Due to my work to co-produce a Rio Grande Watershed documentary in 2018 —citing the critical importance of water and habitat for saving our pollinators— I felt this article should be recounted in full.

We have no idea that we live on the brink…our beloved overused river is sick. It’s not going to get any better folks. Climate change. Does the Rio Grande have any tricks left to survive?

By Laura Paskus| 5 days ago 

Help keep local journalism fighting for you. Donate today to Friends of the Reporter.

In a crinkly government report from the 1920s, two photographs show what the Rio Grande looked like south of Socorro near the town of San Marcial, the remnants and memories of which are submerged today under the sludge and sand of Elephant Butte Reservoir’s northern extent.

Taken from a bluff above the Rio Grande, the photos show a wide, meandering river that has overflowed its channel and engulfed the lands beyond the bosque. The glossy black-and-white photographs are stuck to the report’s pages, and the typeset words read: High Water June 1, 1922. Discharge Old Channel 1,800 S.F., New Channel 7,100 S.F.

The “S.F.” refers to what we today call cubic feet per second and it’s a way to measure how much water is flowing past a certain point.

According to that report: “From time immemorial the Middle Rio Grande Valley has been subject to periodical floods that have at one time or another repeatedly submerged all of the area between its bluffs.”

We’ve changed all that.

Ninety-eight years later, I’m looking at a stretch of that same river—which in Spanish reports from the 1500s is called Nuestra Señora—and watching fish die in the tiny puddles still standing along the river bank as the channel has dried and cracked into an empty, sandy wash. What someone almost 20 years ago told me they called the “Rio Grande highway.”

Almost every year since 2002, when the Rio Grande has dried, I’ve reported on it.

I’ve ticked through all the facts: how many miles are dry, why and how the climate is warming, what biologists are doing to protect rare fish as the waters heat up and evaporate or sink into the sands, and through time, what agencies and irrigators have done to deny, ignore, or nowadays, try to alleviate the drying.

Today, I’m not telling you anything new.

I’m just telling you again.

Our river has dried.

As I type this in mid-July, about 50 miles of the Middle Rio Grande are dry within two stretches south of Albuquerque. Upstream, the Buckman Direct Diversion in Santa Fe warned it might soon turn off its municipal tap from the river due to low flows.

At the end of June, the water utility in Albuquerque had to stop drawing water from the Rio Grande and switch to groundwater pumping. And New Mexico, Colorado and Texas agreed in July to let the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District use water meant for other downstream users to “avoid catastrophic crop losses.” But that water will need to be replaced somehow, which means next year’s conditions will be even more dire.

It rained last night, and even though that cool water felt miraculous on my skin, it wasn’t nearly enough to revive a river and kickstart an ecosystem.

So, again. I’m not telling you anything new.

I’m just telling you again: Our river has dried.

On the first day of June 2020, I peered down into the undulating sands of the Rio Grande from the edge of the Highway 380 bridge in San Antonio, New Mexico. Before heading back to my truck and driving to a different spot where I could traverse the bosque and hike up the riverbed, I heard a wet glug.

The noise came from a spot where 13 months earlier I’d seen the biggest beaver I’ve ever seen. Following the line of small silvery fish shining flat in the sand, it took a few seconds for my eyes to focus on the interweave of light and shadow at the edge of the channel. There, a golden-scaled carp was trying to flip over in the mud; its refuge puddle had evaporated in the morning’s 90-degree heat. I snapped a few pictures and left the bridge.

This is normal.

Normal for New Mexico’s largest river to dry—not every summer, but more summers than not since the mid- to late-1990s.

According to records from across the state, New Mexico’s average annual temperature has increased by about 3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 50 years. In a recent issue of New Mexico Earth Matters, the University of New Mexico’s David Gutzler lays out the gritty details. Again. (He’s been at this a long time: Studying climate change, writing academic papers, talking to reporters, and teaching generations of students.)

In April, I talked to him about snowpack. At the time, Rio Grande was running about 20% of its historic average through Albuquerque. Those were rotten conditions, even though snowpack in the watershed was close to average last fall and into February, when conditions started to warm and dry.

Globally, April was the warmest April on record. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasts that 2020 will be one of the five warmest years on record—and there’s a 75% chance it will be the warmest year since scientists began tracking global temperatures in the late 1880s.

“This year was more along the lines of what I anticipate for the future, to happen more often,” Gutzler told me then.

Warm conditions in the already-warm, already-arid Southwest affect forests, orchards, wildlife, rivers—everything. When it’s warmer, plants need more water. People use more water. And rivers lose more water, even when we’re not in a drought and less snow or rain is falling.

Hydrologist Shaleene Chavarria has been paying attention to declining snowmelt and streamflows in the Rio Grande for a while—and I keep coming back to her research. In a peer-reviewed study she co-authored with Gutzler, she found that between 1958 and 2015, the river’s flows have declined, particularly in March, April and May. Though she called what happened this year “scary,” she wasn’t surprised.

“You get snow in the winter when it’s really cold, but then things get warm and dry—which is the long-term outlook for springtime in the Southwest—and the snow just melts away faster than our historical statistics would suggest,” Gutzler said of this year’s conditions. “This is more like a global warming-style of a low streamflow year, as opposed to a drought year [like 2018] that started off bad and stayed warm, and was just bad for the whole winter.”

In 2018, the Rio Grande dried in early April. Typically, over the past two decades, it has dried at the start of irrigation season, when its waters are diverted into ditches and canals. Two years ago, though, that early spring drying happened right when the river should have been ripping with spring snowmelt.

Then, the winter of 2018/2019 boomed. Spring waters roared down the Rio Grande, filling up side channels excavated to slow waters for rare fish and restoration projects—built to mimic the river we destroyed when we hoisted up dams and filled up reservoirs for farms and cities, straightened and channelized stretches of the river to no longer braid and meander.

The spring of 2019 was marvelous to behold, especially after the previous spring, summer and fall, when the state’s largest reservoir, Elephant Butte, dropped to 3% capacity.

That’s when a friend and I saw that fat, happy beaver grab some willow leaves, flip over, and float off downstream under the San Antonio bridge.

This June, staring down at the dead and dying fish, I wondered where that beaver was. I wondered how and where it found water, what happened to its spring kits.

Initially, when it dries, the Rio Grande can feel like a raucous, busy place.

The dying fish thrash and glug and splash. Birds seem manic with song. Coyote and raccoon prints pace up to each shrinking puddle. There are so many easy meals to snatch that they leave fish with just a few bites out of them in the middle of the bed.

Things quiet down pretty quickly, though.

This year, when I returned to the dry riverbed three days later, it was quiet save for flies. The only birds I see are turkey vultures who soar and descend. The fish I watched struggle in the last of the hot puddles—those that haven’t been eaten—are now heaving masses of bone and maggot.

In 2002, I met some fisheries biologists.We used to drink a lot of beer and whiskey and talk about books. And I’d listen—incredulous—when they talked about their work on the Rio Grande. The river was drying up? I couldn’t believe that could happen. The Rio Grande? Plus, I’d never seen anything about it in the news.

If the state’s largest river were drying, surely that would be newsworthy.

Later that year I started working for High Country News, and could write about it myself, instead of waiting for someone else to notice.

At that time, there were minimum flow requirements during irrigation season—a trickle of water was supposed to be left in the river for the survival of the silvery minnow, a rare fish listed in 1994 for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

But the minimum flow requirements appeared to be an irritation for anyone beyond the biologists who had called for their implementation the previous year. And at the time, as the river’s flows dipped below those minimums, officials at the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Reclamation—this was during the administration of George W. Bush—told me a gauge was out of whack, that the streamflow numbers I was watching on the US Geological Survey’s streamflow website were wrong.

Then 7 miles of the river dried. Agencies leased some water and tried to send it downstream. Biologists seined pools and plucked out rare fish.

Five years ago, I caught back up with Christopher Hoagstrom, one of the Fish and Wildlife Service biologists who worked on minnow issues back then. Now a professor, Hoagstrom described how “weird” it was to see the river dry in 1996, when about 90 miles dried.

Now, decades later, the river dries most years—even in 2019, with its high spring flows, fat beavers, and spawning minnows. That year, the Middle Rio Grande dried in September.

Now, it dries so regularly it’s not newsworthy anymore.

It’s normal. Just like those floods were normal more than a century ago.

Riffling through a 1947 report about plans for development in the Middle Rio Grande, I read about floods of “great magnitude” between 1870 and 1890, “though no official records exist.” Newspaper reports, however, chronicled that the “damaging flows” continued for 90 days and “several competent engineering groups” estimated flows from 45,000 cubic feet per second to 125,000 cubic feet per second.

In 1920, floods lasted 64 days and peaked at 28,800 cfs. In 1941, flood conditions stretched across 61 days and hit 24,000 cfs. The flows in 1922—that I saw in the photographs—don’t even merit a mention.

So far this year, the Rio Grande at the 380 bridge has spiked above 1,000 cfs just once, briefly in April. Even 2019’s beaver-delighting flows weren’t much to brag about in comparison, though they jumped toward 4,000 cfs twice in May and June.

That 1947 report is all about the need for development—to control floods, dampen down a rising water table, control sedimentation and aggregation of the riverbed. To meet demands, revamp old irrigation infrastructure and to save the valley.

“Unless measures are taken to rehabilitate the project and protect the lands and present development against flooding, the existing [Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District,] which includes the metropolitan development of Albuquerque, the irrigated economy of the area, and the non-agricultural economy dependent on it will virtually disappear in an estimated 50 years,” according to that 1947 report.

The urgency of the language strikes me. People were not messing around back then.

Now, the river dries and dries. And we hope next year’s snowpack will be better.

On June 1, when I hopped down intothe sandy riverbed and hiked cautiously toward the deeper cuts in the channel to look for water and fish, I kept thinking about a book I was reading about the transformation of the Bering Strait over the past century.

“The death of one living thing becomes life in another,” writes ecological historian Bathsheba Demuth. “An ecosystem is the aggregate of many species’ habits of transformation, their ways of moving energy from its origin in the sun across space and condensing it over time. To be alive is to take a place in a chain of conversions.”

The drying of the Rio Grande—despite how accustomed most of us have become to ignoring it or dismissing it—represents a vast transformation. And we are caught within that chain of conversions. It’s a transformation that we’re responsible for, on many different levels.

We colonized this river. We stole its floods. Pinned them back behind diversions and dams. Built reservoirs to retain water and attract Anglo farmers and settlements. Sucked away the river’s waters from its channel to foist it upon dry soils where creosote and mesquite scented the desert, replacing them with chile, onion, alfalfa, pecans.

And if you think I’m using the word “colonize” too freely, recall that as recently as the 1970s, the sacred lands and farm fields of the Pueblo of Cochiti were nabbed, then sacrificed to a reservoir to protect Albuquerque from floods.

Congress authorized Cochiti Dam in 1960, and despite outcries from many tribal members, the US Army Corps of Engineers built Cochiti Reservoir between 1965 and 1975. The pueblo “lost” about 30,000 acres. What that really means is they lost farmlands, hunting areas, sacred places, ancestral grounds, connections to their past—and lost their own stretch of the Rio Grande.

We also coughed and spat up so many greenhouse gases that the climate changed, the globe heated. Australia ignites, the Amazon ignites. Temperatures in Siberia soar to 100 degrees. In many places, including within our own state, the future will be uninhabitable—in some instances because of rising seas, in others because they’ll simply be too hot, too dry for humans to survive.

Early in my reporting career, I thoughtthere were good guys and bad guys.

I thought that if I researched hard enough, asked enough questions, talked to enough people, I’d find one agency, one person, one action to blame. (That inclination toward villain-seeking might have something to do with being lied to while reporting on my very first story about the dry riverbed.)

Now, I know it’s the system in its entirety. The system we built to transform the desert, encourage and sustain white settlements, and provide certainty to our cities and ways of life.

I want to point to bad guys, here and now. But the truth is, the people working on these issues are the ones who care the most, who worry about rain and snow, and who’ve likely ceded a great deal of personal happiness to meetings, reports, arguments, litigation and agreements.

Over nearly two decades, I’ve seen how agencies and people have changed, and how hard people work to cooperate. How federal, state, local, and tribal agencies, as well as some conservationists, work together to try to meet everyone’s needs, to jiggle water in the system to try and keep some in the river.

But we can’t keep pretending that everyone’s needs can be met. We can’t keep hoping for a robust winter and hearty snowpack; we can’t keep hoping next year, the reservoirs will fill.

Remember that 2019 was a lustrous year for snow. But still the river dried. And reservoir levels on the Rio Grande remained far below capacity. Elephant Butte, for example, hit a high of about 29 percent capacity last July.

The other day, I received an email update from the Bureau of Reclamation about projected reservoir levels for Elephant Butte and Caballo—two critical reservoirs that supply southern New Mexico and Texas, and are a pinch point for litigation between the two states over distribution of the waters of the Rio Grande.

Right now, Elephant Butte Lake is 11.7% full, holding back about 230,000 acre feet of water. By this time next month, it will plummet to 124,000 acre feet.

“Unfortunately, our worst-case scenario is playing out with very little sustained monsoon activity, and increased temperatures driving demand,” read the email.

By the end of irrigation season, the reservoir will likely be down to where it dipped in 2018—about 3%.

Last spring, upstairs at the Universityof New Mexico Art Museum, six singers spaced themselves out across the floor, each standing in for a spot on the Rio Grande: the headwaters, Albuquerque, Elephant Butte Reservoir, El Paso, Big Bend and the mouth of the river at the Gulf of Mexico. On a screen, the year flashed for the audience, as the singers interpreted the streamflow data in song.

The six began their individual songs in 1974. They roared through the wet period of 1984 through 1993, a time during which many people moved to New Mexico and the state’s population begin inching upwards.

Familiar enough with the data from years of reporting on it, I waited for the ebbs and flows. Likely, I gripped my seat in anticipation of 2018. I didn’t want to hear the river screech to such a halt as it did, didn’t even want to hear Elephant Butte descend to sandy depths and stir the ghosts of its inundated lands.

Once the singers finished embodying the recent data—one of the three composers, Marisa Demarco, explained to me later—they each improvised a possible future for their point.

Listening to them then, I heard the chaos of the near-future. We know temperatures are rising. Scientists like Chavarria keep telling us, repeating again and again, that river flows are decreasing even in wet years thanks to the warming. Scientists like Gutzler keep telling us the warming trend keeps heading upwards, and water pressures will become tighter and tighter.

I listened to the singers’ voices tell the story of rising temperatures, quieted flows, uncertainty and fear. I imagined the chaos as we failed to heed the warnings, failed to make changes and plans, and kept clinging to outdated systems—systems that obliterated ecosystems and species and that had harmed some people to benefit others.

Then, notes emerged in the chaos of their voices that laid bare a different future. A future that left me in tears, but not because our river was gone.

This isn’t a eulogy.

Believe it or not, it’s a love letter.

Every news story I’ve reported on the Rio Grande—for this paper, for radio, for television, for magazines and online outlets—has been a love story. I’ve laid out the facts, asked you to see our river. And I’ve secretly implored each and every one of you to love our river.

Love can coast with the medians and averages. The regulated flows. But there’s banality in trudging through days unrecognizable from one another; there’s a certain dullness to water that’s moved from one reservoir to the next, depending on who needs it, what lawsuit is pending, what capacity there is for volume, and what tolerance we have as a society for dry riverbeds, extinct fish species and dead cottonwood forests.

In bouncy spring flows, however, there is wild, mad love.

And, I’ve learned, there’s love in the bitter quiet of a sandy river channel.

We’ve trapped this river, by our needs and within our laws. We’ve trapped this river by clinging to a colonial past, by failing to heed warnings, by lacking the imagination to change.

But Nuestra Señora, I know she still has tricks up her sleeve. I’ve listened to her voice. And she will outlast us all.

Laura Paskus is an environmental journalist and producer of the New Mexico PBS monthly series, Our Land: New Mexico’s Environmental Past, Present and Future. Paskus was a 2019 Leopold Writing Program Resident and her book At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate, is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press in September.

This lady blog is about one enchanted night spent with my spouse up on the Sandia Crest, overlooking the twinkly lights of Albuquerque, NM. Before your mind races to Camelot and other places…Think ladybugs.

My partner’s birthday wish was that we sleep on the mountain top. We hiked in under the starless mantle of a very dark night, escaping the stifling, smoky heat of the city. We set up our tent in a ring of pine trees, near an old camp fire circle. After we were settled, we walked to the very edge of the ancient, lichen covered granite before sleep claimed us.

The wind was howling and fierce along the edge, cleansing us of any residual corona virus stress, partisan politics and urban misery. Tucked away on our bed of pine needles the wind sang like a mighty ocean tide. Our weary bodies and treacherously overworked minds and hearts were lulled to sleep.

I awoke early the next morning. It was first light. Trowel in hand, ready to perform my daily business, I stumbled through the forest. Suddenly, I began to notice in the crevices of tree bark, on fallen branches, in nooks and crannies everywhere, piles and rivers of lady bugs. The trees surrounding us were literally wrapped in ladybugs!

• 

It was as though they had flown in as a cloud and fallen on the forest like a quilt. Their hallmark red-ochre color accented with black heads, alerted me to their presence. They were everywhere.

Ladybug magic.

• 

I ran back to our camp to tell Kenneth. We grabbed the camera and marveled, following their tell tale trail. I found myself humming from the musical, Fiddler on the Roof,

Wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles…

We had no idea we had slept with ladybugs, snugged in and enveloped. It was a very special birthday gift from the insect world.

Back in town, I went hunting. I wanted to find out more about ladybugs. What was their beneficial purpose in the garden. What meaning did they have in the mythical/archetypal world. What was the meaning of this particular fractal of magic we’d just experienced?

• 

Animal Speak (Llewellyn Publications, St. Paul, MN, 1996) was my first go to. Ted Andrews invites us to experience nature firsthand, notice it, examine it, orient yourself to creaturely habitats. He writes, “nature speaks to us constantly, through it’s shapes, colors, textures, smells and varied expressions of animal life, it communicates to us about the world and our life. The symbolism of nature will vary according to it’s context, so you must know it’s natural context”. (P. 46)

I wondered about the importance of Ladybugs in our ecosystem. I found out that Ladybugs are considered a beneficial insect because they eat insects known to destroy plants in backyard gardens and agricultural crops. The blood of a ladybug is yellow and has a very strong smell that acts as a repellent, to predators.

From the larvae to the adults, all enjoy a diet of insects that are small and soft bodied. During the pupal stage, a ladybug can eat about 400 medium size aphids. Ladybugs live for about a year, but some can live up to three years. Within a year [one ladybug] will usually devour over 5,000 aphids. Larvae consume about 25 aphids a day. Adult ladybugs consume about 50 aphids a day. Their voracious appetite helps them play a vital role in the management of pests that attack agriculture.

https://dengarden.com/gardening/Ladybugs-Facts

I found out that as the temperatures drop, ladybug beetles (the family Coccinellidae) will fly en masse into canyons or assemble in great numbers and go dormant—something called diapause. Perhaps this was the phenomenon we saw.

Historically, the name “ladybird” originated in Britain where the insects became known as “Our Lady’s bird” or the Lady beetle. Mary (Our Lady) was often depicted wearing a red cloak in early paintings, and the seven-spotted ladybird (the most common in Europe) were said to symbolize her seven joys and seven sorrows.

In the human world of myth and culture, beetles have been associated with resurrection and metamorphosis. I perked up. Many spiritual teachers see this time of disruption, pandemic, and institutional failure as the beginning of a new epoch, an initiation for humanity for what must be birthed. The transformation of the cocoon. Animal Speak reminded me that the symbolic message from this most ancient creature, the beetle, might be my metamorphosis, as well as ours. Here’s the insect wisdom of beetle:

Stick together. Rest when you can. Prepare for change. Remember you are in the midst of a metamorphosis. What do you need to shed in order to welcome the new? Change is inevitable and only becomes more difficult when you resist its natural flow.

Ted Andrews (Animal Speak, Llewellyn Publications, St. Paul, MN, 1996)

If you wish to learn more about ladybugs and beneficial insects, you can visit this wonderful site by the Xerces Society/Bee City USA in partnership with New Mexico State University. They are bug experts and entymologists who are exploring all things bugs this summer.

As a bug geek, I urge you to allow yourself to be drawn into the wonder and mystery of the insect world. Pick one species and learn about it. Apprentice yourself to its fascinating intricacies and oddities. Invite beneficials into your backyard by providing plant habitat. Insects are basic to our ecosystem’s building blocks. We must avoid a bugapocalypse if we are to survive as human species.

Blessed be the ladybugs, bees, butterflies and all things beneficial!

It has been hideously hot here in New Mexico this past week. Ninety eight degrees at the height of a New Mexico summer is not unusual, but 105 degrees Farenheit?

I’ve been harvesting and processing honey during this time. I regret not doing this at earlier cool, summer temperature of 90 degrees F. In triple digits, the comb is like butter, it melts off the bar— literally. The honey becomes a river, pouring through the hive. It aggrieves the bees, and I am crushed when this happens. Tomorrow I go at 6:30am, when the temps are still in the 80’s, to the organic farm in the South Valley, and remove this heat holding, insulating honeycomb, packed with the sweet elixir.

So, all this to say I have honey for sale. $15/pint. Unfiltered, raw, light floral honey. You will not regret a penny after you taste this!

If you want a square of chewy honeycomb dripping with honey, I’m selling this delicacy for $20. Delicious.

If you are local, contact me at anita@thinklikeabee.org or call me at 505-514-4982.

We will arrange the handoff!

• 

• 

These days, to stay sane in these times of spiking COVID 19, I pull out happy memories of travel. In May 2019, Kenneth and I made a pilgrimage to our holy honeymoon grounds in southeastern Utah— Red rocks country.

Bluff, Utah is home to a year round population of about 320. There’s the locals, fiercely committed to this land. Then there’s a smattering of river guides, archeologists, anthropologists, artists and students who scrabble out a living on the edge of Navajo country.

• 

• 

• 

In Bluff we stayed at the Recapture lodge, renown as a hospitality center for the stories of legendary western writer, Tony Hillerman.

We visited Comb Ridge Eat and Drink restaurant. Our favorite fare. We visited Liza at Calf Canyon store, filled with beautiful Zuni and Navajo jewelry, fetishes and art. Liza was a favorite character in Bluff, and we could always get the low down on recent developments between conservationists and the fossil fuel industry, hellbent on acquiring as much land as possible. Our admiration for Liza was deep. She was a can-do woman, sturdy, cheerful, sun tanned and a lifelong voice for the land and waters. Her deceased husband, James Ostler, an anthropologist with the fabled Zuni fetish makers, left her the business and she was now taking care of their son with special needs, full-time. Her gourmet restaurant had long ago closed.

This year there was a new kid on the block. Bears Ears Visitor Center. An interpretive and information center for this sacred place of the Indigenous people. It told the story of a national land monument carved to smithereens by the trump administration, then served on a platter to oil and gas interests.

#visitwithrespect is the hashtag. My t-shirt and a bumper sticker remind me of this very special place, and to keep the faith for a return of this land.

Respect.

Seems to be at the bottom of a lot of problems in our country today. Or perhaps I should say… the lack of.

Those who refuse to wear a mask as ICU’s are overflowing and medical workers are dying from COVID. Those who brutalize brown and black people. Those who drill and destroy sacred indigenous ancestral lands for a profit. Those who believe their religious belief and skin color is supreme.

Last week, I learned a hard lesson with my bees. Again. I waited too long to harvest honey. With the intense temperatures, some of the honeycomb had collapsed in the hive. I had neglected them. Now, I was raiding their stores. In my usual manner, I did not don gloves before I put my hands in the hive. I know my bees. I rarely get stung. But as the collapsed honeycomb split and spilled open during removal, the bees began to drown. Frantic to protect their community…let’s just say, I sustained damages.

Because the distance between a bee’s stinger and my hands in the hive is so short, I usually am very respectful. But this time I failed them. They got my attention.

#respect. It’s about the other.

• 

• 

• 

• 

Bee friends, tired of being “sheltered in place”? Have you watched tv until you can no longer digest all that information? Are you sick of puzzles, games, twiddling your thumbs, quarreling, sitting in your own backyard and living room? Expand your horizons! Join us in the garden and backyards of many people and places. Spark your imagination and give your family a treat! THIS WEEK is the 4th annual Pollinator Week festival for Burque Bee City USA. It’s extra special because it is all virtual this year! Albuquerque is the only Bee City USA certified in the Southwest region.

Yes. You can tune in to any of the sessions from far and distant lands! See the event calendar here— with a worm’s (or bee’s?) eye look at the each of the events happening daily!

To kick us off, tomorrow first thing, Wednesday June 24, Dr. Olivia Carril, New Mexico’s very own native bee specialist, will talk about these beautiful, magical, most excellent pollinators that are often not seen. Fairy bees. Carpenter bees. Sweat bees. Long horned bees. Bumble bees. They come in mesmerizing colors, with very specialized functions. They are shy creatures. All but the bumblers don’t sting!

Think Like A Bee will be live on Saturday! Hands in the Hive! with Amy Owen, live footage from her honeybee hive check. Followed by the Documentary about the importance of watersheds and protecting them. Come and visit Lorenzo Candelaria’s farm, where his family has lived continuously for over 300 years, to learn about food and bees and water. In New Mexico, water is precious. Water is life.

Special flashlight version of night pollinators in the Garden with Kaitlin Haase of Xerces/Bee City USA, Lara Lovell in the backyard with bees and showing you bee art! Pollinator tours and all things bugs both at the Bio Park and Open Space Visitors Center.

And music! BéBé La La, an Americana Folk group on Friday night, and Saturday afternoon with Seth Hoffman, live from Haifa Israel!

Bee Geeks Unite! Come on down in for lots of family fun, entertainment and education of all things pollinator!

• 

• 

• 

This weekend is Solstice! On this auspicious day, June 20, 2020 10am Mountain Time, come and join a virtual interview from the Bachechi Open Space with Director, Marnie Rehn, and Anita Amstutz of Think Like A Bee. What are watersheds for and why are they important for bees and food?

“In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught.”

Baba Dioum, Senegalese Engineer and Forester at the 1968 triennial meeting of the General Assembly of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN)

In the wee hours of the morning my husband and I drove slowly up the east back of the Sandia Mountains in New Mexico. Halfway up, I spotted a tiny rainbow colored figure along the side of the road. “Oh no!”, I cried. “A Western tanager”. Just the week before, my friend and I had hiked through this area, marveling at the brightly colored plumage disappearing into the tree canopy, their call indistinguishable from the common Robin.

As we always do, when we see a limp and lifeless or hurt creature on the side of this mountain road, we pull the car over and move the little being to safety, try to offer kindness. With a heavy heart I approached the broken body, it’s eyes already glassy and it’s beak barely moving as it tried to swim to the surface for oxygen, it’s neck broken.

• 

• 

I held this still warm, magical and magnificent being in the palm of my hand, sobbing inconsolably. Somewhere from deep inside, I offered compassion, a prayer of thanksgiving for this brilliant little bird and it’s short sojourn on the planet. Clearly it had collided with a fast moving car.

We had not started the journey like this. Eager for a day away from “sheltering in place”, I was reading to my husband from the recent Summer 2020 issue of Parabola: The Search for Meaning. We wondered and chatted about the stories, “On the Way to Presence”. “When I went from my head to my heart everything was Love“, wrote Ram Dass in his final days. It was a relaxed and joyful way of being together.

And suddenly this.

Life is like that. Constant portals, moving us between life and death. Death and life. Suffering and joy. Peace and fury. Love and despair.

As I hiked, I found my feet pounding the soft dirt trail, as grief gave way to blind rage. All the ecosystems destroyed and dying from human ignorance, darkened imaginations and profit-driven greed. The orangutan orphans in the forests of Borneo, Indonesia and Malaysia, their terrified mothers shot as the saws rip down their forest home for fancy furniture or palm oil in our fossil fuel drenched western lifestyles. Massive windowed skyscrapers full of unnatural light in Dallas at night, millions of tiny bodies of migrating birds littering the streets at their feet—caught in their strange reflections. Native bees disappearing before our eyes as Caterpillar machinery gobbles up native plants, paving over the high desert as wealthy Texans move to New Mexico suburbs. The genocide of millions of soft furry bodies beside our national roads as speeding cars blindly run over them, ignorant of their immense suffering and slow moving lives.

My furious rage and grief over this one tiny creature spilled over and suddenly became all the untimely human deaths in the past 3 weeks. Of two beloved women in my circle— sensitive beings of light, art, song, poetry and compassion. And the pandemic, still claiming millions of lives.

Though human suffering is untold, my task it seems, is to grieve and honor the voiceless, silent disappearing non-human species, even as the humans weep for their own. So much loss.

Walk through the world with care, my love 
And sing the things you see 
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow 
And even as you stumble through machair sands eroding 
Let the fern unfurl your grieving, let the heron still your breathing 
Let the selkie swim you deeper, oh my little silver-seeker 
Even as the hour grows bleaker, be the singer and the speaker 
And in city and in forest, let the larks become your chorus 
And when every hope is gone, let the raven call you home

Spell Songs/The Lost Words(based upon the brilliant and ancient Carmina Gaedelica, a Celtic book of nature prayers, poems, songs and liturgies)

Even so, in this season of weeping, hope comes to me in the form of a what I think is a rusty patched bumblebee in the mountain altitudes. My Xerces friend says my rusty rumped bee is not exactly this extinct bumblebee. Yet, I imagine that there is still one or many in the wild. I will believe.

• 

• 

• 

So as death rises around us like a tsunami, we all are called to weep. To lament.

My friend Phyllis offers this beautiful prayer/poem for humans as they suffer loss and weep…

3 AM Mountain Standard Time

Stranger—You in the lighted window

on the third floor.

Did virus dreams nudge you awake?

Me, too.

Young mother in Iowa-

This isn’t what you imagined.

Your infant, cradled,

as you long to share the smell of her sweet head 

with others you love.

Young Immigrant—

Your fears are closing around you,

the virus only third on your list

of pressing concerns.

Navajo elder-

So many in the house, you alone awake.

Your ancestors come to you with soft murmurings of

past pandemics.  So much weight.

You fall asleep at last to the heavy breathing of your cousin’s child.

Capitol City politician-

With vague unrest at 3 am,

Pondering where you missed the boat,

the heavy touch of your bad judgement.

Dairy farmer in Wisconsin-

Too early to get up now,

too dark yet even for the birds.

Who will buy your milk?

The smell of spring comes through your open window.

At least there’s that.

Young teen in the city-

Was it the siren that awakened you?>

You wonder if this is the sound of your future.

Will you never have the chance to drink too much at a crowded

party—bodies dancing, pressed together?

A light in a cabin in Alaska-

no one to see it but the wandering moose.

You’re good at isolation.

But you worry if you will ever be touched again.

You in Baton Rouge-

Sleep is just returning to you in the moist heat of night,

accompanied by cricket sound.

Would you ask the crickets to send some sleep my way?

Now it’s 5 am Mountain time.

My poem has been written.

The restless ones on East Coast time

have started their day,

nighttime worries dissolving in sunlight.

I will take myself and my poem back to bed.

And wait for the coming light to

bleach my dark hour

and birth my hope again.

Phyllis Bergman, May 2,2020

I will continue to hike in the mountains, pound off the rage burning in my thighs, bring oxygen to my grief filled lungs, bind up my hurt heart with trees and birdsong and sweet perfumed scents of Ponderosa pine. I will continue to look for the lost and dying in the creaturely world and mourn them…

And I will expect to see the extinct rusty patched bumble bee someday.

Thus entitled was the April 2020 The Rolling Stone’s issue that featured Greta Thunberg and all things climate change. The children’s issue.

Is it as bad as they claim? It’s worse. From bugapocalypse to acidifying of the oceans to the extinction of a million species. Viruses are only a new expression of climate change and the decimation of the chain of life. It is a wake up call for the profit driven death machinery that political leaders and corporate culture continue to serve. Issues of food and water security loom.

But I know you will stop right here, dear reader, if I continue on this trajectory.

We are a people of hope. We cannot let it lead to hopioid, a false addictive belief, but ultimately to right action in the world. All great social movements have been about ordinary people moving out into the public square. These days our public square is the world wide internet.

A few things are needed for these times. Vitamins for civic life, to keep us robust.

Gratitude.

This radiant, shining planet earth and all her inhabitants call us to a deeper affection of place, more than ever, in these 9th hour, ground zero, 21st century Covid time. We will not save what we do not love (Baba Dioum, Senegalese forestry engineer, 1968). The natural world is one of the few places open to humans for solace, peace, life giving joy, in these pandemic times. Foster that love by being with earth in all her myriad forms—from backyard to park to wild places, to night sky.

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

What we need is here, Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 1998)

Lament.

We need a wall of lament for those we love—all our relations who might soon be extinct due to climate change and our carefully protected fossil fuel carbonized lifestyles…

Indigenous communities

Pollinators

Koala Bears

• Ringed Seal

Action.

Extinction Rebellion, begun in the U.K. was founded on the power of civil disobedience as social transformation. “If society is going to change as drastically and urgently as we need it to, some level of painful disruption seems necessary.” (Rolling Stone, April 2020, p. 59) They use the greatest tool available to humanity for social change. Mass civil disobedience…not with angry fury, but creative collective action, involving “crowds of people planting trees, singing songs and waving colorful flags. ” (Rolling Stone, April 2020, p. 97)

Fortunately, Mother Nature has intervened. She is helping us with social disruption. We are cocooned, socially distanced, quarantined, masked, grounded from our carbon lifestyles. For those not on the front lines, most are congregated in our own little “sheltering” oases. We cannot move en masse out onto the streets. But for those hidden away in our homes and ‘hoods, we are growing our civic consciousness. As Rebecca Solnit -writes

When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it dissolves itself, quite literally, into liquid. In this state, what was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly is neither one nor the other, it’s a sort of living soup. Within this living soup are the imaginal cells that will catalyse its transformation into winged maturity. May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells – for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is not foreordained. It’s a conflict, one that takes place while things that were frozen, solid and locked up have become open and fluid – full of both the best and worst possibilities. We are both becalmed and in a state of profound change.

“The Impossible has already happened: What the CoronaVirus Can Teach us About Hope”, by Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian, April 7, 2020

The bees also tell me about this new way of being…

In early April, I caught a swarm on a bush. Vulnerable. Their future uncertain. Their bellies gorged with the sweet elixir of honey and dreams for their new home, they set out on a journey. I put them into a hive and left them alone for a month. Every now and then I would peek inside the glass window. There all I could see was a vibrating orb of honeybees dangling there in a massive pulsing ball in the center of the hive. After a month, I opened them up. Inside was a hive, from front to back, filled with beautifully formed combs, brood and bees. It was surreal to see how quickly that had filled that box up to perfection. And now, after “sheltering in place” together for a month, they were ready to be split. Busting at the seams for change, you might say.

So, friends of bees and all, keep company, cocoon, prepare for metamorphosis, transformation.

These days it seems the whole planet is on a vision quest together. Some more aware of this than others—that we cannot, will not be able to go back to the “way things are”. When things were spinning so fast, we couldn’t jump off if we wanted to. Now we’ve all debarked. Together. For those who aren’t on the front lines, our hands have been forced.

I read recently that geologists note the earth is “standing still” . There is less vibration from human activity. Perhaps Mother Earth is finally able to be quiet. How beautiful is that?

We’re sitting, waiting with the earth. Some are listening for the sound of the new world we must create. Some are spending beautiful time with their families. Some are struggling to survive, still working, still in danger. Some are twiddling their thumbs, hoping for business as usual. Some have taken to the street with guns, signs, threats, demanding that their “way of life” be returned.

But for those who have ears to hear, a new world is starting to buzz, quietly. A world where humans are no longer the destroyers, but the healers, the co-creators, the hive mind. Working together. Creating a place where every being belongs. Everyone has enough. Every living thing is shown dignity.

Recently, while I wasn’t paying attention, our city was plunged into freezing temperatures overnight. After days and days of sunshine and warming temperatures, one night the rains came and the world plunged into a world of ice and snow on the mountain top, frost on all living things on this high desert floor.

I woke up one morning to find all my budding fruit, apricots, cherries, blackened by the cold. I grieved the loss, along with everything else I’ve lost these days—community music, employment, social gatherings, restaurants, face time in real time, hugs, the ease of going to the grocery, or meeting a friend for tea without a mask.

Oddly, I noticed up the street, my neighbor’s 50+ year old mature apricot tree which I admire every year (actually, I confess I sneak a few of those round orange globes every summer)had no frost damage. I noted the way all the fruits is clustered near the ground level, how full of leaves and mature this elder tree is. So protective and fully grown.

The apricot tree reminded me that our culture has some growing up to do. This mature, seasoned, adaptive, and resilient tree knows how to navigate a deep freeze, unexpectedly. Most creatures that live outdoors continuously do not expect a life of “easy street”. They have everything they need in their environmentally adapted genetics. I note that a few of my beehives have also weathered seasons, making them my “resilient” stock— adaptive to New Mexico’s unpredictable and harsh climate changes and yes, mites. As much as I also grieved the loss of all but 2 of my hives this past year, I am learning from the ones that survived.

• 

• 

• 

• 

Those who, with modest means, have survived intact through adversity, pandemics, weather catastrophes, Economic depressions and recessions have some wisdom for these times—both human and creaturely.

I see people offering neighborly kindnesses and support in many large and small ways to buoy each other up these days. The following poem was sent by someone who offers a free on-line yoga studio each week for anyone who tunes in. Thank you Meta. You are keeping me balanced. It was one more reminder that we are not alone in the Universal memory or story. This has happened before…for instance the pandemics of 1869 and 1918. We know what to do. Take care of one another.

This reminds us that we can reimagine this time.

By Kitty O’Meara (2020)
And the people stayed home.
And read books, and listened, and rested,
and exercised, and made art, and played games,
and learned new ways of being, and were still.
And listened more deeply.
Some meditated, some prayed, some danced.
Some met their shadows.
And the people began to think differently.
And the people healed.
And, in the absence of people living in ignorant,
dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways,
the earth began to heal.
And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again,
they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images,
and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully,
as they had been healed.

#hivemind #collaborativewisdom #Growinguptogether#slowdown#bestill

It appears that nature continues on. Unabated. Oblivious, in a way, to the human drama unfolding.

Today on my solo, socially distanced walk in the neighborhood, I heard the familiar loud buzzy sound that honeybees make when swarming. My mentor TJ Carr always said that Palm Sunday was THE time for bee swarms to begin.

• 

Looking up towards a pine tree as tall as a 12 story building, I watched a crescendo of bees whirling, swirling slowly upward. It was as though they were Elijah’s chariot come to transport him home to the heavens. A graceful and coordinated spiral, which appeared at first chaotic, they suddenly made a bee-line to the very top branch of that tree. It was though they had evaporated. As hard as I tried, I could not see where the pulsing orb of their sisters hung high in the tree tops. I would’ve needed a telescope.

This swarm would not be mine.

Last week, I received a call on the road. My husband and I rarely venture out these days except on bikes or foot. Kenneth had called from the West Side of Albuquerque for a pick up. His bike had a flat tire. On the way, I received another exciting phone call. A bee swarm had landed next door to the Rio Grande Co-op market in a low bush. Would I pick them up for my friend’s beeyard? Of course. I hadn’t had this much excitement to punctuate the homogeneity of my days for quite awhile.

Picking up a swarm for a beekeeper feels like the exhilaration and anticipation of the hunt. The good news is, nothing has to give up their life. Well, that’s the hope.

On this particular day, I pulled into the parking lot of the co-op where Dunia and her 6 year old son waited with eyes glowing above their face masks. The wonder of bees and children.

The security person kept a fair distance. We waited for our friends, slated to bring their box of beekeeping tools, to safely carry the honeybee swarm to their new digs.

Despite my assurance that bees are most docile in this state, gorged with honey, disoriented as they wait for the word to their new home, least likely to attack— everyone kept a safe distance.

What happened next, ripped a dull gash in our excited expectation.

A truck pulled up, screeched to a stop, and a man on oxygen in the front seat, in a state of undress, rolled down his window and began to yell that these were “his bees’. His two young daughters piled out and began to gear up. We were still waiting for our backup. He was clearly not going to get out of the truck, perhaps was not able to. Instead he threatened us from the cab.

The co-op manager came out to join the fray, stating he had called this man’s bee outfit from the East mountains, at least 45 minutes ago. He had found their website.

Just then, my friends rolled up, and began to unload their bee tools. Their eyes widened as the angry words reached a crescendo.

Finally, I calmly took the swarm box, still without any beesuit or protection, and began to gently nudge the ball of bees into the box. The cloud of anger that wrapped us so tightly that air was being squeezed out of our lungs‚—nevermind COVID 19— began to recede. The Co-op manager and my friends stepped up to help. A bee chased the child and he began to scream as his mother herded him in their car. I entered my own bubble. I was in that charmed state of absolute focus and calm and contemplation that accompanies my forays into the hive. The words flying around me became like the muted voice of the teacher in Charlie Brown. Background noise.

• 

• 

Before I knew it, somewhere on the periphery of my awareness, the man’s daughters had packed up. Throwing a final insult at myself, my friends and the manager, the unhappy group of bee swarm hopefuls drove off. We captured the last of the bees and happily hived them in a fruit tree paradise at my friend’s home. The next day they were dancing in the orchard and making beautiful combs.

I was left with the question…did I do the right thing? Should I have walked away? Given them up? Do bees really “belong” to anyone? This man thought so. Clearly he was in it for the biz. In the world of volunteer beekeepers, swarms are usually first come, first serve—unless of course there is an elegant and coordinated system of sharing, such as the Albuquerque Beekeepers (In Albuquerque, Call CABQ #311).

Meanwhile, there is an urgency of the bees in this season, as they swarm to new homes. Maybe there will be more parking lot fights over swarms. Bee keepers are intensely competitive about gathering swarms. Tempers are at a peak with the lockdown. Oh, such human folly, our need to possess the bees. Or, to possess anything.

I don’t have much else to say about this little bee tale. No wise words of wisdom or crystal clarity about “how to think like a bee”. Mostly I impart this story to let you know that it is honeybee swarm season. The bees will be right on time. They will do their thing to the best of their ability, despite plagues and firestorms and hurricanes and drought.

And if you see one dangling in your backyard from a branch, or your neighbor’s tree, please call a beekeeper who is local. The first one there deserves first dibs.

Anita Amstutz 5055144982. Yes, I do swarm calls:)