Meet the Most Famous Squirrel in the World

BY: Tom Dollar

With a Whistle and a Growl, the Mount Graham Red Squirrel Says, 'Hello'

I can't blame him - or is it a her? - for being spitting mad. I'm an intruder, after all, just another in a long chain of recent ones. Besides, I'm stomping around threateningly close to his carefully laid away cache of winter food. Tail flicking, he scampers a little farther along toward the bobbing tip of a big spruce bough until he's positioned directly overhead. Then, raining bits of bark and spruce needles down upon my head, he sends up a raucous chattering, whistling, and growling the likes of which I've never heard from so tiny a furry package. The Mount Graham red squirrel, the most famous member of his tribe, had just said hello. Or scram! Or get lost! Intimidated, and slightly embarrassed, I back off through the woods.

The squirrel's scientific name is Tamiasciurus hudsonicus grahamensis, and it survives in only one place: a 10,000-acre parcel of mixed conifer forest, including a 2,000-acre patch of spruces and firs, in the Pinaleno Mountain range in southeast Arizona. The squirrel is a foot-long (including the tail). In June, 1987, it was placed on the federal list of endangered species. Its numbers fluctuate depending on the annual crop of spruce and fir cones, its main food source. In June, 1997 biologists estimated the Mount Graham population at 344 to 388, double what it was in 1988.

Like the spotted owl, the Mount Graham red squirrel became famous just for being there. In the red squirrel's case, "there" is the most lofty of southern Arizona's "sky islands," 10,717-foot Mount Graham. Surrounded by desert, the broad mountaintop preserves a Pleistocene relict spruce-fir forest.

The mountain is perfect habitat for the red squirrel, and for years it lived there in relative isolation and obscurity. The squirrel was so reclusive, in fact, that some biologists thought the Mount Graham In no time at all, photographs of the red squirrel began to appear in popular and scientific magazines worldwide. Newspaper cartoons showed squirrels fleeing ahead of bulldozers scraping trees from high peaks. Before long, this big-eyed, bushytailed rodent, hitherto unheard of, had become a kind of team mascot for "no-scopers" and a symbol of the mountain's environmental integrity. The battle to save what has been called "a Pleistocene museum" was often reduced in press accounts to "squirrels vs. scopes."

red squirrel subspecies had been extirpated. Then, in the early 1980s, it got in the way of a major telescope installation spearheaded by the University of Arizona and supported by an international consortium of astronomers. The red squirrel was anonymous no more.

When environmentalists got wind of the telescope project, the turf war over Mount Graham was on. The battle lines were familiar: environmentalists vs. developers.

Meanwhile, the red squirrel, now the object of everyone's attention, quietly went on doing what it had always done. It harvested and stored Douglas fir and Engelmann spruce cones, usually in the fall of the year when the cones are still closed and seeds still inside. In one minute, it could cut and drop to the ground as many as 25 cones. Later it would descend to gather and stuff them into a large damp midden in a cool place beneath canopies of spruce and fir. The midden I had been scolded away from was a messy pile of bark, needles, cones, scales, cores, twigs, and other forest litter piled to a depth of at least one foot and stashed between a pair of rotting logs. More than 15 feet across, the midden had probably been used by generations of red squirrels.

Mount Graham red squirrels are tree squirrels. They nest in cavities or protected crotches, climbing down to burrow into their middens for cones, which they almost invariably carry aloft to eat. In winter, when several feet of snow blankets the landscape, they dig tunnels to their food caches. In these middens, stored food, which also may consist of small amounts of buds, mushrooms, and toadstools, can be kept edible for up to five years.

"The middens are like refrigerators," says Tom Waddell, former game manager for Arizona Game and Fish on Mount Graham. "Since red squirrels store cones there for years, they need to be kept cold and moist so they don't dry out and open. So the midden is the refrigerator. And the microclimate, that spruce-fir forest, is the source of power. Without that forest, there would be no middens; without the middens, no squirrels."

No squirrel has been measured, weighed, and watched more than the red squirrel. Regularly its blood is drawn, temperature taken, middens monitored, and habits noted.

The latest reports demonstrate the Mount Graham red squirrel population has stabilized and appears to be in no danger of disappearing as long as the annual food source from the cooling canopy of conifers doesn't disappear.

Meanwhile the squirrel, oblivious to all the fuss, prepares for winter by stuffing seed cones into mountaintop middens.

Muench David

Aravaipa Creek surprises the Sonoran Desert of southeastern Arizona, chiseling a secret canyon across a few million years and in it nourishing a renegade forest of sycamore, cottonwood, and mesquite - a haven for wildlife including mule deer, javelinas, and bighorn sheep. There are 150-plus species of birds here, with bald eagles and peregrine falcons topping some birders' must-see lists. The canyon surprises us, too. For three days, David Muench, his wife, Bonnie, and I have been hiking the canyon, and despite the fact that we're right in the eye of the arboreal fall color riot, we haven't seen another human being, a scrapof trash, or any other memorandum of civ-

ADVENTURING IN ARIZONA

ilization.

That puts us in good cheer as we hike downstream to a tributary canyon David wants to photograph. We three are all the company we need or want. Our modest concerns are contained and defined by the canyon.

Will Bonnie and I be able to make the obsessive David pack up his camera in time to hike the four miles back to our tents before dark? If not, how curious might a mountain lion become about shivering city folks passing the night in a pile of leaves?

Our overnighter in Aravaipa is the final episode in a year-long collaboration on a new Ari-zona Highways book, David Muench's Arizona. We've been meeting at David's home in Santa Barbara, California, to look at photographs and talk about the issues and adventures he's encountered in photographing Arizona: the forms of the land, the unique character of the light, the shrinking bastions of wilder-ness. Now we're on a field trip, so I can observe him in his natu-ral habitat.

David has lived in California all his life but grew up with Arizona as his backyard. His father, Josef Muench, and Arizona Highways discovered each other in 1938, and the rest, literally, is photographic history. The magazine published thousands of Josef's images. David was born in 1936, and his childhood was leavened with photographic excursions to Arizona with his parents. He did his first serious photography as a teen-ager in Arizona.

"It's been my spiritual home," he says. Part of its pull on his artistic soul is the light. Earlier in his career, he would mine Arizona's skies and landscapes for grand spectacles: kaleidoscopic sunsets, daggers of light slashing dramatically through moody thunderstorms. Now at the age of 61, he is more interested in what light can qui-etly reveal about a subject - and he's finding Arizona even richer in revelations.

For example, as we sorted through a tall pile of 4x5 trans-parencies for the book, we came to a pair of photos of Anasazi pet-roglyphs on sandstone near the Little Colorado River. One, taken just as the sun set, had an orange cast. The other, taken 15 minutes later, had shifted to violet. To me, the two photos conveyed entirely different moods and told different stories. The warm orange photo suggested a culture at a volatile moment, a people in the process of becoming something else (which, shortly after A.D. 1250, they did). The cold violet photo hinted at something frozen in time: an Anasazi spirit that had always existed and would always exist. Continued from page 22 David looked at me as if I had started speaking Anasazi. "I think that's debatable," he said, politely enough. And as we debated, we agreed that light has an astounding power not only to alter our per-ception of physical objects but also to color emotions about them.

(PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 24 AND 25) Storm clouds recede as last light rakes across the rugged Hualapai Mountains south of Kingman.

(LEFT) Sandstone monoliths meet the sky near Lukachukai on the Navajo Indian Reservation.

(ABOVE) Freshly fallen snow decorates a grove of quaking aspen and Engelmann spruce in the Coconino National Forest.

He's also energized by the revealing and sometimes startling forms he's encountered in Arizona. He cherishes sand dunes and slot canyons, where geometric drama abounds. But he also has an uncanny ability to see interesting relationships between some of the most commonobjects in nature a tuft of wild grass sprouting beside a boulder, for example and to make fine art of them. The grass is transient and fragile, the boulder timeless and indestructible, but using light as the connective tissue, the two together speak of the community of nature. "I love to bring opposites together," he says.

desert octopus!" he delights. A cloud of harvester ants dances in the air beside the trail, each bug bobbing up and down as if it were riding an invisible pogo stick. "Kinetic sculpture!" he ex claims.

We stop beside the creek for a break, and I ask how he main tains not only his enthusiasm for photography but also this capacity to be astonished by nature. "There was a period a few years back when I felt like I had just run out," he admits. "I can't explain exactly how I got through it, except by just changing my mental 'head set' to be in more of a receptive mode. I wasn't coming out here to put my own imprint on anything but to discover. And it has just astounded me ever since."

Even though David's been in Aravaipa before, he's like Dorothy in Oz today I started with misgivings about this ex cursion. I'm an enthusiastic day hiker, which incorporates rewards at day's end: a hot shower, real food, a comfortable bed. David and Bonnie, in their former lives, must have been Tibetan yak herders. Not much in the outdoors bothers them except other people.

full of wide-eyed wonderment. A cottonwood's convoluted root system lies half

They're aware of my aversion to cold,

"desert octopus!" he delights. A cloud of harvester ants dances in the air beside the trail, each bug bobbing up and down as if it were riding an invisible pogo stick. "Kinetic sculpture!" he ex claims.

Wet nights in a tent surrounded by wild beasts, but not sympathetic. Naively I had asked Bonnie as we set out how many times the trail crosses the creek. "Hun dreds," she said, a trace of a smile crossing her face. Naively I assumed that meant she was kidding. She was not The canyon is accessible only to people willing to go to some trouble, and of course it is much better off for it. Congress de clared it a Wilderness in 1984, and the Bu reau of Land Management insists on a permit for day or overnight hiking. The west end currently requires a three-mile

Text continued on page 30

Continued from page 27 hike just to reach the canyon's mouth, and the remote east entrance is a 60-mile drive from Willcox, most of it on dirt roads. The trail stretches the full length of the canyon, 11 miles, and much of it is the creek. The water can be anything from ankleto knee-deep.

But the creek runs year around, which is what makes Aravaipa a special place. Modern development sucking the aquifers has turned nearly all the other once-perennial streams in the Sonoran Desert into dusty furrows that run, with luck, for two or three weeks of the year. Because of the reliable water, Aravaipa has preserved some wonderful effects, such as terraces of saguaros on the canyon walls, illuminated by strange amber light reflected from the yellow fall foliage on the canyon floor.

David is in his element here. At home in Santa Barbara, talking over lunch, he's in constant danger of interruption — the phone, the family, the stray ideas swarming and colliding in his own mind. He doesn't often finish a sentence. Out here, he's completely focused. When a picture forms in his head, he's relentless until he gets it onto film.

(PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 28 AND 29) A storm clears and radiant light illuminates a dramatic vista as the Colorado River winds past the Palisades of the Desert, Grand Canyon National Park. (ABOVE) Sunrise shades of rose and magenta color the sandstone buttes of Echo Cliffs in the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness Area. (OPPOSITE PAGE) Driven by the wind, sand dunes on the Navajo Indian Reservation reveal a face sculpted of sunlight and shadow.

Dominoes to the pressure of development and population increase, and he doesn't know any easy answers. He is quiet by nature, not a shouter or a fighter, and he recognizes other people's rights to enjoy nature in more obtrusive ways than his. Still, he can't help feeling that time is running out.

"What I hope these pictures say is that we need wilderness," he philosophizes. "We need wild places where we will not see houses, cars, fences, signs, or even trails. We need places where there is no trace of human interference because these places will then serve as a standard. We need these places because they cleanse us. Whatever pressures and frustrations we have in our lives in the cities, we can lose them out here."

Just off the creek, a pool of clear, nearly still water has gathered, reflecting backlit sycamores and the canyon wall and blue sky behind. David jokes about being in a "reflective mood," sets up his 4x5 Linhof Technika at the pool's edge, and squats in the mud, plotting a picture.

We move on to the afternoon's destination, the mouth of that tributary canyon named, rather ungraciously, Horse Camp. The way into the canyon is almost blocked by minivan-size boulders that somehow rolled down from the highlands, but just behind the rocks hides a He is a desperate environmentalist, "desperate" in the sense that he sees the truly wild, undisturbed places falling like

miniature world of ineffably fragile beauty: ephemeral pools of emerald water embraced by ferns and illuminated by the low autumn sun trickling through the sycamores. David is intent again, trying to coax this improbable oasis onto film before the shadows close in.

I hear the shutter of his Linhof click open, then a growl: "Darn!"

A butterfly has fluttered into his foreground, alighting on a penstemon for afternoon cocktails. It would make a charming video. But in the three seconds that David's 4x5 is open for business, the butterfly will record its passage as a smudge on the film. I feel, though, like it's been a productive day. In the space of an afternoon, I've heard David Muench joke about being in a reflec-tive mood and curse a butterfly.

Editor's Note: "I search for harmony in things. That's a lot of what my photography is about," says renowned nature photographer David Muench in his new book published by Arizona Highways. Titled David Muench's Arizona: Cherish the Land, Walk in Beauty, the 144 page hardcover book, written in concert with Lawrence W. Cheek and with a forward by former Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall, presents an array of Muench's color photos and insightful reflections stressing the need to preserve wilderness areas. The book will be available for $47.95 plus shipping and handling after September 15 by calling Arizona Highways toll-free at (800) 543-5432, or from Phoenix or outside the U.S., (602) 258-1000.

Photo Workshops: David Muench and his photographer son, Marc Muench, lead photography workshops to some of Arizona's most scenic destinations for the Friends of Arizona Highways. Contact the Friends at 2039 W. Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009; (602) 271-5904.

When You Go: Before visiting Aravaipa Canyon, contact The Bureau of Land Management, Safford District Office, 711 14th Ave., Safford, AZ 85546; (520) 428-4040. Ask about road conditions, camping restrictions, and apply for a permit. Only 50 permits are issued for any day, and spring and fall weekends fill up quickly.

The west end is about 100 miles southeast of Phoenix, through the town of Dudleyville on State Route 77. The east entrance, where there will be fewer hikers, is about 140 miles northeast of Tucson; at Willcox turn north onto Fort Grant Road and follow the dirt ranch roads on the state highway map.

Since the canyon floor lies at an elevation of only 2,600 to 3,000 feet, summers are extremely hot. Fall and spring are the most favorable seasons.