after the Spark:
Defending a Desert Island

Kenn Kaufman

The voice on the phone took me by surprise, because under normal circumstances my friend Tom Vezo is remarkably calm. In his work, he has to be: He’s a top-notch bird photographer, and it takes a lot of patience to outwait the birds and capture beautiful images of the sort that Tom produces. But today he sounded anything but calm. And after he told me what was going on, I could understand why.
Tom was calling with news about Madera Canyon. This in itself wasn’t a surprising topic. Madera Canyon is one of the most famous birding spots in the United States. Most of the colorful specialty birds of southeastern Arizona can be found there on a regular basis, and stray birds from Mexico show up with notable frequency. So bird watchers often talk about Madera, and the conversations are usually happy ones. But today Tom had distinctly unhappy news: a plan was under way to put in a huge development, 280 houses or more, in the beautiful desert grassland just a mile from the mouth of the canyon.
The idea brought a wave of emotions over me. I had visited this place for the first time as a 16-year-old from the Midwest, hitchhiking around Arizona on my first big birding trip, and Madera Canyon had seemed a magical destination. Later I had lived in Tucson for several years, and the magic had never waned. From anywhere in Tucson I could look out toward the south and see the rugged outline of the Santa Rita Mountains, with the dip near the center that marked the top of Madera. It was an incredible birding spot that had drawn me to visit countless times.
The approach to the canyon was a big part of the experience. The first part of the drive was just a run south through desert and settlements and irrigated pecan groves. The second part was better, angling southeast from Green Valley through Sonoran desert with its tall saguaros and cholla cactus and green mesquites. But then after a few miles the road would turn straight south, cross a couple of bridges over usually dry arroyos, and start a long, gradual climb toward the mouth of the canyon. The road ran straight as an arrow uphill for three or four miles, with the Santa Ritas looming ahead, and on both sides of the road was the most beautiful dry grassland. In summer, the air above that grassland would ring with the songs of birds, heightening the sense of anticipation for the birds we would see in the canyon itself.
Like many other bird watchers who visited Arizona or moved there, I went to Madera first for the birds that lived up in the canyon. I went there for the flashy little painted redstarts, brash Mexican jays, and elusive Arizona woodpeckers in the oak and juniper woods. I went there for the strikingly striped sulphur-bellied flycatchers and the incomparable red-and-green elegant trogons in the big sycamores along the creek. I went there for dozens of wonderful birds that lived in the shady upper reaches of the canyon. But gradually I came to appreciate the richness of the desert grasslands just outside the canyon.
The grasslands were the place to study Cassin’s and Botteri’s sparrows: so similar in their lack of field marks, so different in their songs, especially when the Cassin’s were singing their cascading trills in skylarking flight. The grasslands were home to such gorgeous birds as blue grosbeak, Scott’s oriole, varied bunting, Costa’s hummingbird, and many more. The grasslands were prime territory for the rufous-winged sparrow, a trim little bird that occurred nowhere in the United States except southern Arizona. Once I came to understand the area, I saw the grasslands as an essential part of the Madera Canyon ecosystem.
So the news that Tom Vezo was telling me came as a shock in more ways than one. “I thought that whole area was protected already,” I protested. “Isn’t it all administered by the Forest Service?”
“Not all of it,” Tom told me. “There are some privately owned pieces that aren’t included in the national forest. That’s the problem in this case.”
As it turned out, barely a mile from the mouth of the canyon, right in the heart of the grasslands, there was a 2,000-acre parcel that was privately owned. And after years of just holding the land, the owner had decided to cash in on his investment by putting in a housing development.
This news had already had a galvanizing effect on a local organization, the Friends of Madera Canyon. Like many “friends” groups around the U.S., this one had been active for years, doing things that were useful but not at all controversial: organizing nature hikes, printing bird lists, hosting trash pickup days. Now, for the first time, the Friends had to counter a serious threat.
Along the paved road in Madera Canyon are a few houses and businesses, on private inholdings established decades ago. One of these, the Chuparosa Inn, is a popular destination for birders. The owner, Luis Calvo, is unfailingly enthusiastic and friendly, the archetypical Friend of Madera Canyon, but now he was thrust into the role of an activist. The Friends group formed an offshoot that they called the Defenders of Madera Canyon. With Luis Calvo, Tom Vezo, and others working around the clock, they started searching for ways to stop this housing development from destroying the fragile grasslands outside the canyon.
So it happened that a few weeks after my phone conversation with Tom, I was on a plane, flying out to Tucson at my own expense, to take part in a fund-raiser to help the Defenders.
I live in Ohio these days, a long way from Arizona, and on the flight that day I was trying to sort out what I would say. I had to stand up and try to summarize, in a short speech, all the reasons why the grasslands were worth defending. How could I come in from outside and tell the Arizonans what they should be doing with their land? By the time the plane landed in Tucson, I had the remarks outlined in my mind.
Southeastern Arizona is wonderful, I would tell them, and everyone knows that, and that is why we’ve all moved here. We’ve seen the statistics about the number of people moving to the Sun Belt. Actually, I would tell them, I skewed the statistics myself by moving away and then moving back to Arizona multiple times, running up the numbers. That’s just a joke, of course. But the fact is that the human population has increased tremendously in recent decades, and all those people need somewhere to live. They need housing. We can’t be opposed to all development, or no one will take us seriously. We have to focus on the details of where that development will take place. Some natural habitats really are more important than others for their value to wildlife.
The mountain ranges of southeastern Arizona are regularly referred to as islands. The metaphor of “sky islands” is now well known, and highly appropriate. All of these ranges—the Santa Ritas, Santa Catalinas, Huachucas, Chiricahuas, and others—tower thousands of feet above the plains, their upper slopes clothed with forests of oak and pine and even fir and spruce, utterly different from the arid valleys that surround them. All of these ranges are isolated from the others. They are islands of forest surrounded by seas of desert and grassland.
Bird watchers and naturalists and conservationists who visit are automatically drawn to these sky islands, but sometimes this attraction blinds us to the value of the surrounding areas. This has led to a paradoxical situation wherein the isolated forests in the mountains are rather well protected, and the lowland habitats, seemingly so widespread, are actually in danger of disappearing.
Particularly endangered are the desert grasslands. Before white settlers arrived, the lowlands of southern Arizona had lush valleys covered with grass. The first ranchers to move in had no experience with this habitat: it looked like the richest grazing land of the midwestern prairies, but it was far more fragile because rainfall was so limited here. These lands simply could not support as many cattle as similar areas elsewhere. It took only a few seasons for most of the grasslands of southern Arizona to be degraded and for their birds to be lost. The masked bobwhite, a beautiful quail that had been common here, vanished altogether from areas north of the border. The aplomado falcon was gone from Arizona by 1940. The rufous-winged sparrow all but disappeared from Arizona for many years before making a comeback.
So the stretch of grassland below Madera Canyon is priceless in its own right. But just as important, it is an essential part of the canyon ecosystem itself. The mountain range of the Santa Ritas might be considered an island, but that doesn’t mean it could thrive in total isolation. Just as an oceanic island depends on the riches of the sea around it, these sky islands are dependent on the surrounding valleys.
In birding the area of Madera Canyon, I had come to see how closely these habitats were connected. Zone-tailed hawks might nest far up the canyon, and golden eagles up on the crags of the Santa Ritas, but they hunted out over the grasslands. Montezuma quail, with their bizarre harlequin patterns, could be found in the lower part of the canyon, but they ranged far out into the grasslands and did much of their feeding there. The brilliant yellow-and-black Scott’s orioles appeared regularly in the lower canyon, but often they were nesting in the yucca plants out on the grasslands. One bird after another revealed this reliance on the desert grasslands: common poorwills, crissal thrashers, ash-throated flycatchers, and on and on. If we were to strip away all of the surrounding lowland habitats, a great many of the species of birds in the canyon and in the mountains would disappear.
And it would be a crime to let the bird life of Madera Canyon be so diminished, because this was a place of historical as well as biological importance. So many of the pioneer ornithologists had sought and found birds here, all the way back to the 1880s. So many discoveries had been made here, by scientists and by recreational birders. As long ago as the 1960s, when Jim Lane wrote his landmark specialized bird-finding guide, he gave this advice: If you have only one day to go bird watching in southeastern Arizona, you should go to Madera Canyon.
I told these stories at our fund-raiser for the Defenders. Tom showed a long series of beautiful bird portraits, landscape photographer Jack Dykinga shared stunning images of the canyon and surrounding areas, and Luis Calvo spoke eloquently about the need to protect the grasslands. We raised several thousand dollars to aid in the effort. But at this writing, it is still too soon to tell what will happen.
The Defenders have met with the landowner, and he is not evil or unreasonable, but he needs to profit from his investment. Pima County, where the land is located, has done progressive things in protecting other habitats, and they probably could afford to buy the land, but so far they have not taken action. So every day the threat looms larger. Soon there could be hundreds of homes right in the heart of the grasslands, and many hundreds of people, bringing habitat destruction and disturbance and roving dogs and cats and sewage issues and garbage issues and so many other things that would degrade this priceless wildlife habitat.
We can only hope that, just this once, wisdom will prevail over mere economic forces.

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