Fall 2021 Children's Sneak Previews

Croydon Woods Has Earned Awards For Environmental Stewardship. It's A Superfund Site

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For more than 30 years, Connie Storz has kept an eye on an 80-acre parcel of woods next to the Keystone Elementary School in Croydon, Bucks County. As a school administrator, she had an interest in what was going on in Croydon Woods.

"This used to be a complete trash dump," Storz said, walking through Croydon Woods Nature Preserve recently when its bare trees were beginning to emerge from winter.

"A lot of homeless, a lot of kids partying back here, and there was a lot of quad riding," she said. "That was probably the worst, kids riding their quads back here. And motorcycles."

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Connie Storz, who has worked at nearby Keystone Elementary School for 32 years, remembers when Croydon Woods Preserve was "a dump" and the community effort it took to reclaim it. (EMMA LEE/WHYY)

But public use of the woods has come a long way in the past three decades. As one of Pennsylvania's last remaining coastal plain forests, Croydon Woods is home to frogs, beavers and owls. It sits along the Delaware River near Bristol and is thick with beech and magnolia trees, wild cinnamon ferns and small, endangered grasses.

It's now maintained as a public green space by Heritage Conservancy, which recently received Gov. Josh Shapiro's Award for Environmental Excellence for its restoration and management of Croydon Woods. Once a dumpimg ground and site for off-roading, Croydon Woods is now a nature preserve, thick with beech and magnolia trees, wild cinnamon ferns and small, endangered grasses. (Emma Lee/WHYY)

While it's an urban oasis of greenery on its surface, Croydon Woods has a legacy of environmental pollution below. The area's groundwater is contaminated with the carcinogen TCE, or Trichloroethylene. In 1986 the site was added to the federal list of toxic Superfund sites.

TCE is used in the manufacturing of refrigerants and cleaning solutions. Exposure to high concentrations of TCE can cause a long list of ailments, including cancer and damage to kidneys, liver, nervous system and fetal development.

For over a century, the area around Croydon has been used for chemical manufacturing by Rohm and Haas, now Dow Chemical. Under the Superfund law, the chemical companies are responsible for the remediation of a groundwater plume in the area surrounding the woods, but the particular plume of TCE found in the groundwater beneath the Croydon woods is of a different type. It could never be positively traced to Rohm and Haas, or Dow. Teachers at nearby Keystone Elementary School use Croydon Woods as a teaching site. Students are appointed Tree Guardians and keep an eye on the young trees the Heritage Conservancy is protecting. (Emma Lee/WHYY)

"The chemical signatures were different in the two plumes," said Andrew Hass, a remedial project manager at the EPA. "The thought was there was maybe some illegal dumping going on."

Without a responsible party, remediation fell to the EPA and Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, paid by the federal Superfund established in 1980 by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). The vernal pools at Croydon Woods provide a breeding ground for frogs and salamanders. (Emma Lee/WHYY)(

Hass said that in the 1980s, TCE contamination was more than 100 parts per billion. The goal now is to get TCE levels down to 5 parts per billion. After two major clean-up projects over the last 30 years — including pumping up the groundwater and treating it on the surface, and injecting a bio-stimulant into the earth to promote TCE-eating bacteria — it's nearly there.

Hass held up his thumb and forefinger to show how close they are. He said some measurements show levels of just 5.2 parts per billion, but that last 0.2 ppb is the hardest. It could be decades before Croydon Woods is finally removed from the active Superfund list. Once a dumpimg ground and site for off-roading, Croydon Woods is now a nature preserve, thick with beech and magnolia trees, wild cinnamon ferns and small, endangered grasses. (Emma Lee/WHYY)

Despite the damage to the subsurface water, no danger exists for recreational use of the land because TCE is not present at the surface, according to the EPA. All homes that once used wells that drew from the polluted groundwater have been connected to the municipal water system since 1989.

Community involvement key to keeping the ecosystem intact

In the meantime, Heritage Conservancy wants to see Croydon Woods enjoyed by the public. The Heritage Conservancy acquired the property in 2016 to preserve its native ecology and encourage neighbors to use its approximately 1.5 miles of trails.

But it was not the toxic groundwater that kept people away. The community had learned to equate Croydon Woods with destruction and illicit behavior. Heritage Conservancy's community engagement manager Shannon Fredebaugh-Siller said many neighbors saw the woods as off limits. A pump house used in the clean-up of Croydon Woods Preserve now belongs to the Heritage Conservancy. (Emma Lee/WHYY)

"There were the quads going through, and one of the first weekends that we owned the property there were unfortunately multiple fires set," she said. "As a parent, myself, I could understand. It's not a place that you would say, 'Yes, children, go enjoy the woods.'"

It is Fredebaugh-Siller's job to change the narrative of Croydon Woods to encourage residents to regard it as a natural oasis. One of the first things Heritage did was hire a 24-hour surveillance company to thwart all-terrain vehicles from tearing up the forest floor.

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Croydon Woods has a great advantage, being next to an elementary school. Fredebaugh-Siller reached out to teachers at Keystone to develop curricula that use the woods as a teaching aide. Shannon Fredebaugh-Siller, community engagement programs manager for the Heritage Conservancy, says volunteers pulled 20,000 pounds of trash from the 80-acre site that has become Croydon Woods Preserve. (Emma Lee/WHYY)

"We had a willing fourth-grade teacher, Kati Bryson, who's been an amazing partner," she said. "That's really where it all started for our environmental education work in schools."

Bryson uses the woods as a teaching site to learn basic environmental conservation. There is an area of small logs that foster habitats for frogs. Students look after cages put into place to protect small saplings. The Heritage Conservancy installed structures, like this simple bridge to encourage play at Croydon Woods Preserve, a site that was once too dangerous for children. (Emma Lee/WHYY)

The schoolchildren acquired a sense of ownership of Croydon Woods, and are relentless lookouts. If they see something, they say something.

"Two weeks ago we had a person with a quad, and he was parking his truck and unloading," Storz recalled. "Somebody comes in and they go, 'Miss Connie! Somebody's out there with a quad.'"

"Well, I go out there. I take a picture of his license plate. He's looking at me, like, 'What?'" she said. "I said, 'You are not allowed to bring quads back here.' I told him where to go, to a place in New Jersey, but not here. He put it up and he left." For many years the trails at Croydon Woods were used for quad bikes and motorcycles. Keeping them out has been a challenge. (Emma Lee/WHYY)

"Thank you for doing that," Fredebaugh-Siller replied. "That is honestly one of the most important pieces of it. The community being aware and involved in this space has been instrumental in the changes that we've seen."

Community engagement is a cornerstone for urban land conservancy, according to guidelines established 10 years ago by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Its Standards and Excellence recommendations include understanding the surrounding community, connecting them to the benefits of natural spaces, and providing equitable access to those spaces.

Fredebaugh-Siller was trained in those fish and wildlife standards and developed Croydon Woods as a pilot program that can be replicated at Heritage Conservancy's other properties.

Turning over a log reveals a two-lined salamander in Croydon Woods Nature Preserve. (Emma Lee/WHYY)

A mural has just been completed on a wall of the adjacent Little League baseball field, which acts as an entry point into Croydon Woods. The image featuring samples of the flora and fauna to be found in the woods was designed with input from children at Keystone Elementary.

The EPA's role in Croydon Woods is limited to detoxifying its groundwater. But Hass says the long-term success of the site requires the involvement of its neighbors.

Croydon Woods is celebrated in a mural recently painted on the concession stand at the Lower Bucks County Athletic Association baseball fields, near Keystone Elementary School. (Emma Lee/WHYY)

"EPA's goal with the Superfund sites is to have them back in use, instead of just being fenced off," he said. "What the Heritage Conservancy has done, taking that parcel over and making it into a park, is a fantastic reuse of a Superfund site."

Heritage Conservancy owns several properties throughout Pennsylvania, including four publicly accessible ones. Fredebaugh-Siller plans to replicate the public engagement model developed at Croydon at those other sites.

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Arizona's Sky Islands Are A 'treasure' That Warming Climate And Mining Threaten To Bury

SUMMERHAVEN — When there's snow on the mountain, an only-in-Arizona party breaks out.

It's Southern Comfort and Krispy Kremes for a birthday party around a forested picnic table on this island in the sky with its views plunging 6,000 feet to the drab expanse of desert scrub and saguaro cactuses below.

It's road cyclists in polyester shorts ending their grueling ascent from toasty Tucson with a selfie atop a snowbank, a hint of marijuana smoke wafting past them from somewhere in the village of weekend cabins while a snowboarder leaps off a berm at Ski Valley in the background. Sometimes a coati, a javelina or a roadrunner shows up in the parking lot. Ravens and jays patrol for untended snacks and scraps.

And it's a 5-year-old boy trudging up a small hill and sliding down back down on a plastic toboggan, while kids from the neighboring Mexican state of Sonora stream out of family cars and squeal as they dodge snowballs and touch their tongues on the frozen flakes.

Jeremiah Reed, 5, of Tucson, sleds down a hill at Mount Lemmon Ski Valley.

"It's easy for us to travel 45 minutes to come to a whole different world," Tucson resident Jordan Reed said while watching her son sled atop Mount Lemmon during the remarkably snowy February of 2023.

In summer, when the city below is sweltering, the granite peak in the Santa Catalina Range offers cool respite. "It's amazing — probably a 20-degree improvement," said Adam Smallman, a mining equipment trainer who travels from London to Tucson four times a year and needs an escape during the summer visits.

Mount Lemmon — Babad Do'ag, or Frog Mountain, to the Tohono O'odham people — rises in the Catalinas, one of 17 ranges in what is known as the Madrean Archipelago Sky Islands, a culturally and ecologically rich sprinkling of towering mountain ranges that rise from the desert. These ranges give beige southeastern Arizona a bouquet of otherworldly greenery, but with very worldly challenges. A warming climate is drying the forests, squeezing the rich web of life into smaller oases on these mountains, periodically chased by intensifying megafires.

For now, this remains a magical realm above the plains where the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts meet, where exotic green-and-red birds like the elegant trogon fly, where mountain springs float endangered frogs and feed the insects that feed Arizona's cornucopia of hummingbird species. These mountains are where, occasionally, America's rarest wandering cats, jaguars and ocelots, roam, and where state and federal biologists seek to recover Mexican gray wolves. They are also a mining zone long exploited by industry and now attracting a new wave of prospects as the emerging green energy economy demands raw materials.

A Coues deer rests at Cave Creek Ranch in Portal, Arizona.

From the New Mexico Bootheel to the Santa Teresa Wilderness southeast of Globe to the Baboquivari Range crossing into Mexico on the Tohono O'odham Nation, Arizona's Sky Islands are a landscape like none other in America. They provide a temperate environment distinct from the sun-baked flats, and act as a vital mixing zone for animals dispersing from the Rocky and Sierra Madre mountains to the north and south.

Birds that hew to the Gulf of California and the Pacific Coast on their springtime migrations to the north veer inland on their way back south, attracted by nectar and clouds of insects that arise after Arizona's summer and autumn monsoon rains, a sort of second spring unique to the region. As lowland areas to the north and south warm, the mountains provide cooler zones for mammals and plants whose ranges must shift with the temperatures.

Already situated precariously at the edge of habitable ranges for many animals and trees, these mountains are like points in a dot-to-dot drawing of the Southwest's ecology. Rising temperatures, highly flammable non-native grasses and development pressures all hang over them as erasers ready to break the chain. The rapidity of change leaves some scientists wondering whether nature may need assistance in adapting, such as with the planting of tree species currently more common to the south.

"These Sky Islands act as stepping stones between those Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Madres, between the tropics and the temperate (zones), between deserts and everything around," said Bryon Lichtenhan, stewardship specialist with the Sky Island Alliance, a Tucson-based group dedicated to protecting and restoring natural diversity of life in the region. "Even larger species ― bears and deer and things like that ― will roam hundreds of miles looking for new habitat and places like this where things are a little cooler, where there is more water to be found, where there's food to eat."

The mountains support most of Arizona's 28 bat species, including a canyon in far southeastern Arizona's Chiricahua Range where biologists capture and study at least 20 of them, many as seasonal migrants from Mexico that perform critical tasks of pollination and cropland pest control around the continent.

"If you like margaritas, you gotta love nectar-feeding bats because they pollinate agaves," said Tim Snow, a retired nongame biologist who helped train biologists on bat capture methods in the Chiricahuas last summer.

Men sing prayer songs during the Holy Ground Ceremony the night before the start of the 32nd Annual Mount Graham Sacred Run on July 20, 2023, at the Old San Carlos Memorial in San Carlos Lake, Arizona.

They're places of spiritual renewal and reverence to some of Arizona's Indigenous peoples.

"Mount Graham is just sacred," a place from which life springs and upon which spirits like angels gather, said Wendsler Nosie, a San Carlos Apache activist who has long organized a yearly spiritual run up the 10,724-foot peak in the Pinaleño Mountains near Safford. "It's one of the most powerful mountains in the Southwest."

Yet Graham ― Dzil Nchaa Si'an, or Big Seated Mountain, in Apache ― also provides a warning of the ravages that a warming climate is aiming at the Sky Islands. A squirrel found only on this one mountain, the Mount Graham red squirrel, has teetered on the brink of extinction for decades, at one time thought to have already gone extinct but now numbering 144 at latest count. It lives in the cool of the mountaintop's spruce-fir forest, with nowhere to go if recurring waves of drought and wildfire erase that stronghold. To bend the island metaphor to the squirrel's perspective, Graham is less a stepping stone than a rock sinking under the rising sea of climate change.

Above all, the Sky Islands are a wholly unique and largely unheralded ecosystem that is itself endangered by rising temperatures that threaten to push pines, firs and the critters that live among them right off the mountaintops and into extinction.

A view from the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona.

For the birds: How to find an elegant trogon

It's easy enough to get under an elegant trogon's skin and test his "elegance" during nesting season. Despite the male bird's dashing, polychromatic suit of feathers — red breast, white collar, black cap, gray wings, green jacket with bronze tail — he sheds all grace when you hold a smartphone overhead and play a recorded trogon call into a southern Arizona oak and sycamore forest.

Jennie MacFarland of Tucson Audubon Society displays an elegant trogon on her phone during the Tucson Audubon Society's annual trogon survey in the Patagonia Mountains of Arizona.

That's how Jennie MacFarland tracks them down each May. The conservation biologist with Tucson Audubon leads the annual count, moving crews of volunteer birders from range to range by the week to track the population's trajectory in the bird's preferred elevations between 5,000 and 6,000 feet. On one such outing in the Patagonia Mountains last spring, she enticed a trogon pair into revealing themselves only moments after stepping out of her vehicle.

"Kwok-kwok-kwok-kwok-kwok-kwok." Six throaty squawks from the phone alert the trogon to a challenger for his nesting turf. Within moments, the bird who has taken up residence swoops overhead to inspect the intruder, who turns out to be human. In this way, MacFarland and volunteers who spread out across the mountains can pinpoint where elegant trogon pairs are nesting.

It's a method she advises birders to forgo in popular trogon-watching locations such as Madera Canyon on the west side of the Santa Ritas, where too many people playing too many recordings around known nests could drive the birds bonkers. Where MacFarland played it, though, off a dirt forest road deep in the Patagonias, it was the only sound besides the rustle of windblown oak leaves.

Jennie MacFarland of the Tucson Audubon Society plays an elegant trogon call on her phone to see if any birds are in the area during the Tucson Audubon Society's annual trogon survey in Finley and Adams Canyon in the Patagonia Mountains of Arizona.

Trogons frequently nest in the cavities that develop in sycamores when the trees drop limbs in a sort of self-pruning job, MacFarland said. For this reason, birders tend to flock to the wetter Sky Island canyons where sycamores thrive, such as Madera Canyon. But trogons like those that she found in the Patagonias are equally at home in cavities that woodpeckers drill out of oaks, she said.

The Patagonias, trending north from the U.S.-Mexico border near Nogales, join other Sky Islands like the Santa Ritas, the Atascosas, the Huachucas and the Chiricahuas as the northernmost redoubts of these mostly Mexican birds. The mountain ranges offer bountiful expanses of what the trogons need, MacFarland said: oak and sycamore tree cavities for nests, and a smorgasbord of insect life that erupts from both winter and summer rainy seasons.

As if to prove the point, a butterfly — specifically, an Arizona sister — flitted among the manzanita underbrush, flashing bright orange spots from the tips of its dark wings.

The birds feast on grasshoppers, katydids, walking sticks and various caterpillars. The name trogon means gnawer in Greek, and the birds are often photographed with grasshopper legs jutting from their beaks.

Earth's warming climate is especially pronounced in the West, and is creating an uncertain outlook for Arizona's trogons. Climate scientists have linked the region's prolonged drought since 2000 to hotter temperatures. The full-year average temperature in the Sky Islands region of southeastern Arizona has warmed by 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1970, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.

The Sky Islands are projected to become drier, MacFarland said. Recent drought years with poor monsoon seasons provide a glimpse into a future where trogons may go the way of the thick-billed parrot, a pine nut-eating species that lived in Arizona pine forests through the early 20th century and again briefly in the 1980s and 1990s after an ultimately unsuccessful reintroduction, but that now clings to lusher sections of Mexico's Sierra Madres.

A male elegant trogon perches in a tree in Finley and Adams Canyon in the Patagonia Mountains of Arizona.

The 2020 bird census logged a record high of 201 trogons in Arizona's Sky Islands, with the highest concentration in the Huachucas. Then came the driest year on record, MacFarland said. "These trees looked so brown and crunchy," she said. Migrating trogons started moving north in spring but likely stopped or turned back when they saw the local conditions. That year's count dropped by two-thirds, to 68.

Mearns quail, the masked game birds also known as Montezuma quail that frequent the oak savannas ringing Sky Island ranges, also crashed that year, MacFarland said.

Heavy monsoon rains followed, helping the 2022 trogon count rebound to 121. Another healthy monsoon followed, and then a wet winter.

"The territory looks good," MacFarland said during her 2023 Patagonia outing. That count would again show a bump in birds, to 183 across the Sky Islands.

The dramatic yo-yo effect shows how quickly things can change for wildlife at the edges of their native range when conditions worsen.

"It's always on the edge where things change most, right?" MacFarland said. "And we're right on the edge" of trogon range.

Volunteers Rosie Bennett (right) and Pam Negri look for elegant trogons on the Madera Canyon Carrie Nation Trail during the Tucson Audubon Society's annual elegant trogon survey in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson.

Farther north last May, at Madera Canyon, birders from around the country traipsed the rocky trails and sat quietly for hours, training camera lenses on sycamore cavities, waiting as male and female trogons took turns returning to or emerging from them. Some had traveled from as far as Minnesota specifically to scratch the trogon off their life list of bird viewings. These birders are a major driver of a billion-dollar wildlife-watching industry in Arizona.

The Arizona Game and Fish Department in 2018 produced a report using 2011 figures to estimate that 1.6 million people watch wildlife in Arizona, and that each spends nearly $600 on average to do it. The wildlife viewing that is dominated by birders in the Sky Islands region is thought to generate at least $300 million a year, according to Tucson Audubon.

"This is on the route," part-time Tucson resident Keith Wiggers said before heading up the trail toward a Madera Canyon trogon nest. "(For) anyone traveling internationally or through the U.S., this is a must stop."

Wiggers, a retiree in his late 70s, is a hardcore nature fan. On the drive into Madera Canyon, he picked up a roadkill jackrabbit and brought it to the trailhead parking lot, where he took it out of a garbage bag that he keeps in the car for such occasions and started flicking ants from it as cleanup for the ride home. It would serve as bait for scavengers. He posts wildlife videos to YouTube, including one showing a vulture tug-of-war match with a roadkill snake.

Trogons are one prize awaiting birders at Madera Canyon, but not nearly the only one. Wiggers has been visiting since the 1980s. On the previous day, he had counted 21 bird species, including flycatchers and Scott's orioles.

The Sky Islands are "a treasure" of biodiversity, Wiggers said, but also a spot at risk from both climate change and mining, a threat that appears to be growing specifically because the nation needs copper, manganese and other minerals to produce a cleaner, climate-friendlier energy future. Human encroachment is pressuring nature here as everywhere.

"It just makes you literally cry sometimes," Wiggers said.

Forests on the edge: 'It felt like the world was burning'

The summer of 2020 was extra hellish for Tucson residents. As usual, the summer heat had ramped up ahead of the cooling from expected seasonal monsoon rains that never fully materialized. By June 4, the city broiled at 108 degrees.

This was the same record-dry summer that repelled elegant trogons across Arizona's Sky Islands, and Tucson would end the year with just over 4 inches of rain, far less than the average of more than 11. In the city, residents with air-conditioned homes stayed inside, confined by both the stifling heat and the fresh horrors of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On June 5, a storm chaser captured video of a massive lightning strike in the Catalinas that soon would wind the lockdown more tightly. The combination of drought and invasive, highly flammable buffelgrass would toast Tucson's Sky Island playground, Mount Lemmon. It was the second time a massive wildfire had traumatized Summerhaven since 2003, when the Aspen Fire torched more than 300 dwellings there. This time, the Bighorn Fire would not destroy buildings, but it would burn uncontained for 45 days across 120,000 acres, again forcing the village's evacuation.

The chilled mountain oasis, usually so close at hand, would elude a population yearning for fresh air.

"It just felt like the world was burning," said Katie Herder, a public health graduate student at the University of Arizona and a former Peace Corps volunteer.

Almost a year and a half later, in November 2021, Herder ascended the mountain with a crew of Sky Island Alliance volunteers who fanned out to find and assess the ecological health of springs that sustain plant and animal life and contribute to Tucson's streams and groundwater recharge. She and two other women were assigned Mint Spring, a spongy trickle through the grass on an otherwise dry ridge behind Summerhaven. Fragrant and refreshing mint sprigs surrounded the narrow ribbon of wet grass, a blanket of green on the brown landscape under the blackened totems of charred ponderosa pines.

Arizona has more identified springs than any U.S. State, whether because they're easier to see in deserts and savannas or, the Alliance's Lichtenhan suggested, because they're so critical to life here and therefore worth mapping. The Alliance has mapped thousands of them in the Sky Islands and assesses their ecological function to prescribe interventions for those at risk of drying up.

Herder and fellow volunteers noted the running water's width, the depth of more than a foot at the point where the spring emerged from the mountain, and the condition of plants. All looked reasonably healthy, if denuded of tree and shrub cover. Their report would inform the alliance's decision to plant shrubs there to provide shade and erosion control.

"Climate change is bringing larger and more intense wildfires to the Sky Islands, which is particularly an issue because these mountain ranges are isolated," Sky Island Alliance Executive Director Louise Misztal said. "When a large fire burns in a mountain range like the Catalinas, a large portion of that high-elevation forested habitat can really be destroyed and altered."

Finding and protecting or restoring springs that could be eroded and clogged by silt is important to both wildlife and people, she said.

So close to urban Arizona, Mount Lemmon offers high-visibility snapshots of how climate warming, drying and fire threaten the state's southern mountain forests. It is by no means the only troubling example.

Another fire, this one of undetermined human origin, broke out in the Chiricahua Mountains of far-southeastern Arizona on May 8, 2011, and may have forever altered the range that includes Chiricahua National Monument.

The Horseshoe 2 Fire began atop the Chiricahua Mountains in May 2011 and scorched nearly 223,000 acres.

The Horseshoe 2 Fire, named for its canyon of origin, blasted more than 200,000 acres, much of it oak-pine woodlands that researchers believe will now favor the oak at the expense of the pines.

"Anything that's capable of sprouting seems to be doing just fine," said Helen Poulos, a Wesleyan University plant ecologist who studies Sky Island changes with research partner Andrew Barton from the University of Maine at Farmington. They found that the intense burning from 2011 has favored oaks, which regenerate from the roots and shade out seed-dependent trees like pines. "That's why these pines under climate change aren't coming back as well."

Nowhere is this more apparent than at Cave Creek Canyon, a popular birding destination near Portal. It's now wall-to-wall oaks, Barton said. That may be fine for some birds, but the full complement of species may never come back. A bird like the Mexican spotted owl, which favors old growth with nesting cavities, could be among the casualties. An endemic species, the Chiricahua fox squirrel, declined in the national monument after the fire, Barton said.

The two researchers are relieved to see pines persisting in some of the monument's cooler and wetter drainages, where the fire slowed and lost intensity. Maybe those areas can serve as refugia for pine-dependent species, and as seed banks for the future.

Sky Island Alliance volunteers survey Mint Spring on Mount Lemmon, where water seeps from the Bighorn Fire's burn scar, on Nov. 13, 2021.

But will a warming and drying climate continue to chip away at Sky Island pines till they're all gone?

"That's a hard question to answer, and a scary question," Barton said. A lot is riding on whether and how quickly the world ameliorates its climate-warming carbon pollution. "It depends on whether humanity gets its shit together, so to speak."

The researchers noted that some scientists are building a case for planting other pine species from warmer parts of Mexico, such as the Chihuahua pine, in Arizona's struggling ponderosa ranges. Doing so would replicate the natural work of jays and squirrels that would disperse the appropriate seeds if they had thousands of years in which to do it. That's time that these ranges don't appear to have under rapidly warming conditions.

"The climate is shifting faster than the species can move on their own," Poulos said. "The bears and the jaguars and the coatis move in between (mountain ranges), but it's harder for plants."

The key, Poulos said, will be to identify the moistest, coolest canyons and slopes and concentrate any pine retention efforts there. The same could be true for other conifers in the Sky Islands, such as the spruce-fir landscape that supports the endangered squirrels on Mount Graham. Threatened Gila trout also face an uncertain fate there, as a 2017 fire forced a fish evacuation for safe keeping at a New Mexico hatchery before volunteers could return them once deadly ash had dissipated from the streams.

Nature's helpers: Doing the work to protect the land

One Saturday last June, the Sky Island Alliance's Lichtenhan led a crew of volunteers up Mount Lemmon to move a bunch of rocks. Their hands were needed to help prevent further erosion that could wash away a pine- and alder-shaded wildlife oasis called Caseco Spring.

The area was damaged in the 2020 Bighorn Fire, and since then water has cascaded over formerly vegetated slopes, especially during big monsoon storms. The U.S. Forest Service, which controls much of the Sky Islands landscape within its Coronado National Forest, provided funds for this and other spring restorations.

Caseco Spring emerges just downhill from where motorists and cyclists make their way up the Catalina Highway to Summerhaven. The crew arrived there to find a 5-ton pile of lunchbox-size rocks sold under the label "Coronado Brown" by a Willcox quarry. They gathered at the pile for instructions on moving them by wheelbarrow and then dumping them down a slope before placing them by hand as little check dams and bowls.

"These rocks were dropped off on Tuesday, so hopefully they're not full of snakes," Lichtenhan said. He also warned the volunteers to watch for scorpions in the cracks.

Volunteer Stacy Goodrich builds an erosion control structure on Caseco Spring on Mount Lemmon in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson.

The volunteers eagerly started plucking and heaving the rocks down to the grassy seep, where Tucson resident Stacy Goodrich soon had her two teens, Kameron and Riley, pressing rocks into the mud.

"I'm just trying to get the idea in their heads to be actively involved and take care of everything," Goodrich said. The family enjoys the outdoors, and nowhere more so than in the Sky Islands. "I've been in the desert for 30 years," she said, "and (Mount Lemmon) is just so unique. There's so much biodiversity, and it's such an oasis for the people from Tucson to escape to."

"I've always enjoyed nature," 13-year-old Riley said. "Kind of an outdoorsy kid."

They anchored the rocks against a boulder to create the first of three dams, each a single rock high, that will prevent floodwaters from downcutting when flowing against or over the boulder.

Volunteers Stacy Goodrich (from left) and Kameron Denomy and Jimmy Gibbin, Sky Island Alliance field coordinator, build an erosion control structure on Caseco Spring on Mount Lemmon in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson.

When the Alliance returned in October to see how their structures held up against the monsoon rains, they were still in place and starting to gather sediment, said the group's habitat conservation manager, Sarah Truebe. "So that was very exciting to stop the incision that was happening in that drainage."

Truebe leads the "Spring Seeker" program that maintains an online database of conditions at current and historic but sometimes damaged and dried up springs. The program has documented more than 900 springs with flowing or standing water within Arizona's Sky Islands region, 75 of them with moist ground only, 55 that are dry but still vegetated, and 272 that have dried completely. Counting those that the volunteers haven't reached, Truebe said, the Sky Islands region is known to have some 4,000 springs.

These springs and the snows and rains that refresh them are sources of the water that flows from mountaintop to the desert and then under the sand, bolstering the aquifers that communities including Tucson draw from and giving life to waterways critical to native species and migrating birds.

Water from one face of Mount Lemmon, for instance, might flow through Sabino Canyon Recreation Area on Tucson's north side, and from there into the city's Tanque Verde Creek, which in turn swells the Santa Cruz River during wet seasons.

Seemingly minor changes can affect these desert rivers in big ways. In recent years, Tucson and Pima County upgraded sewage treatment and directed treated water toward Santa Cruz restoration flows. The result: Partners including the state and the Sonoran Institute have transplanted endangered Gila topminnow into a stretch of river they had long abandoned. The little fish provide Tucsonans a personal ecological service as, according to Arizona Game and Fish, topminnows consume mosquito larvae that would otherwise grow to suck their blood.

James Washburne of the Watershed Management Group walks away from an Arundo patch near Tanque Verde Creek in east Tucson.

To maintain the restoration's momentum, the nonprofit Watershed Management Group brings volunteers to streams where the mountains meet desert to remove tangles of non-native vegetation that sucks water and crowds out native species. In early 2023, one such target was Arundo, or giant reed, a bamboo-like plant that's native to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers but now grows dense, reedy walls along Arizona streams.

Arizonans plant them for ornamental purposes, and volunteers said they see Arundo around Tucson, in yards and at subdivision entries. When monsoon floods snag roots or green shoots, the roots plant themselves and sprout wherever they find a trickle of flowing water. The matted thickets crowd out cottonwoods while also draining flows that might otherwise reach the Santa Cruz or sink to replenish groundwater that neighbors pump for home use.

Fires stripped away vegetation that once helped slow the water's mountainside descent, so there's been plenty of flooding to transport these invasives.

"There's an intimate connection between what's going on up there and down here," said James Washburne, a hydrologist who guided volunteers in removing the stalks by their roots in a stretch of Tanque Verde Creek flowing through northeast Tucson.

A pile of invasive, non-native Arundo is removed from Tanque Verde Creek in east Tucson.

Washburne's team had worked the streambank with heavy equipment before bringing in the volunteers. Canes lay in piles on their sides, ready for the volunteers to knock off dirt clods that otherwise would keep them from drying out, leaving them as a possible threat with the next flood.

Sounds easy, but it's a lot of dirt. Arundo roots stretch a foot or so deep in normal conditions, but resprout higher up the stalk each time new sediment buries part of the plant. The bank had grown to 4 feet deep, so the earth mover had turned up 4 feet of soil and roots.

People who lived near the Tanque Verde 50 years ago will remember a stream that, with the possible exception of June, had at least a trickle in it all the way through town to the Santa Cruz, Washburne said. It has since gone dry for longer periods, largely because of all the wells people have drilled and pumped. There's little that volunteers can do about that, but they can help restore native vegetation that helps slow and sink floodwaters so they can burble back up through the year.

The goal at Tanque Verde is a mesquite bosque to complement the taller cottonwoods that survive there. Even now, it's a place for coyotes and javelinas, and for birds and birders. As volunteers worked last year, black phoebes and vermilion flycatchers darted around collecting flying insects above the streambed.

Kristina Solheim of Tucson is in it for the water and for a sense of accomplishment. She has worked as a teacher around the world, and now, in her 70s, she wants her hometown to have a sustainable supply of water.

"It's gold," she said.

Mountains that never sleep: Nightlife on the islands

Ultrasonic bat chirps filled the air on a June night in the Chiricahuas. Most of them would be inaudible to human ears but for the laptop that bat researcher Janet Tyburec had set on a truck's tailgate to pick them up and translate them into a lower range. The laptop crackled like a Geiger counter, reporting unseen traffic overhead.

Chris Jeffrey holds a hoary bat during a workshop in the Chiricahua Mountains near Portal, Arizona.

These mountain cliffs and forests are a vertical bat city in summer, with some species riding out the day in the craggy tree bark down low, others in rocky high-rise crevices and caves. At dusk they descend toward Cave Creek for a taste of the insects hovering just above the trickling water. Some species hang around through the night, while others shoot down the canyon and across the eastern flats onto New Mexico fields to gorge on farm pests.

"This is like their commute," Tyburec said, "and this (canyon) is I-10."

This busy flyway is where Tyburec led a group of biologists from around the country and Canada during a night of trapping and listening for 20 or so of the species that fly the Chiricahuas.

While all of Arizona attracts bats for at least part of the year, this is the mother lode. Some more or less hibernate here, while others migrate in seasonally from the Sierra Madre Occidentals or the Rockies. The roosting habitat and temperatures vary with elevation, and where there is water there are bugs galore. Species like the lesser long-nosed bat are pollinators that seek out cactus flowers in the surrounding desert.

"It's like Walmart," Tyburec said, "because it has everything they need."

She's a bat surveying consultant based in Tucson and leads classes out of the American Museum of Natural History's Southwestern Research Station in Portal. She does it along Cave Creek, she said, because the bats are so thick it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

A big brown bat is captured in a triple high mist net on Silver Creek during a bat workshop in the Chiricahua Mountains near Portal, Arizona.

Students from federal, state or university departments spread nets like giant, gauzy badminton sets above the creek, waiting to do so until the birds go to bed and the bats come out.

They learn to use both nets and acoustics. Some of the species are either too wary of people or fly too high for trapping, but acoustics equipment can pick up their echolocation chirps, and the computer is programmed to identify the sounds by species.

Part of the crew sat quietly along the stream bank at 8 p.M., watching the nets. Others assembled around a table by the nearby road, waiting to weigh and inspect the bats for pregnancies before releasing them or, in a few cases, taking them up the road to the research station for a brief stay as participants in a study there.

At 8:10, students rushed to grab what they thought was a bat in the net, though it turned out to be a leaf. Five minutes later, a big brown bat (mouse-size, despite its species name) was the first to be trapped. Another, a pregnant female, followed at 8:25. Then a parade of bats commenced — big brown, freetail, Southwestern myotis, hoary — and handlers, all vaccinated, carried them to the monitoring table for a brief looking over. A hoary bat, named for the frosted tint on its fur, complained the loudest, and handlers were cautioned to use leather gloves because "those are bitey." The bat calmed or tired by the time it reached the processing table before release.

Student Dylan Schneider removes a big brown bat from a net during a workshop in the Chiricahua Mountains near Portal, Arizona.

The Sky Islands don't disappoint. Bats, like humans, are drawn to them.

"You just have these little pockets that are separated by the desert seas," Tyburec said.

It's not just bats and bugs that find refuge in the Chiricahuas. A few miles to the north of the bat class, Rick Taylor spends a lot of his time filling hummingbird feeders. One June morning, 10 them hung on trees above the lawn around his little house, a lawn he planted years ago only to give his child fair warning of any rattlesnakes that might approach from the surrounding brush. Normally, he said, he would have a couple more feeders up, but for now he had given up on trying to keep any suspended on his clothesline.

"The bear got the clothesline feeders by strumming the clothesline like a banjo string till they fell off," he said.

Hummingbirds feed at Rick Taylor's home in East Whitetail Canyon near Portal, Arizona.

His home is definitely on the map for hummingbirds and for some astute hummingbird followers. Taylor is known to birders, having literally written the book on elegant trogons and begun the trogon census work that MacFarlane now continues with Audubon.

Word of his hummingbird feeders has also spread, meaning birders will file in along when the migrating hummers come through after monsoon rain. Some of the birds come from the Colorado Rockies. Some, including rufous hummingbirds, return all the way from Alaska.

"Thousands — literally thousands — will be using these feeders right here in the fall," Taylor said.

It's a big enough wave of both birds and people that the people around nearby Portal distribute hand-drawn maps showing which homeowners welcome respectful birders at their feeders and, by process of elimination, which would prefer solitude.

A Chiricahua leopard frog in a pond, June 10, 2023, at Cave Creek Ranch near Portal, Arizona.

Biologists and conservationists have also built little frog ponds around the area to harbor endemic but endangered Chiricahua leopard frogs, replacing dried springs and creating enough distinct habitats to keep disease from spreading throughout the population.

"There are places that seem to be centers of energy," said Taylor, who first came here decades ago as a fire lookout for Chiricahua National Monument, across the range's divide from his current place. "Biodiversity is one of the indicators of that energy."

The Chiricahuas, he said, exhibit greater diversity than most land-locked parts of the country. "I just loved it at first sight. I wanted to live here in the worst way." He moved there in 1972.

Birders wait for an owl to emerge from its nest, June 9, 2023, at Cave Creek Ranch near Portal, Arizona.

Taylor has led birding tours as far afield as Denali National Park and the Pribilof Islands of Alaska. For dive