Serendipity

This weekend's butterfly survey in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve led to a serendipitous discovery. Mohave milkweed is a common host plant for Queen and Monarch butterflies. Previously we had known of only three small populations of Mohave milkweed in the preserve. But one group of butterfly hunters, @ezpixels among them, working in the northeast preserve found a tremendous number of Mohave milkweed plants along Old Paint Wash and Soapberry Wash trails.

Word got out, and a flurry of late Saturday night emails resulted in @ezpixels, @cactus_hugger of the Desert Botanical Garden's Seeds of Success program, Natalie Gagnon (a DBG butterfly ecologist) and I hieing ourselves out bright and early this morning to map the populations. We mapped eight locations, some of them sizeable. I suspect there are many more populations in the sparsely-botanized northeastern corner of the preserve.

In the process we added two grass taxa to the preserve flora, the non-native ripgut grass and the native appressed muhly. Also, after two spring seasons of chasing Lucy's Warblers, I finally got 'im!

Posted on April 10, 2017 04:50 AM by stevejones