It’s late October and I am already reminiscing about the profuse display of diversity that the land proffered during our all-too-brief monsoon season. It will be an entire year until once again I’m witness to the annual summer exuberance that always seems to take me by surprise. Looking in nature’s proverbial rearview mirror can be hazardous to the psyche during a dry autumn – an easy way to get the blues.
After all, looming November is – on average – our driest month in the Sky Islands. Daily desiccation is the rule. November rain? “What’s that” you may well ask! The austerity of November is analogous to searing June and the prelude to our summer rains. Brown sticks pass for plants and flowers are few indeed. Further, winter rains have tended to be more fickle than our warm rainy season as of late. The vast majority of neotropical migrant birds are long since gone, leaving a visual and auditory void that leaves me hungry for some respite from the dun landscape.
Enter the much maligned desert broom! Swimming entirely against the tide, Baccharis sarothroides crashes into the scene with a vengeance. Most of the year this medium-sized-to-tall shrub is simply consistent. It is evergreen and thus displays little seasonality until about mid autumn. The growth form is normally rather upright, lacking the attractive, tortuous curves and twists that characterize so many of our arid-land plants (think Mesquite). To cap it all off desert broom is often labeled, albeit unfairly, a noxious weed – something to be loathed, glared at, and even eradicated. No redeeming qualities, it seems.
Allow me to enlighten you as to the truth about this beautiful and native member of our local flora. Given that it is indeed an evergreen shrub, desert broom provides much-needed cover for a wide spectrum of wildlife. When little else is green along local arroyos and scrubby flats, you can count on brooms to break the monotony, while providing succor to a variety of animals.
Adding to their value, brooms often thrive on very disturbed sites, such as recently cleared land or where flash floods have wreaked havoc. These areas can be highly prone to erosional forces, and hence desert broom helps to stabilize the soil until additional native plants become established. Other pioneer plants in such razed areas such as tumbleweed, lehmann lovegrass, bufflegrass, puncturevine and the like are non-native. I for one will certainly not condemn desert broom for the company it keeps. Think of it as the lone, brave plant willing to enter the saloon full of ruffians from out of town – the kind who have scared off all of the other natives!
It is truly in autumn, however, that brooms enter their full glory. Quite unexpectedly they begin to flower. Being a member of the aster family, they sport star-shaped flowers, which in this case are not very showy, but they are pollinators!
Even a casual glance at a blooming broom may alarm you because of the loud drone of so many insects. It’s here that long-horned beetles are paired off to mate, daytime moths seek their next nectar fix, while their larger cousins, the butterflies, dance all around. It is not unusual to find American snouts, various species of lady butterflies, queens, and great purple hairstreaks all at the same broom! Hunting them all are lurking mantids, predatory hemipterans (true bugs), and of course small, insectivorous birds. The list goes on… Better for you to venture outside and see for yourself.
Vincent Pinto and his wife, Claudia, run Raven’s Way Wild Journeys. They offer local tours dedicated to the preservation of the incredible biodiversity in the Sky Islands.