By Morrigan DeVito, Restoration & Plant Stewardship Coordinator
I guess you could say birds brought me to the Amargosa. It was the joy of birding in the urban wetlands of the Las Vegas Valley that opened my heart up to loving the Mojave Desert and seeing a future for myself in conservation. I feel replenished in desert wetlands, glimpsing glimmers of birdlife as they come and go, some following migratory instincts older than humanity. The Amargosa is a haven for at least 227 species of birds and listed as an Important Bird Area by National Audubon. But they wouldn’t be here without the ancient relationships between water and plants along springs, seeps, and even the elusive Amargosa River itself.
I sometimes wonder if birds and other organisms sense that their world is changing quicker than the evolutionary baseline they’re equipped to handle, or sense that the baseline of their waters and wilderness is not so abundant anymore. But ultimately I think it is our unique responsibility as humans to be conscious of these baselines. As far as we know, we’re the only animal with the gift to project ourselves generations into the future, though we’re not always good at using this gift.
Like mesquite roots that can reach groundwater at dark depths 200 feet below, my own roots in the desert grew deeper into the murky waters of our future when I came onboard. Since starting my work as Restoration & Plant Stewardship Coordinator with AC, I’ve been thinking a lot about how our baseline of nature shapes what we view as normal in an ecosystem. The theory of “shifting baselines” refers to the growing acceptance of environmental degradation across generations, as each generation grows up in a new normal without the lived experience to know what came before. Urban sprawl, chronic drought, endangered species, and population declines are the baseline for those who, like me, have known about climate change since childhood and have grown up in the shadow of ecological loss.
Say’s Phoebe, one of the many birds found in the Amargosa
I first met the Amargosa River at Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in June 2023. A Common Yellowthroat’s lilting, reedy song beckoned me across the boardwalk and to the Crystal Spring where my daily worries dissolved as I watched the Amargosa pupfish cavorting in turquoise water, a curtain of virgas painting the horizon. Flame skimmers and blue darners patrolled the waters in zigzags, and a thrashing cicada buzzed in an orb-weavers web. I spent the morning wandering along the springs in the refuge, feeling my spirit spring to life with the melodious songs of Bewick’s Wrens and Northern Mockingbirds and the squeaks and tseets of Gambel’s Quails and Verdins. My Amargosa baseline was one of abundance, and all thanks to the advocacy that kept Ash Meadows from being lost to development as a resort community in the 1970s. I left the refuge that day as rain touched the parched earth, making a promise to come back, to look deeper each time I returned.
I’m keeping that promise now as a staff member. But I’ll be honest, returning to the bitter waters of the Amargosa is bittersweet, shadowed by the inevitability of loss. Industrial-scale solar development, exploratory drilling, drought, federal land loss and layoffs, and climate change continue to threaten the Amargosa and its people. And while I’m still getting to know the physical landscape of the Amargosa, I’m also learning the landscape of advocacy. The shifting world of politics and public lands management that Amargosa Conservancy addresses head-on requires me to think generations into the future, and to remain resilient as I do so. But fortunately, each time I’m in the Amargosa I’m reminded why I do this work, coming into the clarity of open skies, salt, birdsong, clear water, and thorny mesquites.
Rippling water in Crystal Spring
Phainopeplas, the red-eyed sentinels of the mesquite bosque, whistled from screwbean mesquites, branches thin and spiky like grasshopper legs, at Ash Meadows the morning I began my first official day on the job. I joined AC staff and board members, as well as grant and community partners for a hydrological tour of the Amargosa Basin and to discuss the restoration work that needs to be done. I soon learned that these mesquites were in trouble. Screwbean mesquites are facing wide scale dieoff throughout their range because of a fungal pathogen, and at Ash Meadows there is a 10-50% mortality rate. What I once thought were wintering trees, dormant and abundant, became another loss, another reason to do this work. My baseline shifted. It shifted again when I learned about the cycles of climate change-fueled floods and fires reshaping the Mojave… and again when I learned about years of toil spent removing invasive tamarisk and trapping predatory cowbirds… and again joining the Save Ash Meadows public meeting, and again a few weeks later sitting with elders from the Timbisha Shoshone tribe, listening to people’s stories of protecting their homelands. I’m sure my baseline will continue to shift and expand as I learn more of the work that’s gone on behind the scenes to keep the Amargosa in as wild a condition as it can be in the 21st century.
I know that to love the desert, you have to be intentional, to be unafraid to look deeply into what seems barren. That includes looking deeply into my own barrenness, the emptiness I feel inside when thinking of bird declines, of drought, of development and dust and dryness and environmental despair. But if the Amargosa has taught me anything so far, it’s that even the most barren-seeming places have life.
Western Bluebirds reminded me of this lesson last week as Scott trained me on how to do hydrological monitoring to measure groundwater depth in the Carson Slough, a peripheral flow of the Amargosa River and a spring discharge area near Ash Meadows Wildlife Refuge. The soil here is white and crusty, crunching and breaking under each footstep. It’s here that I saw my first Amargosa niterwort, a priority endangered plant in the botanical monitoring I’ll do. The niterwort was small and brown in dormancy with a few little green shoots. The white soil was completely dry, or so I thought. As we continued to walk across the salt and towards denser stands of phragmites, the salt became mud, the mud became murky water. Mallards protested and flew away when we approached one of their puddles. As we went from piezometer to piezometer, I spotted a small flock of Western bluebirds following the streams of water, pausing to perch and catch flies. Their backs shimmered from black to dark blue depending on how the light grazed their feathers. They rattled to one another and continued flying over the salt, towards more water, more plants, more food.
The relief I feel glimpsing a bluebird in flight is something I hope future generations will feel, but it can’t live on without hard work to keep true barrenness from becoming our future. Habitat restoration is an antidote to our growing tolerance of environmental degradation, a path forward that quite literally plants seeds for future generations to take care of and benefit from. Alongside AC and our grant partners, I’ll be implementing a 3-year grant from the State of CA Wildlife Conservation Board, working with local communities to establish a cultural seedbanking with the Timbisha-Shoshone, monitor the endangered Amargosa niterwort at alkaline wetlands in the Carson Slough and Tecopa Hot Springs, and outreach to locals and tourists about the alkaline wetland plant communities. All of this is to keep a healthy baseline throughout the Amargosa, to keep these vulnerable ecological communities intact, because future generations may glean wisdom and wellbeing from them in ways we can’t predict.
Like the alkaline wetland plants that grow from the salt, like the birds that press on through our ever-changing world, my work is focused on restoring what we can amid the existential threat of climate change. The Amargosa River’s future will never be the same. There will be loss. But if we use our ability to imagine and create the future we wish to see, then perhaps we can dare to dream of a new baseline that improves what our future generations, both human and nonhuman, will inherit.
View of the Carson Slough