Desert Museum's plants for pollinators are nectar from the sod

 By Maureen O'Connell The Arizona Daily Star

 A dazzling display of wildflowers is blooming in desert gardens just
west of town.

 What? You doubt it?

 That's understandable, considering that three months ago chances for
an encore of last year's lavish show seemed as likely as a snowstorm
on, well, Easter Sunday.

 Southern Arizona's long dry spells effectively called off most of this
year's displays.

 But there are exceptions.

 One is the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum's Pollination Gardens, which
will be dedicated today as a permanent exhibit. They feature 225
species of flowering plants for pollinators, such as hummingbirds,
bees, butterflies and bats.

 The 5:30 p.m. ceremony will also start the 1999 Binational Conference
on Migratory Pollinators, at which American and Mexican pollination
scientists plan to team up for a study of the ``nectar corridor,''
which runs from western Mexico to the southwestern United States.

 While most of the gardens - the largest cultivated pollination area in
the nation - opened about a year ago, interpretive signs and
landscaping touches were recently completed.

 ``We're concentrating on some of the showiest wildflowers,'' said
Barbara Skye, the Desert Museum's collection manager of botany.

 Fragrant and frail evening primroses are among the main attractions.

 ``They're going gangbusters right now,'' she said, noting white as
well as yellow varieties are sporting heart-shaped petals - until the
thermometer hits 80 degrees or so - in the moth garden.

 Among other colorful sprays, the bee garden is dotted with orange
globemallow, which were a common site around town last spring. The few
butterflies flitting about are drawn to verbenas, milkweed and thistle,
while bats are pollinating organ pipe and saguaro cactuses.

 The new exhibit runs alongside the museum's hummingbird aviary that
features several tiny-winged species feeding and nesting among 100
plant varieties.

 In a pollination garden outside the aviary, salvia - a mint family
plant that's a native of Chihuahua - is a magnet for visiting hummers.

 ``It's a really bright, knock-your-socks-off pinkish red,'' Skye said,
pointing out that the plant also blooms in shades of blue, yellow and
white.

 Rick Daley, the Desert Museum's executive director, said the gardens
are an ideal backdrop for the conference, which will launch a five-year
study of the so-called nectar corridor.

 Pollination scientists maintain that factors ranging from land
development to ranching along the migratory path, are damaging it.

 ``There's enormous fear that we're losing both plants and animals,''
Daley said, explaining that as native plants disappear, pollinators
struggle to fly over large stretches of the landscape.

 ``We're very concerned about the long-term health of the ecosystem,''
he said.

 The conference's team of scientists intends to study migratory
patterns and draft conservation strategies.

 If the crucial areas of the corridor can be pinpointed, Daley said,
``we can try to find harmony between our desire to live in the desert
and maintain the ecosystem.''

-------------------------------

Protect these small migrants

 These are troubling times on the ``nectar corridors'' of Western
Mexico and the Southwest, along which millions of under-appreciated,
pollen-carrying birds and insects migrate so beneficially each year.

 Lesser long-nosed bats are threatened by the gating of mines and
destruction of cave roosts.

 Saguaro-pollinating white-winged doves are disappearing as riparian
forests die off.

 And rufous hummingbirds and monarch butterflies are facing declines as
exotic species invasions and herbicides kill the plants they rely on as
they make their way from tropical Mexico to Canada.

 In short, the human-caused decline of a fascinating set of migrant
workers threatens to reduce not just nature's diversity but the dollar
productivity of the agricultural fields they pollinate.

 All of which suggests the urgency of a conference occurring just now
at the invaluable Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

 There, a hundred top ecologists from Mexico, Canada and the United
States are convening today and tomorrow. They will plot further
research on migratory pollinators and develop conservation initiatives.


 Their gathering began yesterday evening with the dedication by
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's science adviser of the museum's
lovely new Pollination Gardens, the largest garden anywhere of
flowering plants for pollinators. Implicitly, this ceremony recognized
Tucson's world leadership in pollinator research, given museum
scientist Gary Nabhan's work on the issue.

 Much more than ceremonialism is under way today, however. Far more
practically, the museum, supported by the Turner Endangered Species
Fund, is hashing out battle plans for a five-year effort to monitor the
migrants' needs and routes and to intervene for them.

 Inevitably this campaign will be complicated and far-flung, involving
as it does fugitive, enigmatic creatures flying across thousands of
miles and touching dozens of different plants and ecosystems - one
hopes to transfer pollen from one plant to another.

 For instance, keeping bats in the business of pollinating crops and
wild plants will involve conservation in two nations along a loop as
long as 3,200 miles. Moreover, that loop follows the sequential
flowering of at least 16 flowering plant species, including three
morning glories, several century plants and the giant saguaro - a tough
target.

 Still, the general direction of a conservation agenda for the monarchs
and hummers and bats can be discerned now and will become clearer in
today and tomorrow's discussion groups.

 Land use policies need improvement in Mexico and this nation to
protect bat roosts, reduce pesticide use and designate key migratory
stopovers as pollinator preserves.

 Habitats should be restored through the planting of native milk weeds,
hummingbird bushes, agaves and cacti along roadsides, in damaged areas,
on golf courses and right-of-ways.

 And far greater visibility is needed for an under-appreciated threat
to nature's health.

 The Desert Museum is sounding an invaluable alarm this week - one that
should be heeded by land managers, conservationists and educators from
tropical Mexico to Alaska. Should these flickering, darting hummers and
monarchs and doves decline, so will Arizona's natural flora and its
agriculture's productivity.


  -----------== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News ==----------
   http://www.newsfeeds.com       The Largest Usenet Servers in the World!
------== Over 73,000 Newsgroups - Including  Dedicated  Binaries Servers
==-----