![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() #JOSH DEAR SUN VALLEY NV PATCH#They appeared to have dug their teeth into Joshua trees in a last-ditch effort to survive.Īt the base of one tree, whose age Cornett put at about well over 100, he noticed another threat: A patch of bark had been scraped away.Ĭornett crouched, inspected, harrumphed. “This is the first time I’ve seen signs of rodents attacking stems on this site,” he said, pointing out some gnawed branches.Īs with the ocotillo, the problem seemed to be that the plants usually found around the trees were dead or dying, leaving virtually no moisture for rodents. “It’s the first time I’ve seen him this year.”Īt the Queen Valley site, Cornett examined the stems of the four surviving trees and discovered yet another assault on their health. “That’s a hooded oriole, getting nectar from an aloe plant,” Cornett said when I asked him to ID an eye-popping, bright yellow bird with a contrasting fan of black neck and wing feathers. Over the years, the wildlife show has included a parade of bighorn sheep, bobcats, coyotes, mule deer, striped skunks, racoons, hawks, snakes, a mountain lion and a variety of birds. He paused for just a beat, sighed and said we’ve run out of other explanations.Ĭornett’s Palm Springs condo butts up against a section of the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument, with rocky cliffs plunging into the ravine that cuts past his home. I asked Cornett whether such changes can be definitively tied to climate change. “There may be some species of hummingbirds that will either cease migrating or become extinct because of the slow demise of the ocotillo.” “The ocotillo is a critically important nectar-producing plant that is vital for migrating hummingbirds that come up from Mexico,” Cornett said. Climate- related change has a cascading effect, Cornett said, using the ocotillo to illustrate his point. The rat nests in the ocotillos are part of a much bigger saga, he said, in which the characters are insects, birds, rodents, lizards, snakes and other wildlife, along with plant species. Some will survive, Cornett predicts, but many will die.Ĭornett, in fact, is documenting this and other desert ecosystem transformations for a book, which has a working title of “The California Deserts: Then and Now.” The book will feature a collection of photographs Cornett has taken over time, demonstrating the decline of plant life by aiming his lens at the same locations over a decades-long span. How about this: Joshua Tree National Park might one day not be the best place to see Joshua trees. So what is changing, and why should we care? “Our desert areas in California are being rather dramatically changed in composition and appearance,” Cornett said, offering an assessment that casual visitors may have trouble grasping. And that’s how I ended up staring at rat nests in ocotillos. I was curious about whether there were visible changes in the desert, so I called Cornett. In the last year, I’ve written about the ways in which extreme heat, drought and diminishing fog have affected California’s wine industry, redwood trees and marine habitats. On a five-mile hike near Lake Cahuilla in La Quinta, my wife and I saw bighorn sheep, but no wildflowers. “This was not here last year, and I’m shocked to see it.” “This is only the second time in my life that I’ve seen a wood rat’s nest in a living ocotillo,” said Cornett, who makes multiple visits each year to dozens of study sites to monitor the growth and health of ocotillo plants, Joshua trees and fan palms. This ocotillo was brown and dry, thanks to the drought, and it was sporting a nest the size of a small tumbleweed, fashioned from the brittle twigs of creosote bushes and other plants. It was just past noon when Cornett came upon a rat’s nest built into the base of an ocotillo, a spindly, long-stemmed plant with Kelly-green leaves and lipstick-red flowers that bloom in spring. Roadrunners, palm trees, snakes, Joshua trees - Cornett has studied them all and written more than 40 books.īut the 72-year-old ecologist, who fell in love with the desert as a schoolboy and is still on his honeymoon 60 years later, was stumped one day in April near the southern entrance to Joshua Tree National Park. If you have any questions about how the plants and animals of Southern California’s deserts are faring as the Earth gets hotter and drier, Jim Cornett is a good bet to have the answers. ![]()
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