopard frogs. Dykinga stood in the pond fretting, muttering and hoping the setting sun would break through clouds on the horizon to illuminate the thunderheads reflected in the pond's surface. Unlike Dykinga, I was spared the tyranny of lugging a 4x5 landscape camera as I inhaled the fragrant, ozone-tinged air and wished a bobwhite quail would pick that moment to flush out of the waving grass.

But the sun never found Dykingas thunderhead, the quail never flushed and the storm gathered overhead reminding me to seek shelter for the night. Which brings us back to that locked gate. Insisting that I should not miss visiting Brown Canyon with its ranch house converted into a 16-bed Environmental Education Center, Shifflett had instructed me to drive up the 5 miles of narrow dirt road off State Route 286 in thedark, key in the code to open the gate, and drive another 3 or 4 miles up to the center. Brown Canyon is open to the public for guided tours and seminars only, but since the center was unoccupied, I was granted the special privilege of spending the night there in splen-did solitude.

Except I couldn't find the keypad. I finally located a locked box on the backside of the gate and decided that Shifflett must have neglected to give me the key to open the keypad box. I felt sure he was sitting snug in his little house by the refuge headquarters, chuckling.

I pondered the sky, a patchwork of clouds, stars and moon: perfect night for a walk unless the monsoon resumed. So I grabbed my duster, my camera, my toothpaste and some matches and headed up the road.

Several miles later, I remembered the jaguars, which reminded me of the mountain lions, which reminded me of the bears that frequent the refuge. Oh my.

A jaguar was treed and photographed near Brown Canyon in recent years - a heartening sign. Some experts speculate that the rarely seen jaguars may have been living in the area all along - but only recently noticed. Of course, the jaguars have to coexist with mountain lions and black bears, which love oak woodlands.

Suddenly, I felt like a link in the food chain.

But I bravely reminded myself that I'm a tool-using animal, big-brained and all. So I picked up a hunk of sharpedged quartz, figuring I could whack a mountain lion pretty hard on the head if we got to arguing dinner arrangements.

Of course, I saw no sign of lions, jaguars or bears.

I got my reward the next morning for enduring this "dangerous" trek, when I emerged onto the porch of theeducation center - a splendid two-story ranch house with a huge kitchen and a stone fireplace - to stare slackjawed at Baboquivari Peak, draped in cloud drifts. Birds in the oaks and sycamores cheered the dawn. So I wandered for half a mile up the creek, bordered with purple morning glories sparkling with morning dew.

Then I hurried back to the refuge headquarters, determined to see both pronghorns and masked bobwhite quail two reasons we relented from a century of destroying the grasslands that once covered much of southeast Arizona.

Back at headquarters, I found Dykinga lounging triumphantly, having taken a dawn shot of heavenly light rays slanting down through the clouds to illuminate the pond's surface.

I explained about the locked gate and the rock and the lions and jaguars and bears. Shifflett explained the keypad was on the backside of the other post.

Dykinga, recently back from photographing grizzlies in Alaska, just smiled.

"So what were you gonna do with the rock?" he asked politely. "Knock yourself out?" Shifflett found this very funny.

Once they quit laughing, I figured it was time to get going if I hoped to catch sight of a pronghorn not to mention a bobwhite. But I really just wanted to explore this last, best patch of Sonoran grasslands, a refuge for the pronghorns, four types of quail and a species count that includes more than 500 birds, 58 mammals, 42 reptiles, 11 amphibians and more than 600 plants. For the grassland revival, we can thank the masked bobwhite quail once common, then lost, then rediscovered in the dwindling Sonoran grasslands in Mexico. The bobwhite, a droll flurry of brick-red feathers in the waving fields of poppies and grass, still struggles but In trying to save the bird, we recovered the grassland. The refuge draws a modest 35,000 visitors a year, mostly day-trippers and bird-watchers from Tucson. The spring-fed cienega near the historic, quirky town of Arivaca remains the most-visited site on the refuge, a birders' wonderland of marshes and cottonwoods, with a meandering boardwalk offering glimpses of a large variety of birds including the rare yellow-billed cuckoo. Many visitors wander across the grasslands in hopes of seeing a pronghorn, which the Apaches called the "One Who Is Becoming" because its ghostlike face and unearthly speed made it seem part spirit, part animal.

The refuge runs northerly about 24 miles from the Mexican border through the Altar Valley along State Route 286, an area where giant ground sloths, camels, huge bison, horses, beavers, mammoths and saber-toothed tigers wandered during the last Ice Age. Prehistoric hunters, and later the Hohokam, left traces in the valley. Apaches arrived in the 1500s and 1600s to hunt pronghorns, driving the farming-based Tohono O'odham back toward the Baboquivari Mountains.

The number of cattle in the southeast Arizona grasslands rose from perhaps 5,000 in 1870 to 1.5 million in 1890. Periodic droughts prompted the starving cattle to eat everything in sight, dramatically altering the grasslands. Droughts in the 1890s, 1920s and 1950s left piles of cattle bones and converted most of the rolling grasslands into mesquite-dominated desert. Instead of nourishing fields of grass across the Altar Valley, storm runoff scoured out a 20-foot-deep, 1,400-foot-wide, 40-mile long arroyo down the middle of the Altar Valley.

The exclusion of cattle and the lack of grassfire suppression in the past 18 years have dramatically increased native grasses in the refuge, slowed erosion and boosted numbers of key plant and animal species. However, efforts to bring back both pronghorns and bobwhite quail demonstrate the difficulty of rebuilding populations of declining species.

The Buenos Aires refuge remains the only place in North America where you can find four quail species Gambels, scaled, Montezuma and masked bobwhite. The masked bobwhite depends most heavily on thick, continuous grasslands for its survival, perhaps because it eats smaller seeds, feeds its young exclusively on summer grasshoppers and relies on camouflage protection in the deep grass when threatened.

Despite the return of the grassland, the reintroduced bobwhites still struggle because they lack survival skills. Surviving in a world of sudden storms, sporadic freezes, intermittent droughts, hungry coyotes, patrolling hawks and slithering snakes requires training by attentive parents. The refuge's bobwhite breeding facility has released 22,000 captive-bred birds into

the wild. However, the bobwhite population hovers at 200 to 300 and has been dwindling in the face of ongoing drought, probably because the young birds don't have wary, wild-reared parents. Quail captured in Mexico and released on the refuge fare better, but overgrazing and drought in Mexico have nearly wiped out the wild populations there, making it hard to find wild birds to transplant.

Efforts to reintroduce pronghorns also have struggled. Ice Age survivors, pronghorns rely on binocular vision and spectacular speed for safety. With the largest eyes proportionately of any mammal - equivalent to 8-power binoculars with nearly a 360-degree field of vision - they can spot a human or predator sneaking up from 4 miles away. They can run for long distances at 40 miles per hour and sprint at 70 miles per hour - taking 27foot-long strides to land on exquisitely evolved pads of cartilage in their feet.

Pronghorns burn oxygen three times as fast as most animals, thanks to a huge heart and a windpipe more than twice as big as a human's. Although they resemble African antelope, they're actually in their own scientific family - with unique pronged horns that shed their sheathes each year.

The animals thrived for 40 million years before Europeans arrived in North America. But long-range rifles enabled hunters to slaughter them by the wagonload; at one point, four pronghorns sold for a mere quarter. A North American pronghorn population estimated in the tens of millions plunged to 30,000 by 1920and to 650 in Arizona. Thanks to conservation efforts, about a million pronghorns now wander the nation's grasslands-including a herd of about 60 at Buenos Aires. Patient refuge visitors can usually glimpse a small herd by taking the 12-mile Antelope Drive, which starts near the visitors center and ends just north of Sasabe. Biologists are uncertain why the herd hasn't grown much in recent years.

During my visit, spotting the pronghorn herd or the bobwhite quail coveys proved as tough as locating the keypad on the gatepost. So I returned to Antelope Drive, paying special attention to the patches of wickedly thorned acacia that the quail favor. Overhead, the monsoon gathered for an afternoon assault. I spied a flutter in a patch of acacia. As I rolled to a stop, a quail exploded from the bush flying low over the windswept grass. He might have had a bobwhite's reddish tinge and a dark head, but he might have been a scaled quail. So I hopped out of the car and followed him toward the crest of a long hill.

I moved through the grass, through the poppies, through the morning glories, stirring rustles of grasshoppers at every step. The approaching black monsoon cloud dropped to the horizon ahead, although I was in brilliant sun. Then the haunting song of a horned lark transfixed me. Baboquivari Peak dominated the far horizon, concealing the jaguars and mountain lions of my imagination. In that moment, in the line of the mountain, the approach of the storm, the waver of the grass, the call of the lark - I understood why the Creator lived here.

Continuing toward the hidden quail, I came to the hill's crest. Perhaps 100 yards away, I saw six pronghorns. The big-horned male lifted his ghostly face to study me. I froze, my heart brimming, ruffled by the wind. One of the youngsters bolted and the male raced after him, with his impossible 27-foot strides - as One Who Is Becoming the wind, the storm, the grass, the sun. The other females trotted after them.

I watched them disappear over the hill, into the storm, into the jags of lightning now threading through the blackness.

Somewhere in the waving grass, the bobwhite crouched, frozen, invisible, as I stood frozen, watching the storm bear down.

It did not matter any more whether I saw him, so long as I knew he was there, somewhere, blended with the grass. It was enough that he had given me the great gift of that single moment, as he had given us all this sacred place, on the edge of the storm.

Phoenix's Desert Botanical Garden bloomin' with butte

What looks like a showy orange flower dangling from a shrub suddenly soars into the air. Like a reckless hang glider, it zigzags past spectators, then flies aloft, nearly skimming the tops of their heads. With its brilliant pumpkin orange 3-inch wingspan outstretched to glide, the flying "flower" at last reveals its true identity: a Julia butterfly from the woodlands of southern Texas and Florida.

At the Desert Botanical Garden's Butterfly Pavilion in Phoenix, the Julia adds its bright hue to nearly a thousand lepidoptera decked out in almost all colors of the rainbow. In a mesh-enclosed habitat festooned with exotic greenery, cooling mist systems and ponds afloat with lily pads, butterflies soar, court, bask in the sun or sip flower nectar.

Some, like the low-flying zebra longwing, Florida's state butterfly with striking yellow stripes on black, entertain like circus performers. They often light on children's outstretched hands or heads. Laughing in delight, a 6-year-old boy exclaimed, "I've been here three times, and the same zebra keeps landing on me. He must really like me!"

Even 6-year-olds can master the art of butterfly attraction: Wear a colorful shirt, and a butterfly might mistake you for a flowered shrub. Dab on anything with a sweet fragrance, and you're butterfly bait. One man briefly wore a giant swallowtail emblazoned across his balding forehead, all because his few wisps of hair were pasted in place with an alluringly fragranced hair gel.

Serendipitous encounters with butterflies add fun and adventure to the Desert Botanical Garden spanning 145 acres, 47 of which are open for exploration and it's abloom in dazzling color during the spring. At the entrance, brilliant yellow-flowered orchid vines intertwine the rusted entry arbor dome, and paloverde trees line the path. Fairy duster bushes and their fuzzy bright red flowers buzz with bees, and African aloe plants spiked with reddish-orange blooms beckon hummingbirds. Amid stately centuries-old saguaros, it's the "youngsters" who steal the show on the Harriet K. Maxwell Desert Wildflower Trail: desert marigolds, poppies, bluebells and zinnias. They line a 2-acre interpretive loop walk showcasing blossoms from the four North American deserts, with an emphasis on the local Sonoran Desert.

Still, nothing can top the magic and charm of the Butterfly Pavilion, now in its second season and running from March 15 to May 11. It's one of a growing number of butterfly houses springing up across the United States. Butterfly World at Coconut Creek, Florida, opened in 1988, and at least a dozen others followed, including the Cecil B. Day Butterfly Center at Georgia's Callaway Gardens; the Cockrell Butterfly Center in Houston and the Sophia M. Sachs Butterfly House in Chesterfield, Missouri.

The centers grant seldom-seen glimpses of dazzling creatures becoming increasingly rare, endangered or even extinct through