Cactus Blog

Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge

In 2002, there were only about 21 Sonoran pronghorn left in the United States. But their numbers are rising as researchers have collaborated to carve out a home on a wildlife refuge, expand the herd with a captive-breeding program and help the animals reclaim their range….

in 2002, their entire range went dry… Pronghorn can also eat cactus to survive, researchers have found. They will eat chain-fruit cholla, which is 85 percent water, Hervert said, but it doesn’t provide a lot of nutrition.

In 2002, biologists watched as the last of the herd was reduced to eating cholla, slowly starving to death and more than likely within a few weeks of dying, Hervert said. “It was hard to watch.”

When rains finally came, the herd stabilized, but the agencies watching the animals knew that something had to be done.

Since we’re going to be having some big storm fronts moving in over the next day/weeks I thought I would feature this spectacular photo of the Painted Hills in Oregon under a rainbow.

Painted Hills Rainbow
National Geographic Photo of the Day
© 1996-2010 National Geographic Society.

Photograph by Larry Andreasen

Taken at the Painted Hills National Monument in Central Oregon near sunset. Having been here numerous times before in the summer months, seeing a rainbow on a 100-degree day was the last thing I expected … usually the skies are clear on hot days.

Kids ride bikes in the desert, Newspaper takes notice.

Rider Cassie, 11, negotiates the Cactus Forest Trail during a Trips for Kids Southern Arizona group ride through Saguaro National Park East.
Photos by Greg Bryan / Arizona Daily Star

Fortunately, nobody fell into a cactus, so all’s well that ends well.

It’s eight months in federal prison for a man who stole saguaros from a national park in Tucson….

Tillman and McKee took two of the giant cacti from Saguaro National Park West in January 2007.

From the current issue of National Geographic,

A city of limestone towers rises in western Madagascar…. Unexplored passages shelter some of the island’s—and the world’s—strangest species, from the ghostly Decken’s sifaka, a lemur, to a host of reptiles, insects, and plants….

Photograph by Stephen Alvarez

Spiny, drought-tolerant Pachypodium plants… thrive in… Tsingy de Bemaraha national park and reserve in western Madagascar.

Succulent gardens on Alcatraz are blooming.

Today, thanks to dozens of green-thumbed volunteers and Garden Conservancy staff, Alcatraz is blooming again. (Provided by the Garden Conservancy)

Here’s my photo of the leading edge of the island covered by Agave americanas, many of them in bloom.

Closer… (more…)

Saguaro National Park makes the news every ten years or so.

Saguaro National Park counts its saguaro cactus population every decade.

Good to know.

“In the past, we had more of the very tall ones, the older saguaros,” Swann said.  “But a lot of those older saguaros have died over the years.”

That can’t be good.

“The population seems to be coming back,” Swann said.

Yay!

(I)t will take time… ”A saguaro that’s about an inch tall, is about seven years old,” Swann explained.

Indeed that is so. Sooooo slooooowwww….

When people used to regularly take saguaros out of the desert to put in their yard, they actually took a whole generation of medium-sized plants out. That’s why with the oldest saguaros dying, they’re not being replaced with new giants yet. It will take years for the newly protected babies to fill in behind that lost generation.

Claretcup Cactus Blossoms
Photo Credit: Elizabeth R. Rose

Earlier this year I was hiking at Navajo National Monument near Kayenta in the Four Corners area and found… an amazing Claret cup cactus flower.

That is a very nice picture indeed. Cactus are pretty…

Have you ever been to Navajo NM? It’s got amazing cliff dwellings. As are many of the extant cliff dwellings, it’s near the Four Corners part of the country, or so they tell me. No, wait, actually I’ve been there, so I can tell you this myself. Interesting name since there aren’t any corners there at all, unless you’re looking at a map.

Did You Know?
Hisatsinom is the Hopi name for their ancestors that lived in the Four Corners region of the Southwest.

Well, no I did not know this before today, but now I do.

High desert among the grasslands of Colorado? Pawnee National Grasslands are a bonanza for walking and birdwatching and flower spotting too. This is a long excerpt, but there’s even more if you click through. More pictures, more interesting descriptions. It makes me want to go visit, you know.

This spring brought downpour after downpour of rain, making the prairie burst into bloom. The pioneers who came here in the 1880s learned that plowing the sod in the arid high desert shouldn’t have been done and when the Dust Bowl hit in the 1930s, the farms were abandoned.

After the people gave up on their dreams and forfeited their land, it reverted back to its natural state. Remnants of homesteads, windmills and cemeteries can be seen from the trails near the Buttes…

Whenever we’d see a photo opportunity, I’d say, “Stop!” Wild flowers were everywhere we looked, a sea of lavender, Vetch, Yellow Evening Primrose, Ball Cactus, Prickly Pear Cactus, Sand Lilies, bright pink Locoweed, Penstemon, lavender, Fleabane, and yellow sweet clover.

Just watch where you step, OK?

Kniphofia rooperi

Big shaggy leaves, but really it’s all about the blooms, as it is with all these aloe relatives. What sets this one apart is that the flowers are a fairly dense pyramid, unlike the regular red hot pokers you see everywhere. And they have both the yellow and the red together, in one fell swoop.

Also, they are from the East Cape unlike the red hots, which are not from the East Cape.

I wonder what East Cape it is they’re talking about? I’ve been to the east side of Cape Cod, but it’s not usually called the East Cape there, it’s usually called the Outer Cape, or the National Seashore. Really, they’re my favorite beaches in the whole world, those easterly beaches of Cape Cod, but then I’ve never seen any of these kniph’s over there, so it must be another East Cape they mean.

Probably not this one either.

Maybe this one.

From the Arizona Republic.

A stiff wind blows out of Alamo Canyon on a sunny day. It whistles past organ-pipe-cactus needles and sends ripples across pools of water in a rocky wash below.

What with the new President coming in and all (soon…), the Senate has passed a bill to expand wilderness areas, including a larger Joshua Tree National Park:

In California, Joshua Tree National Park (above) would expand under the legislation along with two other areas in the state. (Gabriel Bouys / AFP/Getty Images)

Nice picture of yuccas. Any cactus being saved too? Indeed!

Joshua Tree National Park cactus garden is one of many wonders in the high desert. (Gabriel Bouys / AFP/Getty Images)

But is there anything the SF Chronicle can tell us to go along with these pretty pictures? Why, but of course!

This bill would designate as wilderness some 190,000 acres of scenic and ecologically sensitive desert land in the mountains of Riverside County adjacent to Palm Springs, including large chunks of Joshua Tree National Park….

The designation of 80,000 acres of additional wilderness in Joshua Tree National Park would protect the high, moist Mojave desert habitat, which supports Joshua trees, and the lower, warmer Colorado desert ecosystem, where Cholla cactus is prevalent.

Epiphyllum species hanging off a tree in Carara National Park, Costa Rica

Auntie R is still 4-wheeling it through the desert and sent along this photo.

We think she should clean her lens, but it is a spectacular Yucca. We’ve tried to grow them in Berkeley, and people keep asking for them at the nursery, but no such luck.

Permits now available from the Tonto National Forest.

Rafting permit applications for the Upper Salt River Canyon Wilderness are now available from the Tonto National Forest.

The Salt River… flows through oak and juniper woodlands down into striking Lower Sonoran desert vegetation with its giant multi-armed saguaro cactus as well as cactus of every description.

Several side canyons reveal oasis-like microhabitats.

From National Geographic’s Photo of the Day

Grazing Eland, Drakensberg Range, South Africa, 2001

Photograph by Kenneth Garrett

The rich foliage, roots, and bulbs on the slopes of South Africa’s Drakensberg Range attract a wide variety of mammals, including eland, the world’s largest antelope species. Logging, overgrazing, and soil erosion, however, threaten this critical African habitat.

What plants are there in the Drakensberg Range? Read on…
(more…)

We told you previously about efforts to keep people from stealing cactus out of gardens. Now the National Park Service is getting into the act of microchipping plants. This is good, but won’t actually help find the plants, only track plants that are already found back to their original source.

Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press

TUCSON (AP) — Anyone swiping a saguaro cactus from the desert could soon be hauling off more than just a giant plant.

National Park Service officials plan to imbed microchips in saguaros, Arizona’s signature plant, to protect them from thieves who rip them from the desert to sell them to landscapers, nurseries and homeowners.

I wonder if you can microchip a tomato plant? The possibilities to track your produce as it travels could be quite entertaining.

From my Senator:

Now, how about a cactus?

Here’s a good one from Joshua Tree National Park:

Suszan Standing Next to the Cholla Cactus
A cholla cactus stuck to my elbow while I was taking pictures. Removing it from my skin was a painful process because each thorn consists of microscopic, jagged edges that tore my flesh.

That’s an Opuntia bigelovii, aka Teddy Bear Cholla, or Jumping Cholla. Photo borrowed from Joshua at fotohorizon.com.

Now it seems like Saguaro National Park is going to tag cacti to discourage theft. A timely opinion column in the Tucson Citizen tells the story.

These are tough times for the saguaro cactus. The Goliaths of the desert have been besieged in recent years by non-native plants. Invaders such as buffelgrass choke off young saguaros and increase the likelihood of a habitat-scorching wildfire.

Man, of course, also has proven to be a nemesis. Thieves, while rare, have made off with young cactuses, sometimes taking a dozen at a time.

Thankfully, technology offers a way to fight back.

Saguaro National Park plans to tag young cactuses with tiny microchips to help in investigations of missing cactuses and to make robbers think twice before striking.

Saguaros are a living symbol of the Southwest and lure visitors from around the world to our city. Keeping the cactuses alive and well should be a top priority, and we’re glad to see that Saguaro National Park has found a high-tech way to stick it to thieves.

I hope they don’t mind that I quoted it in full. It’s short, and relevant.

In Saguaro National Park they’ve come up with such a simple and elegant solution to poaching, that one wonders why it wasn’t thought of before.

Bob Love, the chief ranger says “Saguaro National Park was set aside to preserve the saguaro cactus if we can’t protect them here where can we can we protect them.”

So he’s come up with a plan to deter plant poachers. A microchip will be implanted in the saguaros…. Each chip costs $3.50

I like it. Maybe we can also microchip my sunglasses, since they keep getting stolen too, or lost, hard to know which.