Saving the Pup Fish

As you already know, or soon (within 1-2 seconds, depending on your reading speed) will, I work with a conservation corps in the southwest now (aptly called the Southwest Conservation Corps).

It’s a sweet deal – it provides a context for me to be outside in different places for three months without the hassle of starving. We work on public land (national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, etc) for two weeks at a time doing manual labor type stuff that ends up being mostly trailwork, which means that we do things that, if we do them well, mean that no one will ever notice what good work we did because they are too astounded by the natural beauty of their surroundings. It’s a good thing we’re all so self-motivated and humble, eh?

Our most recent “hitch” was in Organ Pipe National Monument, right on the US-Mexico (or Mexico-US, depending on your latitude) border. We spent some time doing odd jobs for them, like breaking and laying new asphalt for the RV sites, raking tire tracks presumably left by border patrol in various parts of the area, and removing prickly pear, a not-necessarily-invasive-but-absolutely-irritating cactus that thinks it has some sort of right to grow wherever the heck in the desert it wants without even considering the literal pain in the rear end it might be to undeserving tourists.

However various and pleasant and close-to-bathroom facilities campsite maintenance jobs were, we were all looking forward to the last three days of work, when we were going to take a break from our usual chopping and cutting and breaking in order to help with a project at Quitobaquito Pond that could ultimately result in conserving a certain type of fish that is relatively endemic to the manmade (but natural spring supported), several-hundred-year old pond that otherwise might suffer a dry and dusty death (both the pond and the fish). The Quitobaquito pupfish is not really an impressive sight, but it can apparently live in extreme conditions (for a fish, anyway, they’ve got nothing on Archaeic creatures), like heat up to 95 F and salinity levels three times that of sea water (thanks, Wikipedia). It can also possibly spontaneously regenerate. Highly unlikely, but no one really knows how it got to the pond, and anything is possible, right?

The specific problem at Quitobaquito pond is that there’s this dang cottonwood tree which has become a cultural icon through various important landscape artists’ respresentation of it, but like many cultural icons, it is faulted. There’s probably a hole underneath it and water is leaking out at astounding rates, but because it is such a pretty tree, no one wants to get rid of it. I find this ironic. Considering that this tree HAS been immortalized so many times through art, you’d think it’d be okay to cut it down. Other trees that have never been painted or photographed once are leveled without a second glance.    Ah well, such is life.

The pond has been losing non-negligible amounts of water for years now, and without cutting down the tree, it has been hard to come up with sustainable solutions for water loss. It’s been an ongoing process. There’s a lot of literature on the matter, if you’re interested.

This time, the park staff decided to build a dam around the tree.

This was all background information. It’s overwhelming, I know, but fret not, gentle reader: the rest of the story is easy to tell, particularly since it hasn’t ended yet (we worked on QBQ for the first three days of the project. They weren’t done when we left. Another SCC crew is going in next week), so I only have to tell part of it. This is what happened: We drove to Quitobaquito every morning RIGHT along the border, escorted by a caravan of law enforcement officers there to “serve and protect” us from drug smuggling violence.

We pulled out bullrush which had grown in the past few years to have a clear area around the tree. We sorted through the bullrush and general muck looking for Sonoyta mud turtles. The plan was to find them and keep them out of danger until construction was over. We also censed them, taking measurements and weight of each turtle we found. Their shells were marked by filing them with a unique pattern along the sides. As far as I know, it didn’t hurt them.

Despite their undeniable reptilian cuteness, it was not a pleasant job – now I know why “pond scum” is used as a derogatory term – everything smelled like DEATH.

Here people are, sorting through the grossness. You can see in the picture that a lot of the bullrush is gone. You can also see our, um, escorts, vigilant as always.

Anyway, after everything was clear, we assembled pieces of dam out of pvc pipes, set them up in the pond (this required everyone getting in the pond….everyone but me, that is), pulled a giant tarp over it and weighed it down with sandbags.

I know it sounds ridiculously simple, but apparently that works. Or at least, it works if you use enough sandbags, which we did not. The day after “finishing” the dam, in the midst of pupfish relocation, (to the right side of the water), there was a great creaking and everyone thought that Ye Olde Cottonwoode was falling over and panicked, but oh, it was actually “just” the dam being breached.

……Oh. Shoot.

Luckily, everyone knows the only thing more fun than passing sandbags down an assembly line in a pond is fishing for those same bags under the water, pulling them out covered in detritus, and putting them back on the shore to start over. Hurray.

We did that without any great agitation and ended up losing about a day of work. But that’s how science goes, right?

When we left, Quitobaquito was still under construction, swarming with agents and scientists and sca volunteers, so I can’t say much regarding its progress past this point. It has had a very conflicted past, but considering its historical and ecological significance and the dedication of the Organ Pipe staff (need I remind you of the pond sludge?), I’m pretty optomistic about its future.