Picking Beans

Well, not really beans ... seed pods, actually.

The old towel trick worked. Either that or it was marginally warmer in the morning. We woke up to temperatures in the 20s and we had running water. Hallelujah!

We have a new project in our job jar, seed collection. Dan and Ann are trying do reestablish some foraging plants which used to be more prevalent on the refuge. They are particularly useful for the birds, especially the quail and, of course, that's the primary mission of the refuge. The main plants on their list are Four-wing Saltbush and White-ball Acacia. Both of these plants are much more rare on the refuge than they had been in the past.

One of the reasons that they are found in fewer numbers has been past over-burning of the grasslands. While grasslands should burn occasionally, the refuge may have been too aggressive in its program of prescribed burns in the past. The object was to eliminate mesquite, but the shrubs such as the acacia and saltbush were pretty heavily impacted. Since they are important winter food sources for the birds, the effort is being made to bring them back.

The process involves finding existing plants on the refuge and harvesting the seeds. That's where we come in. Our task today is to go out in the field, find the plants and pick the seeds. Today it was the White-ball acacia. The seeds are found in seed pods that look sort-of like beans.

Where do we find them? The suggestion was along the main road, so that is where we looked. We did find several patches of the plants. They have long since dropped most of their foliage leaving only brown needle-like leaves and some pods.

We picked for a couple of hours and probably picked a basketball-sized clump of pods apiece. It was pretty unexciting work, aside from trying to find the bushes and dodge the Border Patrol vehicles that passed by almost every couple of minutes (we had no idea there was that much Border Patrol traffic). We wondered if they would stop after seeing these people walking in the brush along the roadside carrying trash bags.

We will probably go out again next week to find and harvest some more. We have also been told of a site with lots of saltbush that can be harvested. We will see what happens next week.