New Book Celebrates The Natural History Of The Anza-Borrego Desert State Park

Speaker 1: 00:01 You don't have to travel far to get to California is the largest state park, the huge Anza Borrego state parks, Fred's from San Diego County to Riverside and into the Imperial Valley. And once inside visitors are often surprised to see the variety of plants and animals that thrive in the parks. Desert setting a new book by authors, Mike Wells and Marie Simovich celebrates the unique look and landscape of the park. It's called a natural history of Anza Borrego region then and now, welcome to you both. Hello. Hi. Hi there. So this book evolved from a course you both taught at USD. Marie, can you give us an overview of what was covered in that course? Speaker 2: 00:40 Yeah. Wow. It was a little bit of everything. Um, we started out talking about the physical nature of the area, how it started out being under the Pacific ocean and as the Earth's plates collided, mountains were built and those mountains changed the physical structure of the area. They changed the drainage, they changed the climate, and it went from being an ocean to a Delta, to a terrestrial area of lakes and streams. And then later to a desert. Then we move on to talk about the biological aspects, the organisms that have lived there and live there. Now if we talk a bit about the megafauna that lived there previously and is extinct now, things like mammoths and sabertooth cats and giant sloths and why they're extinct. And we talk about the organisms that live there now that are, that have evolved to be able to survive in this very, very harsh environment. Speaker 2: 01:34 Wow. And Mike, what made you both decide to take that leap from a course to a book? Well, it was a number of things. One was that former students contacted re and would say, you know, ask her, well, could you tell us that story again about the kangaroo rats or where did we see the pictographs in the park? And so that sort of gave her the idea and then she spoke to me and, and uh, we decided that maybe the best thing to do would be to take 16 years worth of lecture notes and convert it into a book, which we thought would be, Hey, what could be easier? But, um, it ended up taking us about six years to do. So a lot of things probably would have been easier, Speaker 1: 02:12 but hopefully something that everyone can kind of obtain. Um, you know, Mike was exposed to Anza Borrego through his 34 year career with the state parks department. Marie, how did you first become exposed to the park and what led you to do Speaker 2: 02:24 teaching a course on the region? Well, I first started cutting out to enter Borrego when I was an undergraduate at Cal poly Pomona. And I came out for a field trips for herpetology and ornithology and mammalogy classes and just fell in love with it and went there off and on subsequently. And then when Mike and I got together, we started going out there camping and taking a retreat of biology professors from the USD out there. And the chair of the department at, we would do little tours and telling people stories about the plants and the animals and all of that. And the chair of the department said, well, why didn't you guys just teach a class? We said, wow, that sounds like a really fun idea. It turned out to be a great idea. We loved it. Yeah, and Marie, who do you see as the audience for this book? The book can be used as a textbook for college courses or extension courses, but we really tried to make it accessible to the general public, the people that kind of like to look at national geographic and one of the ways we did that was to include a lot of illustrations. Mike, there are how many Speaker 3: 03:30 in 208 pages in the book there are 314 illustration, so a good part of the book actually is illustrations and I think actually if you went through the book and looked at all the pictures and tables and read the captions, that you'd pretty much get the gist of it. There are a variety of different habitats within the state park. Tell us about that. First of all, it's big ends of BRECHO is about 640,000 acres, which is about a thousand square miles. Within that area. We have mountains that go up over 6,000 feet in elevation. And also we have lower areas that go down to sea level. So, um, there's a huge variety of habitats there. And we also have places in the mountains. They get quite a bit of rain and then we get places in the low ends, they get very little precipitation at all. And so this leads to a variety of different types of habitats. Everything from Alpine habitats that you would see, uh, in the Sierras to Sandy desert washes implies where there's very little vegetation at all. Speaker 2: 04:27 And that weeds, uh, leads to it being home to a variety of different birds and animals, right, Marie? Yes. Sieving deserts are harsh and a lot of people think that they're so harsh that's so hot and so dry and so salty that it's just a big empty sandbox. You know, and that's not true at all. There's a huge diversity of plants, animals, fungi and such that are adapted to be able to cope with these intense challenges. And they also work together in complicated food webs and they interact with each other and influence the evolution of each other. For example, there are things like tranche LA Hawks that are big wasp that paralyzed trenchless haul them into a burrow, lay their eggs on them, the larva develop on that [inaudible] and there are kangaroo rats who jump and add like kangaroos instead of run because pushing the sand down is more efficient than pushing it behind you. Speaker 2: 05:27 And they live in burrows that are cooler and more moist and they have really efficient kidneys so they don't even have to drink water. But there are also things like flowers that are adapted to be pollinated by bats and there are two kinds of bats that's, that are adapted to these flowers which are big and cup shaped and white and open at night. And they have long tongues to lap up and they can hover and they can hover and there are other bats that are not so, so adapted that basically just go in and face plant in the flower and get pollen all over their face and then go to another flower. And they actually turned out to be better pollinators. Then the ones that are adapted, it all sounds like they're are very intricate ecosystems that are both fascinating and terrifying at the same time. A lot going on out there. Um, Anza Borrego is the largest state park in California covering nearly 1000 square miles. As you mentioned, Mike, uh, how do you foresee the park being impacted by climate change? Speaker 3: 06:27 One of the big things we know about climate change, one of the symptoms that we see is the raising of the temperature of tropical sea waters. And that emphasizes a cycle of circulation in the atmosphere called the Hadley cell. And the upshot is, is the part of the Hadley cell that descends comes down about where we are in between about 30 degrees North and South of the equator. And it causes high pressure cells and those high pressure cells thinned away storms that come in, in the wintertime. And so that's why we have a Mediterranean climate here, meaning that we have dry summers and wet winters. Probably the impact of climate change will be to emphasize or, or increase that action. And so we'll probably get less winter rain and less winter storm. So if anything, our area will get dry or during the winter. But the flip side of it is that it also enhances monsoonal moisture that we get in the late summer and early fall. So in a way, what it'll do is it'll change our climate and make it more like that of Northern Mexico and Baja California rather than what it is Speaker 2: 07:32 today. You know, is the thought that the animals will have to adapt to that new climate or will they migrate for the plants and the animals? The problem is, is it's difficult to migrate when you're surrounded by cities. And so some organisms can migrate up the mountains a little bit and get to cooler climates, but a lot of these organisms are going to be trapped. I mean, it's going to be difficult to get past Riverside and LA and wherever else to go to other latitudes. And so there's some species that are going to be lost. Speaker 3: 08:02 Yeah. We, you know, if you think about it during the ice ages, the Pleistocene, um, we had several different, um, times when climate change rapidly, but you didn't have Los Angeles to the North of us. And so our two wanted to the South and so animals could move in either direction to adjust to adjust their habitat to suit them. But for this period of climate change that we're currently in, a lot of the organisms don't have that option anymore. Speaker 2: 08:25 And Mike, what do you see as other threats to the park? Speaker 3: 08:28 Well, um, I think human development is one of the big ones. And I'm oddly one of the vulnerabilities of Anza. Borrego is its large size because to get anywhere across San Diego County, you pretty much have to cut through it. It makes up the Eastern 20% of the County. And especially now that I'm, uh, one of the responses to climate change is to develop low carbon impact energy such as solar and wind. And those tend to be in very places where they can be developed. And one of them of course is the desert because there's lots of sun there. And there are places where it's very windy and also there are geothermal resources out there too, but you've got to get the energy from where it's generated out to the coast where it gets used. And so in the past there have been a series of of electrical line developments that would have passed through Anza Borrego and the most recent one being the sunrise Powerlink. However, eventually that alignment was changed so that it passes to the South of the park. And it was mainly the interaction of the public that really forced the decision to be made to change the path of that. And so we, we rely heavily on the public to defend Anza Borrego and that's one of the things we'd like to get out of our book. We'd like people to read it and better understand the desert and because they understand the desert to love it and if they love it to defend it. Speaker 1: 09:48 I've been speaking with Mike Wells and Marie Simovich authors of a natural history of the Anza Borrego region then and now. Thank you both for joining us. Thank you. They'll both be speaking about the book on Friday, December 20th at the anti Borrego desert state park visitor center.