A scattered one
Ruby throated buzz
Wet sand, this post downpour day
Fleeting rainbow clouds
~ ~ ~
The last week of March was eventful - desert rain and our first seed collection! The pace of our job seems to be ramping up: checking in on populations that now feel familiar, trying to figure out when our next collection will be while still finding a few new locations with happy plants. At this point, we have explored most areas in our range and are making it to some of the more remote roads to look for particular plants.
. . .
The rain came when we were back in town for the day: 10 minutes of water simply gushing from the sky, hitting hot asphalt and sloshing every which way. Pure drama. I danced. The concrete turned into a river.
And just as quickly it was gone, leaving the ground steaming and me standing in fully soaked clothes. The way things go around here, I suppose.
. . .
On Tuesday, we parked on the highway and, buckets in hand, began the short tromp toward a group of cattle saltbush who are still holding onto seeds from last fall - seeds we can collect! Sand still wet from the rain, we ducked over barbed wire and did a few last minute tests before heading to opposite sides of the population to spend the day going from plant to plant, shaking seeds into our waiting buckets.
Our buckets are the first step in what will now be a long journey for these sweet embryos, beginning with a trip to Bend, Oregon. From here (at the seed extractory) they will be cleaned and sorted and only those who are viable will move on to either be stored in a seedbank, used for research, or mass produced for future restoration projects (hopefully in this very area)! It is still funky and fascinating to me that this is happening. I think it is generally a hopeful thing that agencies ranging from seed banks and botanic gardens to the Bureau of Land Management are prioritizing the future (essentially) by choosing to collect, preserve, and redistribute seed in this way. I also wonder whether this is really the most effective way to be doing this - it’s one of those projects just sort of boggles my mind due to the large scale. Even though our day-to-day is very removed from the rest of the process, I hope my still-shifting understanding will grow in time as the seeds we collect move through it! This is still the very beginning
. . .
Some collection moments, observations, surprises…
Feels like picking fruit. Seeds plopping into my bucket.
So many bug friends! I did not expect this to be such a big part of collecting day - spiders, beetles, all sorts of others I don’t know just doing their thing. So they have a whole world in there! Crawling around, snacking on seeds, leaves, each other. In collecting so many of these seeds, we are taking a world and putting it in our buckets. OF COURSE we cannot keep all of these other debris out (sticks and leaves as well as bugs and much more that escapes my gaze): they are fully intertwined. It’s not really that I feel bad taking a portion of these seeds, but seeing how inseparable they are from their close partners in this ecosystem hit me. It seems that it’s actually impossible for us to just collect seeds. The best we can do is take a slice of the ecosystem that contains a high concentration of seed. Or something like that.
Overthought my collection methods much less once I started listening to an audiobook. And holy moly Beatrice reccomended “The City We Became” by N. K. Jemisin. Hold onto your hats! What a production! It is a wild story complete with great voices and audio effects! If anyone needs to be fully auditorily emmersed, would highly reccomend (so far). An ever-filling bucket is always a happy thing. What a silly job this is.
seeds!
pal!
. . .
School bus stops ahead
Purple clouds and Christian Sands
Ocotillo town
~ ~ ~
Sending thoughts of sunshine and the smell of creosote to anyone who needs it. Run in the rain for me if you’ve got it.
<3 maya