... but I was wrong. Buenos Aires NWR is actually a grassland.
Although it was another chilly morning, it was quite sunny so we decided to bicycle the Pronghorn Loop, the refuge's auto tour road. It travels southward from west of the visitor center, off the refuge entrance road, and is about a ten-mile ride on an unpaved road.
While the road runs through gorgeous landscape, cycling was not a good idea, at least not on this Thursday morning. To begin the road is rough for a bicycle, with golf ball-sized gravel, but the wind was blowing so stiffly from the south we had to peddle going downhill. We got about a third of the way around before turning back. Later in the day, we drove it in Speedy.
Once we turned around, it was a almost a coast back to the entrance road. We continued on to the flight pens near the maintenance buildings where captive-bred Masked Bobwhite Quail are housed. There were supposedly about a hundred present. The pens are a set of large enclosures withe fine mesh fencing all around, including the top, and surrounded by another high fence, surrounded by electric fencing. Needless to say, we couldn't get very close and no one was around so we couldn't go in. I made a circuit of the pens anyway but was unable to catch a glance of any quail. I did see a Cactus Wren though.
After that Ellen cycled back to the Sonoran Outpost and I went back up to the visitor center area to see the refuge biologist, Ann Steffler, and introduce myself. We had an interesting discussion about the refuge and possible projects as well as climate and population issues in the area. This is when I learned that we were actually on a grassland. One of the goals of the refuge is to return the land to is natural grassland state. It is an arid grassland but not as dry as the Sonoran Desert on the other side of the mountain range to the west of us.
The land is nourished by enough rainfall coming up through Mexico and the Gulf of California to maintain the grasses. The area which is now refuge was severely overgrazed in the past and the land was taken over by mesquite which, although a native plant, is invasive here. Once established the mesquite does not allow the grasses to come back. This is very obvious when driving south from Tucson to the refuge. As the road approaches the refuge boundary, the land on both sides is just bare ground with mesquite bushes as far as the eye can see. Once the road enters the refuge, the vegetation changes and becomes much more grassy, with fewer mesquite, since there is a refuge effort to reduce the mesquite through cutting of the trees and with prescribed burning.
After lunch we we took Speedy on the Pronghorn Loop to check out the road for our next cycle tour. Needless to say it was a more comfortable in the van. The tour loop goes through an area of open grassland with tall waving grasses on a rolling landscape, with mountains in the background. It is particularly lush right now at the end for a fairly rainy early autumn. It is great hunting for the raptors—we saw Northern Harrier, American Kestrel, Red-tailed Hawk and Ellen's first life bird on the refuge, White-tailed Kite.
After seeing the kite, the skies darkened, thunderheads were building in the sky and we could see rain falling across the plains. We hastened back to our campsite as we had left all our bike gear outside. We got back just in time to put the bags away before it started raining and thundering and hailing. This continued for the rest of that day and we just holed up in Speedy.
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