WEBVTT - Ep. 28: Understanding Nature in a Southwestern State 0:00:01.680 --> 0:00:05.279 Where the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, the Colorado Plateau, 0:00:05.440 --> 0:00:10.080 and the southwestern deserts converged to create New Mexico. There 0:00:10.119 --> 0:00:14.640 is more ecological variety than in any interior Western state. 0:00:15.480 --> 0:00:18.560 I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American. 0:00:18.160 --> 0:00:44.880 West, understanding nature in a southwestern state. In the first 0:00:45.000 --> 0:00:48.000 fifteen years of the two thousands, I spent part of 0:00:48.040 --> 0:00:52.480 my time in Montana, part in New Mexico. That experience 0:00:52.560 --> 0:00:58.000 drove home a fact of modern Western life I'd never considered, namely, 0:00:58.520 --> 0:01:01.920 how little inhabitants of any part of the West often 0:01:02.080 --> 0:01:05.679 know about the rest of their region. And a West 0:01:05.840 --> 0:01:10.119 settled relatively recently by Americans who came here from other places. 0:01:10.280 --> 0:01:13.240 I know this has something to do with the Western 0:01:13.360 --> 0:01:18.600 settlement patterns geographers have long studied. One of their insights 0:01:18.720 --> 0:01:21.520 is that as the West was settled in the nineteenth 0:01:21.520 --> 0:01:26.800 and twentieth centuries, settlers almost always moved west along the 0:01:26.920 --> 0:01:31.000 same latitude lines where they had started. Texas and the 0:01:31.040 --> 0:01:34.959 Southwest were largely settled by people moving westward from the South. 0:01:35.440 --> 0:01:40.319 Colorado and Utah got peopled by Midwesterners from Missouri and Illinois, 0:01:40.640 --> 0:01:44.200 and the northern West. The Dakotas across Montana on to 0:01:44.360 --> 0:01:48.120 Oregon and Washington by people who started out in New 0:01:48.120 --> 0:01:51.600 England or around the Great Lakes. When the dust Bowl 0:01:51.680 --> 0:01:56.360 of the nineteen thirties launched millions of Oklahomas and Kansas 0:01:56.400 --> 0:02:02.800 on their migration west, their primary destination, naturally enough, southern California. 0:02:03.560 --> 0:02:09.280 Understanding the wider West obviously involves travel. It's a big place, 0:02:10.040 --> 0:02:15.600 but even tourists travel often follows those same latitude lines. Today, 0:02:15.639 --> 0:02:19.680 when Minnesota's travel west, they commonly go to Glacier National Park, 0:02:19.800 --> 0:02:25.040 are onto Washington State. Chicagoans travel to Yellowstone. Texans go 0:02:25.120 --> 0:02:28.520 to Santa Fe or Grand Canyon National Park, or they 0:02:28.639 --> 0:02:33.520 golf in Arizona. Obviously, the snowbird phenomenon has changed at 0:02:33.639 --> 0:02:38.480 migration patterns, some bringing Midwesterners south to states like Arizona 0:02:38.560 --> 0:02:42.840 for the winters. But I think those classic latitudinal patterns 0:02:43.040 --> 0:02:46.720 explain at least some of the strange lack of familiarity 0:02:46.919 --> 0:02:49.640 with other parts of the West. I found among both 0:02:49.800 --> 0:02:54.160 Southwesterners and residents of the Northern Rockies during my time 0:02:54.240 --> 0:02:55.560 in those two places. 0:02:56.400 --> 0:02:57.480 Told that I live. 0:02:57.440 --> 0:03:01.359 Part of the year outside Missoula, Montana. For example, West 0:03:01.400 --> 0:03:05.280 Texans and even New Mexicans were incredulous. How do you 0:03:05.360 --> 0:03:09.600 stand living all winter at forty below zero? For Montanas? 0:03:09.639 --> 0:03:13.320 That worked in perfect reverse. You go to Santa Fe 0:03:13.440 --> 0:03:16.240 for the summers, how can you stand that one hundred 0:03:16.280 --> 0:03:19.280 and twenty five degree heat. I never developed a good 0:03:19.320 --> 0:03:24.720 comeback about Montana, except to observe lamely that other Montanas 0:03:24.800 --> 0:03:28.760 often called Missoula and the Bitterroot Valley the Banana Belt. 0:03:29.400 --> 0:03:31.680 Over time, I did work out a fair one about 0:03:31.680 --> 0:03:36.040 Santa Fe. Though, so Denver is the mile high city 0:03:36.120 --> 0:03:39.880 and it snows there, right Santa Fe sits even closer 0:03:39.920 --> 0:03:42.640 to the rocky mountains than Denver does, and it's a 0:03:42.680 --> 0:03:44.320 half mile higher up. 0:03:44.720 --> 0:03:45.600 You figure it out. 0:03:46.200 --> 0:03:49.520 The looks I got were still and comprehending, though like 0:03:49.600 --> 0:03:57.080 I was arguing that the Sahara wasn't a desert. The 0:03:57.160 --> 0:04:00.840 Southwest struck me then and still does as the part 0:04:00.840 --> 0:04:05.080 of the West that seems most alien to Americans from elsewhere, 0:04:05.280 --> 0:04:10.080 even other Westerners with reputations for their green forested mountains 0:04:10.120 --> 0:04:14.680 and ski weather winter snows. Interior West states like Colorado 0:04:14.760 --> 0:04:19.880 and Utah, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho seem easy places to 0:04:19.960 --> 0:04:24.159 picture in the mine for most Americans living outside the West, 0:04:24.880 --> 0:04:30.120 but the Southwest, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada presents a different 0:04:30.160 --> 0:04:35.360 world to the national consciousness. The irresistible proclivity for national 0:04:35.400 --> 0:04:39.200 sports announcers to label any sporting event taking place in 0:04:39.320 --> 0:04:43.600 Arizona as being played down in the desert conveys to 0:04:43.640 --> 0:04:48.160 me at least a continuing national cinema that the imagined 0:04:48.360 --> 0:04:53.400 Southwest still falls outside the American norm. So let me 0:04:53.440 --> 0:04:58.400 take a stab at familiarizing the American West's audience with 0:04:58.600 --> 0:05:01.480 the part of the Southwest I know best the state 0:05:01.520 --> 0:05:05.320 of New Mexico and the story I've studied there, which 0:05:05.400 --> 0:05:09.000 is the discovery of the state's wildlife ecology. 0:05:09.880 --> 0:05:12.000 If you struggle to exactly place. 0:05:11.760 --> 0:05:15.080 It, New Mexico is that slice of the West situated 0:05:15.200 --> 0:05:21.200 directly below mountainous Colorado. It's the western state sandwich between 0:05:21.240 --> 0:05:25.640 the flatlands of Texas and the arid Colorado Plateau and 0:05:25.839 --> 0:05:30.800 Suaro deserts of Arizona. The Rocky Mountains extend down into 0:05:30.880 --> 0:05:34.120 New Mexico, and so do the slick rock canyons of 0:05:34.160 --> 0:05:35.400 the Colorado Plateau. 0:05:36.080 --> 0:05:37.440 The whole eastern. 0:05:37.160 --> 0:05:40.160 Third of New Mexico, though lies in the Great plains, 0:05:40.400 --> 0:05:44.320 and the entire southwestern quadrant of it is true desert, 0:05:44.440 --> 0:05:48.480 although a different desert the Chihuahuan than the ones found 0:05:48.560 --> 0:05:53.240 in either Arizona or Nevada, and New Mexico happens to 0:05:53.279 --> 0:05:56.760 be the part of the West with the oldest continuous 0:05:56.960 --> 0:06:02.000 human history In Santa Fe, founded in sixteen ten, it 0:06:02.040 --> 0:06:07.039 has the oldest European town anywhere in the West. Turns out, 0:06:07.200 --> 0:06:10.440 it's an easy thing to pick out the human beginnings 0:06:10.480 --> 0:06:15.800 of understanding nature in New Mexico. A great many millennia 0:06:16.200 --> 0:06:20.480 before today's White Sands National Monument down in the southern 0:06:20.520 --> 0:06:24.000 part of the state ever existed, a young woman who 0:06:24.040 --> 0:06:28.520 sometimes carried a child on her hip, walked barefoot along 0:06:28.680 --> 0:06:32.440 a muddy lake shore among the white sand dunes, and 0:06:32.680 --> 0:06:37.039 encountered a giant ground sloth, which reared back in alarm. 0:06:38.000 --> 0:06:42.000 We know this because the footprints from that ancient close encounter, 0:06:42.360 --> 0:06:46.080 excavated by a park service employee in twenty nineteen, had 0:06:46.200 --> 0:06:50.960 crushed grass seeds below them that radiocarbon dated to twenty 0:06:51.040 --> 0:06:55.560 three thousand years ago. That date is prior to the 0:06:55.600 --> 0:07:00.040 glacial maximum of the Wisconsin Ice Age, and it's the 0:07:00.080 --> 0:07:04.680 oldest evidence for humans anywhere in North America. The human 0:07:04.880 --> 0:07:08.680 and sloth prints weren't the extent of it either. Mammoths 0:07:08.800 --> 0:07:13.640 and dire wolves also crossed the tracks this young woman left. 0:07:14.360 --> 0:07:19.120 Ten thousand years after that, the hunting culture we've named 0:07:19.320 --> 0:07:23.920 Clovis left their spear points in the remains of multiple 0:07:24.200 --> 0:07:28.520 now to us vanished mammoths near what would become one 0:07:28.600 --> 0:07:33.400 day New Mexico's High Plains town carrying the Clovis name. 0:07:34.200 --> 0:07:38.320 There's believable evidence that the Clovis people had a significant 0:07:38.320 --> 0:07:41.520 effect on the Africa like wildlife that covered the West 0:07:41.600 --> 0:07:44.480 down to about ten thousand years ago, much of which 0:07:44.640 --> 0:07:50.640 went extinct by that time. In contrast to these Paleolithic hunters, however, 0:07:51.040 --> 0:07:56.680 subsequent native peoples in New Mexico affected a wildlife management 0:07:56.840 --> 0:08:01.120 of the area that preserved its biological divers for ten 0:08:01.360 --> 0:08:06.760 millennia down to the arrival of Old worlders. When Spaniards 0:08:06.760 --> 0:08:11.720 and Americans did arrive, travelers like Francisco Coronado, Albert Pike, 0:08:12.000 --> 0:08:16.520 George Ruxton, and Josiah Gregg, and especially William Emery of 0:08:16.560 --> 0:08:20.640 the Mexican Boundary Survey left us accounts of New Mexico 0:08:20.840 --> 0:08:24.280 when its mountains brimmed with flocks of big horned sheep 0:08:24.360 --> 0:08:27.320 and beaver down pools, and its planes were a kind 0:08:27.360 --> 0:08:32.840 of American version of the Serengetti or Massai Mara, with grizzlies, 0:08:33.240 --> 0:08:39.240 wolf packs, spotted jaguars, and jackal like coyotes trailing vast 0:08:39.360 --> 0:08:45.280 herds of bison, elk, and pronghorns. During New Mexico's brief 0:08:45.440 --> 0:08:49.679 time as part of the Republic of Mexico, New Mexicans 0:08:49.760 --> 0:08:54.360 even tried to halt the eradication of its beavers by 0:08:54.440 --> 0:09:01.360 American fur traders. The first real chance for the scientific 0:09:01.440 --> 0:09:05.120 study of the mammals, birds, and reptiles in New Mexico 0:09:05.240 --> 0:09:08.760 and the Southwest came after the Mexican War, when the 0:09:08.840 --> 0:09:13.319 far Southwest became part of the United States. There were 0:09:13.440 --> 0:09:17.320 several expeditions led by explorers called the Army Corps of 0:09:17.400 --> 0:09:21.840 Topographical Engineers, and there were also parties surveying routes for 0:09:21.920 --> 0:09:23.280 a railroad line. 0:09:23.040 --> 0:09:24.160 To the Pacific Coast. 0:09:25.000 --> 0:09:29.360 Some of the topographical engineers like John Charles Fremont, for example, 0:09:29.480 --> 0:09:33.000 who became such a celebrity that in eighteen fifty six 0:09:33.160 --> 0:09:36.240 he got the New Republican Party's nomination to be its 0:09:36.280 --> 0:09:42.320 first presidential candidate became cultural stars in America from these expeditions, 0:09:43.040 --> 0:09:46.280 but as is the fate of most scientists, history has 0:09:46.280 --> 0:09:49.960 forgotten most of the naturalists who wrote about America's animals 0:09:50.000 --> 0:09:54.040 when they were novel to discovery. The most notable of 0:09:54.080 --> 0:09:58.720 these many expeditions was the Mexican Boundary Survey, which laid 0:09:58.720 --> 0:10:02.600 out a new un boundary. After the treaty ending the 0:10:02.640 --> 0:10:07.040 war forced Mexico to seede its northern territories. 0:10:06.400 --> 0:10:07.440 To the United States. 0:10:08.120 --> 0:10:11.600 Exploring that line fell to William Emery, one of the 0:10:11.640 --> 0:10:15.199 founders of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 0:10:15.480 --> 0:10:20.440 with a young New Yorker named Spencer Baird as his assistant. 0:10:20.920 --> 0:10:25.079 Soon to be a nationalist of legendary proportion, Baird, as 0:10:25.120 --> 0:10:28.040 a teen had wanted to go west with Autubon, but 0:10:28.160 --> 0:10:32.760 his parents had demurred because of the dangers. Emory was 0:10:32.840 --> 0:10:37.040 himself an excellent field nationalist to send to the Southwest 0:10:37.640 --> 0:10:41.440 during the war. He accompanied the American Armies push from 0:10:41.440 --> 0:10:45.520 New Mexico to California, and had already added several species 0:10:45.559 --> 0:10:50.480 of desert cacti to science, including giant souaros, along with 0:10:50.679 --> 0:10:55.760 visiting ruins like Shacko, whose antiquity he suspected went back 0:10:55.920 --> 0:10:57.520 into America's deep past. 0:10:58.280 --> 0:11:00.679 But this was the eighteen fifties. 0:11:01.160 --> 0:11:06.439 Red Whiskered Emory was also a Maryland slaveholder whose closest 0:11:06.480 --> 0:11:10.880 boyhood friend was Jefferson Davis, soon to be President of 0:11:10.960 --> 0:11:14.640 the Confederacy. So when he got west this time, his 0:11:14.800 --> 0:11:18.120 time and background led him to an odd lack of 0:11:18.160 --> 0:11:23.599 appreciation about how Spanish settlers and local Indians had interacted 0:11:23.640 --> 0:11:28.760 with Western wildlife. That wild animals were still abundant around 0:11:28.840 --> 0:11:32.439 towns in the Southwest appeared certain proof to Emory of 0:11:32.720 --> 0:11:37.720 Hispanic what he called indolence and incapacity evidently has said 0:11:37.760 --> 0:11:42.040 something laudatory that back home Americans would never suffer animals 0:11:42.080 --> 0:11:50.800 within reach to survive like that. A half century after 0:11:50.920 --> 0:11:55.000 Jefferson had aimed his second major expiration at the Southwest, 0:11:55.160 --> 0:11:59.280 Emory's survey from Texas to California at last got to 0:11:59.360 --> 0:12:03.520 illuminate the animals and birds of the western deserts. This 0:12:03.720 --> 0:12:06.400 was an exotic part of North America, with a mix 0:12:06.440 --> 0:12:11.240 of familiar creatures in combination with several Central American species 0:12:11.320 --> 0:12:14.840 at the northern limits of their ranges. White tailed deer 0:12:14.880 --> 0:12:18.160 inhabited the southwest in vast numbers, and the mule deer 0:12:18.240 --> 0:12:22.600 Lewis and Clark had found also ranged widely across this region. 0:12:23.000 --> 0:12:27.120 Beavers yet dammed up the streams and shy and comparatively 0:12:27.360 --> 0:12:31.120 rare desert. Big horn sheet looked down from the canyon rims. 0:12:31.679 --> 0:12:36.640 Prairie dogs and pronghorns populated the flats, and coyotes Emory 0:12:36.720 --> 0:12:41.520 had already borrowed the Southwestern name for them, became camp followers, 0:12:41.559 --> 0:12:46.440 stealing food and snatching gear. Grizzlies were present, but Emory 0:12:46.480 --> 0:12:49.400 couldn't decide if those in the interior were the same 0:12:49.559 --> 0:12:52.360 as the bears on the coast, which were much larger. 0:12:53.040 --> 0:12:53.880 There were two. 0:12:53.760 --> 0:12:58.440 Different wolves, the red Texan wolf eastward and farther west, 0:12:58.559 --> 0:13:01.560 a gray wolf. This this was a new animal, the 0:13:01.679 --> 0:13:06.160 Mexican wolf, but scientists wouldn't recognize that for another fifty years. 0:13:06.840 --> 0:13:12.360 The unfamiliar creatures were especially intriguing. Particularly impressive and numerous 0:13:12.400 --> 0:13:16.440 were the big cats. As Bear described it. A vast 0:13:16.600 --> 0:13:20.880 number of pumas and jaguars were preying on wildlife and 0:13:20.960 --> 0:13:23.680 on the immense herds of wild horses and wild cattle, 0:13:24.400 --> 0:13:27.920 known to Spanish settlers as l tigre and to most 0:13:27.960 --> 0:13:28.880 Americans as. 0:13:28.960 --> 0:13:30.360 Tigers or leopards. 0:13:30.720 --> 0:13:34.520 Jaguars hunted the jungles of the Americas as far south 0:13:34.640 --> 0:13:39.440 as Argentina, but their northern range clearly extended into open 0:13:39.520 --> 0:13:45.680 country in North America. Francisco Carnado's early fifteen forties expiration 0:13:45.880 --> 0:13:49.840 into the Southwest had mentioned leopards, and mountain man Rufus 0:13:49.960 --> 0:13:52.920 Sage claimed to have seen such an animal on the 0:13:52.960 --> 0:13:58.400 headwaters of the North Platte in today's Colorado, Jaguars apparently 0:13:58.440 --> 0:14:02.520 were common predators of deer and wild horses, and comanches 0:14:02.559 --> 0:14:08.199 and other tribes even used jaguar hides decoratively. In Emory's report, 0:14:08.559 --> 0:14:13.160 jaguars were on the outskirts of Santa Fe at some point. 0:14:13.200 --> 0:14:14.280 As he worked on his. 0:14:14.320 --> 0:14:19.160 Survey, he discovered a literary source describing a frightening morning 0:14:19.240 --> 0:14:22.240 in eighteen twenty five in what he assumed was New 0:14:22.280 --> 0:14:26.680 Mexico's capital. A massive flood in the nearby Rio Bravo, 0:14:27.120 --> 0:14:29.720 the name for the real Grand for many people had 0:14:29.840 --> 0:14:33.280 driven out wildlife, and on opening the church, a lay 0:14:33.320 --> 0:14:37.240 brother found himself face to face with a jaguar of 0:14:37.440 --> 0:14:42.040 very extraordinary size. The big cat killed four clerics before 0:14:42.120 --> 0:14:45.520 survivors drilled a hole through a church door large enough 0:14:45.560 --> 0:14:48.920 for a rifle barrel. Jaguars would turn up in the 0:14:49.000 --> 0:14:52.480 Southern Rockies for decades to come, no question, so their 0:14:52.520 --> 0:14:55.000 presence in the area was not a miss, but the 0:14:55.080 --> 0:15:01.160 story Emory included actually referred to an incident in Santa Fe, Argentina, 0:15:01.440 --> 0:15:09.880 on the Rio Parana Bravo. Other creatures reflected a different 0:15:09.960 --> 0:15:15.000 West than Montana or even California. Emery's people saw swine 0:15:15.280 --> 0:15:20.800 like collared peckreas the southwestern Desert's native Halinas, another creature 0:15:20.840 --> 0:15:24.400 of the southern latitudes. At the northern limits of its range, 0:15:24.640 --> 0:15:29.280 they collected a bizarrely armored South American immigrant called the armadillo, 0:15:29.680 --> 0:15:33.720 exclusive to the Americas and distantly related to anteaters and 0:15:33.800 --> 0:15:39.200 ground slaws. They reported a remarkable variety of reptiles, particularly 0:15:39.280 --> 0:15:42.800 snakes and lizards, of which the most impressive were chuck Wallace. 0:15:43.040 --> 0:15:44.400 They acquired the first. 0:15:44.120 --> 0:15:47.360 Specimen and included an illustration in the report of the 0:15:47.440 --> 0:15:52.600 remarkable Heela monster, although taxonomists in Washington misidentified it and 0:15:52.720 --> 0:15:55.680 didn't realize it had a venomous bite. 0:15:55.760 --> 0:15:56.920 The bird life was. 0:15:57.000 --> 0:16:01.840 Prodigious among the more intriguing were what they called chaparral cox, 0:16:02.120 --> 0:16:06.360 the big cuckoos known as road runners. The fierce fleet 0:16:06.480 --> 0:16:10.440 road runner was a great enemy of the rattlesnake, they said, 0:16:10.680 --> 0:16:14.840 taking them in pitched battles, it usually won. And they 0:16:14.920 --> 0:16:19.200 found the so called Mexican eagle, the outsized falcon known 0:16:19.240 --> 0:16:23.320 as the carocera, extremely numerous, from the Rio Grande to 0:16:23.400 --> 0:16:27.120 the Sierra Madre. By the time all the identifications were 0:16:27.120 --> 0:16:31.000 in the Mexican Boundary Survey added a total of three 0:16:31.280 --> 0:16:36.280 hundred eleven new mammals, birds, and reptiles to America's list 0:16:36.440 --> 0:16:41.240 of native animal life. Another relatable time for early New 0:16:41.280 --> 0:16:45.800 Mexico's wildlife story is probably a century ago, when Vernon 0:16:45.840 --> 0:16:50.160 Bailey and his wife Laurence Miriam Bailey began to analyze 0:16:50.240 --> 0:16:54.800 New Mexico's biological riches and ecologies. They were followed to 0:16:54.840 --> 0:16:58.600 New Mexico a few years later by another scientist, Aldo Leopold, 0:16:58.800 --> 0:17:02.280 who rearranged the furniture in all our heads with respect 0:17:02.280 --> 0:17:06.520 to wildlife. Joining those three was the popular wildlife arthur 0:17:06.720 --> 0:17:12.480 Ernest Thompson, seton writing from Santa Fe setan penned heartbrending 0:17:12.600 --> 0:17:17.640 stories of New Mexico animals such as Tito, the female coyote, 0:17:17.680 --> 0:17:22.240 who allegorically taught coyotes how to avoid extermination, and the 0:17:22.440 --> 0:17:28.400 ratone area wolf Lobo, king of Corumpau, who possessed one 0:17:28.560 --> 0:17:32.480 fatal flaw his fidelity to his mate. 0:17:32.880 --> 0:17:33.879 It got him killed. 0:17:34.560 --> 0:17:39.399 Setan's literary theme, we and the Beasts are kin no 0:17:39.560 --> 0:17:44.080 doubt resonated with the native people of New Mexico. What 0:17:44.280 --> 0:17:48.560 Vernon and Florence Bailey, Aldo Leopold and Ernest Thompson Setan 0:17:48.640 --> 0:17:51.439 provided all of us living in the West since was 0:17:51.560 --> 0:17:56.040 simple but crucial in effect, how to understand a state 0:17:56.160 --> 0:18:03.800 like New Mexico and its wildlife story by virtue of 0:18:03.840 --> 0:18:07.200 its location on the continent. New Mexico is a Western 0:18:07.240 --> 0:18:11.840 state that possesses a riot of diverse ecologies, with more 0:18:12.080 --> 0:18:16.520 native mammal species one hundred and fifty one than any 0:18:16.680 --> 0:18:22.199 other state except California. But a century ago, it's diversity 0:18:22.320 --> 0:18:27.400 struck many observers as almost chaotic. The Baileys were essential 0:18:27.520 --> 0:18:32.320 in changing that perception. Vernon was a slight out eyed, 0:18:32.600 --> 0:18:36.480 chinless farm boy from Minnesota with seven years of education 0:18:36.720 --> 0:18:39.880 and churchy enough that until his twenties he had never even 0:18:40.000 --> 0:18:44.040 heard of Charles Darwin. He was a teetotaler his entire life, 0:18:44.080 --> 0:18:47.400 and a man as other scientists Marvel who never let 0:18:47.440 --> 0:18:50.600 fly even a mild curse. But he was such a 0:18:50.640 --> 0:18:54.320 whiz at catching animals and preserving them as specimens that 0:18:54.359 --> 0:18:57.920 he became the right hand man to Clinton H. Merriam, who, 0:18:57.920 --> 0:19:01.920 in the eighteen nineties was established the new federal agency 0:19:02.040 --> 0:19:06.359 called the Biological Survey, which became the US Fish. 0:19:06.119 --> 0:19:07.080 And Wildlife Service. 0:19:07.840 --> 0:19:14.520 Miriam's younger sister, Florence, seemed the unlikeliest imaginable partner for Bailey. 0:19:15.000 --> 0:19:18.840 She was a graduate of Smith College who'd originally planned 0:19:18.880 --> 0:19:22.719 a thesis on Darwinian evolution. But one of the environmental 0:19:22.760 --> 0:19:26.160 crises of a century ago was the destruction of birds 0:19:26.200 --> 0:19:30.240 for hats and fashion, and that diverted Florence towards writing 0:19:30.400 --> 0:19:35.000 about birds their steep decline and preservation. By the start 0:19:35.040 --> 0:19:38.840 of the twentieth century, she had also discovered Arizona and 0:19:38.920 --> 0:19:43.119 New Mexico, where as she said, the climate is wonderful. 0:19:43.800 --> 0:19:48.439 Their pairing raised eyebrows, but Florence and Vernon Bailey married 0:19:48.520 --> 0:19:52.160 in eighteen ninety nine and in nineteen hundred struck out 0:19:52.400 --> 0:19:56.080 on a camping trip across Texas and New Mexico for 0:19:56.200 --> 0:19:59.800 their honeymoon. It was a part of America that left 0:20:00.040 --> 0:20:05.600 an altogether different impression than the East. We felt everywhere 0:20:05.640 --> 0:20:09.280 in New Mexico that, while to us the country was new, 0:20:09.680 --> 0:20:14.359 in fact this land of Poco t Info is an old, 0:20:14.720 --> 0:20:20.639 old land. She wrote, very perceptive of Florence. What Vernon 0:20:20.800 --> 0:20:24.040 was working on for New Mexico was a brand new 0:20:24.240 --> 0:20:28.920 idea designed to make sense of wildlife distribution. Why were 0:20:28.960 --> 0:20:32.520 animals found in some locations but not others? Bailey and 0:20:32.600 --> 0:20:36.520 his boss Seehart Miriam believed they knew, and they pioneered 0:20:36.600 --> 0:20:41.240 a model called life zones. While Bailey is often remembered 0:20:41.240 --> 0:20:44.880 today for the role he played in designing and defending 0:20:45.160 --> 0:20:48.879 wolf eradication in the West, he left New Mexico a 0:20:49.000 --> 0:20:54.720 remarkable baseline record for wildlife in a territory where elevation 0:20:55.040 --> 0:20:58.879 ranged from twenty eight hundred feet to more than thirteen 0:20:59.040 --> 0:21:03.320 thousand feet atop its highest point, Wheeler Peak, near Taos, 0:21:03.720 --> 0:21:07.720 Bailey mapped out six life zones for plants and animals. 0:21:08.240 --> 0:21:13.320 He named them the Lower Sonoran, the Upper Sonoran, the Transition, 0:21:13.800 --> 0:21:18.879 the Canadian, the Hudsonian and the Arctic Alpine. In a 0:21:19.000 --> 0:21:23.919 nineteen thirteen monograph published in North American Fauna, he described 0:21:24.080 --> 0:21:28.120 the existing species compositions of all six of those zones 0:21:28.200 --> 0:21:30.920 in the brand new state of New Mexico and made 0:21:31.000 --> 0:21:36.720 its wildlife distribution newly intelligible. Taxonomists also credit him with 0:21:36.880 --> 0:21:41.080 realizing that our now endangered Mexican gray wolf was different 0:21:41.119 --> 0:21:45.160 from other wolves, which is why its Latin binomial carries 0:21:45.280 --> 0:21:50.480 Bailey's name. Florence Bailey's contribution was to fashion a similar 0:21:50.560 --> 0:21:54.360 baseline for New Mexico's birds. Her Birds of New Mexico 0:21:54.640 --> 0:21:57.400 was the first close study of the birds of an 0:21:57.440 --> 0:22:02.000 interior American state. Along with writing the first ever field 0:22:02.000 --> 0:22:06.080 guide for western birds in general, she added a whopping 0:22:06.359 --> 0:22:10.200 ninety four new species of birds to the ornithological list 0:22:10.320 --> 0:22:30.359 for New Mexico and the Southwest. Seton and the Baileys 0:22:30.480 --> 0:22:34.200 were experiencing New Mexico at a time when market hunting 0:22:34.320 --> 0:22:39.600 excesses were destroying numerous species that had anciently evolved in America. 0:22:39.920 --> 0:22:43.840 An industrial hunt for high leather eradicated bison on the 0:22:43.880 --> 0:22:48.000 southern plains in the eighteen seventies, sacrificing billions of animals 0:22:48.160 --> 0:22:50.880 native peoples in New Mexico had depended on for ten 0:22:50.960 --> 0:22:55.840 thousand years. Hispanic New Mexicans, called Sibal arrows, had long 0:22:55.960 --> 0:23:00.159 made pilgrimages themselves to the planes from Santa Fe and towns, 0:23:00.200 --> 0:23:04.720 and as expert horsemen had hunted bison with lances, hauling 0:23:04.800 --> 0:23:07.480 the meat and pelts back to their real grand towns 0:23:07.520 --> 0:23:12.480 and creaking two wheeled wooden carts. But by eighteen seventy five, 0:23:12.760 --> 0:23:17.760 a decade before they disappeared from Montana, bison were extinguished 0:23:17.800 --> 0:23:22.560 in plains New Mexico. Their destruction had barely taken ten years, 0:23:22.680 --> 0:23:26.160 and that was just the beginning. Exploring the Pecos river 0:23:26.320 --> 0:23:29.800 headwaters in the southern Rockies of New Mexico in eighteen 0:23:29.840 --> 0:23:33.919 eighty two and eighty three, naturalists Lewis Disch found no 0:23:34.280 --> 0:23:38.280 big horn sheep left, no elk in the country except 0:23:38.320 --> 0:23:41.640 a rare and occasional straggler, he wrote, and he neither 0:23:41.800 --> 0:23:45.679 saw wolves nor heard one. Howel he did see what 0:23:45.760 --> 0:23:50.520 he called a herd of eleven grizzly bears traversing Hamilton 0:23:50.640 --> 0:23:54.720 Mesa in the high rockies above Santa Fe, New Mexico, 0:23:55.040 --> 0:23:58.119 made an effort to save some of these animals, but 0:23:58.359 --> 0:24:02.840 following inherited fo traditions from the Old World, the state 0:24:02.960 --> 0:24:07.439 concerned itself largely with the ones called game birds and 0:24:07.560 --> 0:24:11.800 mammals people wanted to hunt. There was little appreciation for 0:24:12.000 --> 0:24:15.360 non game or even for native species that had evolved 0:24:15.400 --> 0:24:19.240 in the southwest. New Mexico Territory created its first bounty 0:24:19.240 --> 0:24:23.199 system for predators in eighteen ninety three. That list of 0:24:23.320 --> 0:24:29.480 money for scalps included wolves, coyotes, bears, lions, and bobcats. 0:24:30.080 --> 0:24:36.320 State sponsored exotic species introductions of animals like ibex Oryx 0:24:36.560 --> 0:24:41.000 and our dads particularly became a specialty of the New 0:24:41.040 --> 0:24:44.920 Mexico Game Agency. At least the new National Forests and 0:24:45.000 --> 0:24:48.399 other public lands the US federal government was setting aside 0:24:48.400 --> 0:24:51.160 in New Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century 0:24:51.440 --> 0:24:56.720 did continue to preserve wildlife habitat for future animal recoveries. 0:25:01.240 --> 0:25:06.000 When America's giant step lions and saber toothed cats had 0:25:06.119 --> 0:25:10.919 died out in the Pleistocene extinctions, jaguars had assumed the 0:25:10.960 --> 0:25:15.480 mantle of North America's most imposing big cat, with a 0:25:15.600 --> 0:25:20.000 range that stretched through most of South America. Jaguars were 0:25:20.000 --> 0:25:23.800 at the northernmost limits of their range in the southern US. 0:25:24.520 --> 0:25:28.440 Leopard like in appearance, but heavier and more muscular. Male 0:25:28.560 --> 0:25:32.119 jaguars can weigh more than three hundred pounds. In the 0:25:32.240 --> 0:25:37.200 early twentieth century, the great cats still had established territories 0:25:37.280 --> 0:25:41.080 and were breeding in New Mexico and Arizona, so this 0:25:41.280 --> 0:25:45.159 northern range was not merely a place the occasional male 0:25:45.320 --> 0:25:49.879 jaguar roamed into. Among more than sixty historical records of 0:25:50.000 --> 0:25:54.160 jaguars in the Southwest from eighteen eighty to nineteen ninety five, 0:25:54.560 --> 0:25:59.879 females and kittens are well represented. North American jaguars den 0:26:00.200 --> 0:26:05.000 and hunted in deserts, oak foothills, pinions, juniper and Ponderosa 0:26:05.080 --> 0:26:10.320 pine forests countries, strikingly unlike their jungle habitats to the south. 0:26:10.840 --> 0:26:13.960 Such open train made them vulnerable to human eyes, though 0:26:14.240 --> 0:26:17.399 especially the eyes of stock raisers and the bounty and 0:26:17.480 --> 0:26:20.320 government hunters employed to protect cows. 0:26:20.440 --> 0:26:21.840 In the early twentieth. 0:26:21.520 --> 0:26:26.880 Century, Aware that jaguars were declining, Vernon Bailey collected as 0:26:26.920 --> 0:26:29.399 many accounts of jaguars as he could find. 0:26:30.119 --> 0:26:32.600 From them, he concluded that the Black. 0:26:32.359 --> 0:26:35.120 Range in the center of New Mexico had long been 0:26:35.280 --> 0:26:39.199 jaguar territory. A bounty hunter had killed jaguars in that 0:26:39.320 --> 0:26:43.040 range of choppy vertical ridges in nineteen hundred and again 0:26:43.080 --> 0:26:46.919 in nineteen oh two, and Bailey collected several other accounts 0:26:46.960 --> 0:26:51.320 from there. Other New Mexico ranges, the Sambre de Cristo's 0:26:51.640 --> 0:26:55.280 the Southern Rockies, in other words, the Sacramentos and the 0:26:55.280 --> 0:26:59.640 San Andres also held jaguars, and into the nineteen twenties 0:26:59.840 --> 0:27:04.359 ranchers were still shooting them. There were accounts of jaguars 0:27:04.400 --> 0:27:08.960 nearly to Colorado, as well as out on the Great Plans. Arizona, 0:27:09.000 --> 0:27:13.119 where settlers reported jaguars from Saint Gray's Muggy owned Rim 0:27:13.160 --> 0:27:16.719 Country to the Grand Canyon, had a similar jaguar record. 0:27:17.160 --> 0:27:22.000 The Biological Survey's first recorded jaguar kill was there a 0:27:22.040 --> 0:27:26.399 Federal hunter shot at jaguar in Arizona's Santa Rita Mountains 0:27:26.400 --> 0:27:31.160 in nineteen eighteen. The Bureau's operatives in Arizona had few 0:27:31.320 --> 0:27:35.000 doubts about the sources of the jaguar threat, as they 0:27:35.040 --> 0:27:39.720 called it. Its position was this, and I'm quoting, all 0:27:39.880 --> 0:27:43.520 lobo wolves and jaguars will be taken as fast as 0:27:43.560 --> 0:27:47.120 they enter this state from Mexico and New Mexico, as 0:27:47.200 --> 0:27:50.240 one hundred percent of them live on livestock and game. 0:27:51.680 --> 0:27:56.600 The Bureau recorded five such renegades crossing into a supposedly 0:27:56.720 --> 0:28:00.840 jaguar free Arizona from nineteen twenty four tonight ten twenty seven. 0:28:01.520 --> 0:28:06.800 Two of those were females, all ended up killed. Jaguars 0:28:06.840 --> 0:28:09.800 were still dying at human hands even on the Gulf 0:28:09.840 --> 0:28:19.639 coast of Texas as late as the nineteen forties. In 0:28:19.720 --> 0:28:23.640 the first half of the twentieth century, another legendary figure, 0:28:23.760 --> 0:28:27.720 ecologist Aldo Leopold, spent enough time in New Mexico to 0:28:27.920 --> 0:28:33.520 shape future wildlife policy, both there and more broadly. Stationed 0:28:33.600 --> 0:28:36.560 in the territory first to manage one of its new 0:28:36.640 --> 0:28:41.440 national forests, Leopold met his future wife, Estella Bergier in 0:28:41.600 --> 0:28:42.880 Santa Fe. 0:28:42.960 --> 0:28:44.520 He went on to study. 0:28:44.200 --> 0:28:49.400 A new phenomenon called game eruptions, the unchecked growth then 0:28:49.560 --> 0:28:54.160 spectacular crash of populations of mule, deer, elk, and other 0:28:54.280 --> 0:28:59.280 ungulates that followed Americas and New Mexico's eradication of predators 0:28:59.360 --> 0:29:03.840 on behalf of the livestock industry. Leopold found almost no 0:29:04.080 --> 0:29:07.720 record of eruptions before nineteen hundred but he tracked a 0:29:07.800 --> 0:29:12.080