Earth Notes

The Grand Canyon has always attracted people who fall deeply in love with the landscape and its lessons. One of those who made the place his life’s work was Edwin Dinwiddie McKee.

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1906, McKee was influenced by his scoutmaster Francois Matthes, an early Grand Canyon mapmaker. A summer paleontology internship at the canyon was all it took to ignite young Eddie’s life-long love affair with geology.

From rodents to bats, many mammals that live in cold climates make it through the lean days of winter by hibernating without food. They find a safe place to rest, lower their body temperature and breathing rate, and wait for milder conditions. Most birds that rely on an insect diet, on the other hand, head south.

But the open mesas and canyons of the American Southwest are home to an odd exception. It’s the common poorwill, a highly camouflaged insect-eater no more than seven inches long.

Many people have heard them, for their repeated “poor-WILL” calls are a familiar element of warm spring and summer evenings in the desert. But few have seen them up close. Poor-wills sleep all day, then wake up to hunt moths and other insects on the wing at night.

Over the past hundred years, people have introduced dozens of non-native fish species into the Colorado River and its tributaries. During that time, populations of native fish species have dropped, in some cases dramatically. It’s easy to guess at the causes of native species decline, like predation and competition for food. But it’s far more difficult to prove.

Researchers from Northern Arizona University and Arizona State University recently studied two native fish species and their presumed non-native competitors. Two of the fish are bottom-dwellers: native Sonora sucker and non-native common carp.

In the depths of the Great Depression, the nation’s unemployment stood at 25 percent. With people hungry and desperate for jobs, President Franklin Roosevelt signed a law in March 1933 creating the Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC gave jobs to single men 18 to 25 years old, with most of their thirty-dollar-a-month paychecks returned to their families.

Military-style camps were quickly set up all over the country to house enrollees. Nearly 130,000 men ultimately were sent to national parks and forests on the Colorado Plateau. Roosevelt’s “tree army” went to work here on shovel-ready projects--fighting fires; installing water lines, and building roads, dams, and bridges.

Fewer than five percent of the more than 550 U.S. wildlife refuges are located in urban areas. In New Mexico, another is joining the list as the former Price’s Dairy near downtown Albuquerque is slated to become the Middle Rio Grande Wildlife Refuge. At almost 600 acres and only five miles from downtown, it is the largest farm left in a metropolitan area now home to nearly one million people.

Even when operating as a working farm, the South Valley dairy has been a critical stop for such migratory waterfowl as sandhill cranes, Arctic-nesting geese, and varied duck species. Its fields and wetlands support numerous other species, too.

This week Earth Notes concludes its series on the sun with a look at how to use a backyard solar oven. You can use one anywhere there’s a few square feet of sunny exposure on a backyard or balcony.

And yes, you can use a solar oven on some winter days. Even when it’s cold and the ground is covering with snow, a cooker will work if you have enough sunshine and your solar oven is well insulated. But you’ll need to use the midday hours when the sun is at least 45 degrees above the horizon—that means your shadow is shorter than your height.

Prime solar cooking days occur when the sun is up that high for four hours or more. In Northern Arizona that’s around 170 days a year.