Tonto anomalies

Today I walked an area in the Tonto National Forest near the Verde River, thinking that the lower elevation (480M) location would have more spring ephemerals in bloom. That turned out not to be true, but it was an interesting walk anyway. The fenced area east of the road to Needle Rock is some of the most cow-beat land I've seen. Horse-beat these days, as the cattle are gone, but there are plenty of horse tracks and a lot of manure. They're even eating ironwood. Non-native Schismus is the ubiquitous ground cover. But just across the road to the west is an entirely different landscape; a mature Arizona Upland community with many large buckhorn chollas, numerous ironwoods, and saguaros of many age classes. And very few non-natives.

The mesquite bosque above the Verde there is in terrible condition. Lots of beat-up mesquites, and lots of mistletoe in them. Interestingly, because of that, there was a larger number of birds in the area - phainopepla and Gila woodpeckers especially. They favor the fruit of the desert mistletoe. There were deep gullies dug into in the sandy river deposits. Some of them were filled with trash.

West of the road was remarkably different. Though not fenced off from the road, it's only disturbed by one dirt road traversing the area. There were young and old trees, shrubs and cacti. While there may have been fewer birds, there were definitely more species - house finches, gnatcatchers, verdins (no photo), cactus wrens (same) and thrashers. There were also potsherds, tools and other Hohokam relics; the area is near a large Hohokam community know locally as Azatlan.

Posted on February 5, 2017 05:27 AM by stevejones