SAGEBRUSH APE Phainopepla

Thursday, June 26, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Sagebrush Ape: Departures

By Heidi Walters

Two of my friends left the valley for good this week. Karen's going back to the Bay Area. And Cali is heading north. They're probably not coming back here except to visit. I will miss hiking with Karen, and I will miss hanging out with Cali at Zion's cafés watching the light change on the red cliffs. I'll miss their political rants and environmental awareness--it's a wonder they never met each other, considering their shared concern for the state of the earth and humanity.

But I'll be able to keep in touch with them: Wherever they go, they're not that far.

No, the greater loss is to this valley. Because, although they lived here less than three years, in their separate ways Cali and Karen helped do more for the quality of life in Las Vegas than most of us can hope to do in a lifetime.

I first met Karen in an official capacity, when I was interviewing Sierra Clubbers about the war in Iraq. Karen, a volunteer activist for the club, was one of the few there not afraid to share her personal views with passion. Karen also has been a one-woman wonder in recycling awareness for the club, in a town that's pretty lax about recycling. And she has been a force in getting the word out--and people's ire up--on proposed massive development projects on Blue Diamond Hill. Sure, the whole valley, even state, seemed to rally against urbanization of the hill that stands between Las Vegas and the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. But Karen and a handful of others were out there consistently educating citizens, walking up and down events lines with petitions, and engaging the media's voice in the cause.

Later I met Karen socially, on a group hike out in the Valley of Fire. And I noticed that while everyone else plodded along dutifully behind the trip leader, Karen morphed into Alice and dove through every water-tunneled hole in the sandstone she could fit through, laughing the whole time. On subsequent hikes and outings with her and a couple of other friends, she'd alternate between that silliness-inducing joie de vivre and a planet-saving seriousness of mind that spotlights all hypocrites.

Cali, on the other hand, I met through a mutual friend who worried about us hiking alone and thought we'd enjoy each other's company. Cali e-mailed me, and we did end up hiking together here in Nevada some, and making forays to Zion National Park to presumably hike some more. But typically those trips were an easy cycle of arrive late in Springdale, eat dinner and drink Polygamy Porter at the Bit 'n' Spur, camp on the edge of a ravine next to someone's renegade outdoor living room (couch near the abyss, artistically rock-bound firepit, tidy), sleep in, drink coffee in town, shop in the hippy stores, wander aways down the river and back soaking up the green and red of the trees and rocks, then drink more Polygamy Porter.

Occasionally, I went with Cali into the field. She's an ecology and conservation biology Ph.D. candidate at the University of Nevada, Reno, and she's been coming to Southern Nevada for the past few years from fall to spring to study the phainopepla, which winters in the Mojave. The phainopepla is a silky flycatcher with an Elvis-flip crest on its head and a distinctive, short, low-key call of "Whurp?" The males are inky black, the females and young a soft gray, and the adults have red eyes that match the color of the tiny berries they eat off the mistletoe that grows in dark scraggly clumps on acacia and mesquite trees. Their droppings spread the mistletoe's seeds to other branches, other trees, continuing a cycle of sustenance for the birds and longevity for the mistletoe.

One late May, I drove with Cali to one of her study sites down south, beyond Searchlight, in the lowlands fronting the granitic Newberry Range to spy into some phaino nests and see how many of the tiny white eggs with lavender spots had hatched into cheeping beings. At midday, driving back up the dirt road toward the highway, we saw two desert tortoises making their slow retreat from the heat-white noon into some shrubby shade.

Cali's work is adding to the body of information in the Clark County Multi-Species Habitat Conservation Plan. And she may have enlightened some planners and developers as to the virtues of mistletoe--oft mistaken as a plague to be eradicated--as food for the phainopepla (the whurping charms of which don't need to be explained). Maybe future development will include more of these and other native life, marking an end to the scraping makeovers in vogue now that cater to sterility and exotics.

Alas, Cali's last bird fledged and left the nest about two weeks ago, and the last season of her field work is completed. Now all that's left is another year to crunch the numbers in Reno.

So, in one week, I've lost the companionship of two friends. And the valley's hills and lowlands have lost two rare advocates. I'm not saying they should stay--just that what they did while they were here is appreciated.