by Christopher Morris
Restoration Coordinator, Sky Island Alliance

University students from three cities in Sonora, Mexico, recently got hooked on birding, wildlife, and habitat restoration, thanks to funding support from the Sonoran Joint Venture. It all started with a mid-winter camping trip to the Whitewater Draw State Wildlife Area in southeast Arizona to see 30,000+ Sandhill cranes and other species. Some students from Cananea, Moctezuma, and Hermosillo were unable to join us on the field trip, so we began to make plans to hold a spring restoration workshop in Sonora. I planned to teach them about migratory birds, as well as low-tech creek restoration techniques. The goal: give them skills to improve habitat for birds and wildlife in their own communities.

Friday, March 6 – Saturday, March 7, 2015
After lots of planning, I make the trip to Cananea, Sonora. There I pick up faculty Guillermo Molina and Chito Martinez at the Instituto Tecnológico Superior de Cananea (ITSC). We head out to meet up with rancher Carlos Molina in the town of Arizpe. Carlos is an uncle of our new intern at Sky Island Alliance, Mirna Manteca Rodriguez. He has agreed to talk about the possibility of hosting us on his property for a restoration workshop later in the month. We arrive at his field at Los Pilares de Tetuachi 10 minutes south of Arizpe along the Río Sonora. The setting blows us away. We talk about the mission of Sky Island Alliance and the collaboration that we have enjoyed over the last three years with ITSC. Carlos says that we have his permission to camp there in the newly planted walnut orchard. He also gives us permission to carry out the restoration demonstration sites with the students. I accept a copy of the key to get into the site and tell him that I’ll keep him in the loop with the workshop details. I will also do my best to recruit someone to join me to compile an inventory of bird species that we’re able to identify on site.

Friday, March 20, 2015
Sky Island Alliance volunteer (and my “ringer” for bird identification) Ryan Gillespie and I leave Tucson around 8:00am. Next stop: the ITSC another 45 minutes south. Professor Guillermo Molina hops in and we’re off to continue our final leg of the journey, 1.5 hours to the site. We scout the area and confirm the project demo sites while awaiting our companions. Speaking of companions, a stray dog we find ambling down the middle of the highway knows a good thing when he sees it. He follows us into our campsite; he would stay the entire weekend, vacuuming up food scraps and lounging in the shade of the truck. By 5:00pm our ranks have grown to include 27 people. It is mostly students from Cananea, as well as quartet from Hermosillo. We do introductions after the group sets up their tents and then talk a little about what else is on the docket for the weekend. The group takes care of chores: digging a latrine, gathering firewood and digging a fire pit. S’mores are a novelty for the group and a big hit! My offer of leading a night hike to the base of the pillars is a major bust. It’s impossible to keep ~20 people quiet, even when you remind them every few minutes. Guillermo’s sighting of a Western Screech-Owl near tomorrow’s work site caps off the night.

Saturday, March 21, 2015
Marcelo and the group from Moctezuma arrive right on schedule around 8:30am. We do introductions as a larger group. The day’s exercise: build a one-rock dam to detain water and sediment. We head out to the site and review safety before laying out the steps and talking about what success would look like over time. The group works hard and knocks it out with everybody participating. Fortunately we weren’t lacking for rocks in the immediate area.

We wrap up there by shortly after 11:00am and do plant ID on the way back to camp. We stop to talk about hackberry, eucalyptus, mesquite, willow, cottonwood, and walnut, among others. After a relaxed lunch, Ryan and I lead a talk about bird habitat and bird migration. I use maps from eBird to show migration of Swainson’s Hawks that overwintered in Argentina and moved north through Central America. Although eBird sightings from AZ and CA have tracked dozens of them in the past 30 days they are conspicuously absent from most of Sonora. Our bird checklists for eBird from this weekend’s trip will be a good lesson for the students. They can contribute in a meaningful way, even if they’re not experts.

Up to this point we’ve identified about 50 bird species. Sulphur-bellied Flycatcher, Gray Hawk, and Rufous-backed Robin have all made appearances. Several members of the group decide to hike to the top of the pillars to take in the sunset. Meanwhile, Marcelo and I take a stroll towards the same area and catch views of a swooping Peregrine Falcon. With binoculars trained on our target, we see it alight on top of the northernmost pillar and begin to feed on something! Back at camp we polish off the rest of the s’mores before drifting to our sleeping bags.

Sunday, March 22   
The hooting of a Great Horned Owl in the cool, dark hours pre-dawn wakes me up. I don’t need to look at the time to know that it’s still way too early for the group to be up. I take off on my own through the gate and head upstream along the river. The one-two punch of last September’s hurricanes did some major reconfiguration to the floodplain. The force of the swollen river washed away roads and ripped out  barbwire fences. But the banks had received generous helpings of rich sedimen. It was the perfect foundation for today’s exercise with the students: riparian reforestation with Goodding’s willow and seepwillow. Among the ubiquitous Northern Cardinals and sparrows, I pick out a Hermit Thrush, a Yellow-rumped Warbler and a hummingbird that looks an awful lot like a Violet-crowned. My hummingbird ID skills are seriously lacking. Around9:00am we have all had a chance to get some food so I group us up to talk about the process of pole planting. We spend the next hour split up into smaller groups. We rove the riverbank harvesting “whips,” trimming them down, and planting them in clumps of three with the tips angled downstream. When higher waters come, this method adds extra protection. Even if the sapling farther upstream gets torn up by a debris flow, the other two poles might live on through the sacrifice of the first.

I’ve printed off training certificates for everybody and hand them out before we take off for home. Several of the students ask me when the next event will be but it’s too early to tell. For now, we’ve had an excellent time in each other’s company, detecting 62 species of birds at the foot of the phenomenal Pilares de Tetuachi.

(See more pictures of our trip here).

To learn more about this or other Sky Island Alliance projects in the region, contact Christopher Morris.