A wild turkey investigates a remotely triggered camera. Photo by Roy Toft.
Evening light graces the "beautiful canyon." Photo by Claudio Contreras Koob.
Javelina are inhabitants of the borderlands region. Photo by Chris Linder.
New foliage erupts from cottonwood trees in the canyon. Photo by Krista Schlyer.
A short-lived snowstorm dusts the agaves in the mountains. Photo by Jack Dykinga.
Detail of agave spines. Photo by Ian Shive.
Detail of an endemic mammilaria cactus. Photo by Miguel Ángel de la Cueva.
Landowner Wendy Glenn displays a blanket discarded by immigrants crossing the wall at the southern border of her property. The Malpai Group of conservation ranchers are vehemently opposed to the border wall. Photo by Ted Wood.
Wendy Glenn drives her truck along the border wall road where it meets her ranch. The trees of the San Bernadino National Wildlife Refuge are visible in the background. Photo by Jeff Foott.
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Dividing a Continent by Krista Schlyer
February 6, 2009
Driving out of the Cajon Bonito, translated "beautiful canyon," a rainstorm in the canyon transitions into a snowstorm at the higher elevations. At the floor of the canyon where we have been staying, the hilltops grow paler and paler, while clouds settle themselves in between peaks. This is our first storm of any kind on the trip. For two weeks we have been traveling under constant desert sun and the occasional solitary cloud, but suddenly the agaves are dusted with snow.
The majority of our group rushes up the canyon to the snowy hillsides. I linger a bit, mesmerized by the instant life that this precipitation had ignited in the dry landscape. From halfway up the mountain, the cottonwoods that line the stream, and had seemed so dormant and lifeless for the past five days, glow with pale green buds. Perhaps the new growth has been there for a while, but the now diffuse light has imbued every green thing with an inner illumination, impossible to overlook or ignore.
We all hate to depart at this moment, but it is a fitting end to our time in this beguiling location. Here is a place that bears proof that one person, or a small group of people can make a profound difference in the world.
Los Ojos is a conservation property owned by Joe and Valer Austin, located in the northwestern corner of the Mexican state of Chihuahua. It is situated only a few miles south of the international border, near the line that separates the US states of Arizona and New Mexico. The Austin's bought the property, along with several neighboring ranches and one across the border in the US, in order to actively participate in the restoration and protection of migration corridors and crucial habitat for the region's wildlife. Species like jaguar, Mexican gray wolf, bighorn sheep, pronghorn, and black bear once roamed these lands, but many have been eradicated or their numbers cut back so severely that they are rarely seen now.
The Austin's are working to rebuild this ecosystem so that its inhabitants can return. And they are not alone. In fact, a whole cadre of ranchers and landowners in southestern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico and the northern segments of the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora, are working on their own and together to protect lands where wildlife can replenish themselves, and to recreate corridors that allow them to travel from one habitat haven to another. People like Wendy and Warner Glenn, who own the property where one of the only jaguars photographed on US soil in decades was found. And Anna and Matt Magoffin who have set in place a conservation easement on their land to keep it safe for wildlife forever.
But over the past few years all of these landowners and all the work they are doing to make space and pathways for north American wildlife has been threatened by the building of barriers and roadways that bisect crucial corridors and diminish vital habitat for wildlife. New roads built by border patrol so that they can access the newly constructed wall and vehicle barriers, has allowed smugglers to travel more quickly and efficiently when transporting their goods. New construction has created not only barriers, but hazards for creatures like deer and pronghorn antelope to get caught in or injured.
We witnessed some of this construction at the San Bernadino Ranch owned by the Austins, which sits just south of the San Bernadino National Wildlife Refuge. The Department of Homeland Security built two different kinds of barrier here, one less benign that consists of upright posts and two cross beams, and another that is a Normandy style barrier with added cross beams that will make a dangerous and perhaps deadly crossing for deer. I visited this spot several months ago, before the new barriers were erected. The transition between the countries was marked, but well overgrown with vegetation so that if a road existed at all it could not have been very well passable. Now there is wide swath of level dirt road, well maintained and easily traveled by border patrol and smugglers alike.
Rapid construction over the past year has made those who live here and love the land and wildlife, heartsick as they have watched the piecemeal unraveling of so much of what they have been working to accomplish. And what's worse, they all say that the $3 million plus per mile that the US is spending on the barrier construction is a waste of money and will not work for it's intended purpose-to stop illegal traffic.
Down in the Cajon Bonito, it is easy to forget for a while that there is a world where people spend so much time, energy and money throwing a mist of water at an economically driven inferno of migration and drug trafficking.
Here wild turkeys and javelina plod through mesquite shrublands, deer glide through golden grassland meadows, woodpeckers work upon the alabaster limbs of sycamore trees reaching toward the distant rim of the canyon, and coatimundi slip silently through the night. But isolation here does not remove these creatures from the threat of a closed border. Many of them need to move constantly to seek new habitat and mates and for others, as climate patterns continue to change, migration will be the only option.
For them all it comes down to this statement, made by wildlife biologist Rurik List: the walls and fences and other obstacles the United States is building are ultimately not just separating the United States from Mexico. They are dividing a continent.
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