The Saguaro, Part 3

but do briefly refresh. In the past couple of episodes, we talked about the natural anthromorphism of the swarrow, We talked about how slowly it grows, we talked about its biological adaptations for surviving in extremely arid conditions, and we also talked a bit about its history and nomenclature. And today we're back to finish up the discussion. But before we get into the meat of today's episode, rob I wanted to briefly come back to a question that I

asked you in part two. Since you have recently visited the Sonoran Desert. You were there among these cacti and you went hiking, didn't you.

Some people kind of say they do, just googling, But in the time since the last episode, I went looking up questions about whether sorrows make sounds, and in one sense the answer is yes, because the main thing I actually came across was a post from the National Parks Trust talking about how when the wind blows, if you stand close to a sorrow, you will hear a hissing or high whistling sound, which is apparently caused by the wind into flowing around its ribs and through its spines.

Sot a whistling cactus.

heard just like nothing. It was like more quiet than I ever remember anything being anywhere outside.

the middle like a central tree trunk. And then when the in the case of a mature plant, it usually has arms branching out from the central column and then a single point at the top. So the central column just goes straight up and then it terminates in a slightly tapered, rounded tip. But on rare occasions, instead of a central column or a branch terminating in this round, tapered tip, it spreads out, sometimes wildly at the top,

like a fan or like a peacock's tail. So I've got some pictures of this for you to look at in the outline here, Rob. And so this can happen to the central column of the cactus, to the trunk, or to any of the cactus's limbs. And this is especially interesting when paired with the human anatomical analogy, because a crested central column can look very much like a crown or maybe hair or a hat, while a crust the limb can look like a waving hand on one

of the arms. So in most of the pictures you see when you do an image search, this crest is at the top of the central column or at the end of a limb. But a cactus doesn't necessarily or doesn't even usually stop growing when it develops a crest, so quite often you will see further columns or limbs growing well out of the fan formation.

you know, some very ahead of their time. And others kind of quaint historical oddities now, but one of the exhibits here was what was known as an Arizona Territory display. Oh so, they had shipped a bunch of flora from Arizona to Chicago for this display, and one of the cacti that they harvested and brought to Chicago's for the people to see is a was a rare crested sorrow.

And I've got a picture for you to look at in the outline here, Rob, So we've got a black and white photo with this big house with columns and then all of this Arizona plant life positioned out front in the garden, including some regular soarro cactus right just you know, just regular looking columns. But then one of them is this beautiful strange fan shape right at the top.

And they I was watching a section about this in a PBS documentary and it mentions that the cactus, we don't know what happened to it, but it almost certainly died from this transportation process, especially once exposed to the cold weather in Chicago.

Here I was doing a little reading about this yesterday, about the various protections that are in place for the soarros in Arizona especially, you know, you know, to keep people from messing with them, harvesting them, moving them, you know, unless there is a you know, a certified reason for it and you have a permit for it, because yeah, they're just not gonna just can't do this with the full grown soorrow.

that occasionally develop crested tips. This is seen in other columnar cacti as well, but the suarow is the one where it is the most visually striking and mysterious and according to all of the sources I was reading, biologists still do not fully agree on what causes the cresting pattern, so this is somewhat an unsolved mystery. I was reading about the hypothesized causes in a few different places, like the There's a fact page by the National Park Service

that identifies a few leading hypotheses. One is that I think this is an older way of thinking, is that it's the result of some kind of physical trauma. Like an older idea was that there were like lightning strikes. Maybe when lightning hits a cactus, it starts cresting. From what I can tell, this is maybe not very widely subscribed to by biologists anymore. Another idea was injury from frost could cause this. But a different idea is that

it is caused by a genetic mutation. And I was watching a short documentary on the crested suarows hosted by PBS, which includes interviews with a sorrow expert named Bill peache and Peachey explains that the soarow's normal growth. He kind of compares it to blowing up a party animal balloon, so like a long balloon, you know. He says, it's a long tube that grows by unfolding at the growth tip, and as it unfolds here it creates these plats or ribs that we see along the outside of the cactus,

which hosts the spine clusters. And of course those clusters can later turn into flowers and fruit can But these plats can also have developments that turn into branches, you know, they branch out and turn into limbs. And Peache says, quote, what's happening is the control mechanism for what causes the number of pleats is out of control. So instead of occasionally branching, there are multiple branches on a crest and

it keeps branching until it can't branch anymore. So that's his idea of what's going on with the growth pattern. But what exactly is the underlying cause?

out of control crested growth is not necessarily permanent. Once it starts, it can turn on and off, and he points as evidence of this, He points to examples of cacti where you get a cresting pattern start and then for some reason it stops, and then there is a normal stem or branch growth coming out of the crest which just continues to grow normally after that. And Rob, I've got a picture you can look at in the

outline here. Yeah, it's a mature saro with some branches down below, and then up at the top there is a crested section and then out of the crest are actually branching to what looked like normal branches or central trunks.

this cactus is doomed. I mean, I guess every plant will die eventually, But a cactus with crested growth patterns can go on living for a long time and it appears to be otherwise healthy. It can produce flowers and fruit and go on growing.

often like a strange wooden or barkie picture or jug. Yeah, but what's cool is that these structures are actually formed inside the sorrow as a result of excavation by birds. So they are a defense mechanism that forms in reaction to tissue trauma that later can take on lives of their own.

the flesh and make a hole. And coming back to the complexity of the you know, the kind of many faceted help and harm relationships in the desert that we talked about last time. That was in the context of suarrows and their nurse plants. I was reading in the Yetman at All book that we've talked about in the past couple of episodes. In fact, we should give the

full citation again right now. This is the book The Soorro Cactus, a Natural History by David Yetman, Alberto Berquez, Kevin Holteen, and Michael Sanderson from the University of Arizona Press, twenty twenty. But in this book, the authors have a section about the soorrow boot and they're talking about the relationships between these birds that peck holes in the side of the cactus and the cactus itself, and they say, actually, the birds might simultaneously help and harm the cactus. So

the harm is pretty easy to understand. They're digging a hole in your flesh. But the book points out they may serve as minor pollinators for the cactus flowers and as vectors for dispersing the fruit seeds. And the authors also mention that the birds may protect the sooro in a way by eating larva from diseased plant tissue near the nest.

jug or bowl. And this is this is what we end up calling the cactus boot. So the barkie boot stays even after the decomposition of the cactus. And in fact, historically these boots have been repurposed by humans. So I was reading about this in a few sources, but the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum mentions that the thana Authum, the Epima, and the Seri people all have traditions of repurposing the salvaged boots as water containers.

animal demonstrations as well. You can see some halina. It's a wonderful place, So I reckon it's another place I recommend if you're visiting the Tucson area, the Holy Heavily. Yeah, all right, well let's continue with this discussion of human beings and the soaro. So well, you know, obviously relatively new classification to Western science. This we discussed in the first episode, but the native peoples of the Sonoran Desert obviously knew about the soaro for millennia, and they had

different names for it. So the thana Apham called it the hashan or hassan, and they derive multiple resources from the cactus. We'll discuss some of these, but food, drink, lumber, tools, and shade. The coastal Sonoran people called the Seri call it the Mohepe, and the southern Sonoran Maos and Yaquis people called it the Sagwo. I may be mispronouncing this, but it's sag u o and this would be where we get sa g u a r o soar from. So this would this seems to be where we get

the main name for this organism. Now, colonial recognition of the suarro was ultimately sketchy and limited. We got into that a little bit. The authors of these Soarro cactus point out that for a long time the Sonoran Desert was just difficult country for the Spanish. He was far from Mexico City, and people who ventured here generally encountered less than friendly receptions from native people's And so the sowaro is often briefly described it's looped in with other cacti.

And there were plenty of Spanish botanists that were interested in the cacti of the Americas, but their work tended to focus on species outside of this far flung and difficult country. Now, coming back to the thana Aphem, there, of course natives of the Sonoran Desert, and they occupied these lands when Europeans first ventured there. They reside here still, though their lands in society were artificially divided by colonial influences.

So I'm going to be referring to an older work of scholarship, and I may fall into past tense a little bit talking about some of these practices, but I do want to stress at the top here that we're discussing the people who are still very much around and still very very active in the world, so they do not exist in the past tense. So obviously they have a lot of experience with the Suaro and it has

an important place in their culture. That University of Arizona book we've been referencing includes a paper titled the Annual Soarro Harvest and Crop Cycle of the Papago with reference to Ecology and Symbolism, and this was by Frank S. Cross White, which David Yetman explains. The title here uses a now outdated Spanish name for the thana Athham people.

They moved away from this title in a firmer sense about the same time that the paper came out, or maybe a little bit after, so it's a nineteen eighty paper, but the name issue aside, is still rather informative and is considered like a foundational work. So cross White wrote that the thana Apham were very connected with the environment, and their charting and perception of time is very much based and is in tune with the ebb and flow of the natural world, as you might expect, and as

far as the sowarrow is concerned for them. June is soorrow harvest month, the time during which they'd harvest, process, and eat the fruit of this mighty cactus. May is the month when soarrow's seeds are turning black in the developing fruit, the painful month that still invokes optimism for the coming harvest, and as early as March, rituals are performed and were performed to ensure a good harvest to follow.

Some of these rituals involved the grinding of soorrow seeds and placing the results in a basket with quote four pieces of rib from a soaro skeleton, one at each cardinal point. And then they're singing. There's divination and there

is a consumption of the seeds. And it's here that he connects this with He points out that he's uncertain if the basket was buried in this ritual, but he connects it possibly to a particular resurrection legend concerning the sowarro that I found quite beautiful and ties in with someone like the deeper mythic anthropomorphism involved with the soarro. So basically the story goes as follows. In this legend, you have a child and this child somehow sinks into

the ground. I don't know, they're like pulled into the ground, they fall into the ground, but at any rate, now they are underground. The child's is concerned, and she turns to the trickster coyote to help dig the child out. She's like, coyote, can come help me dig my child out. Coyote, of course, is a trickster spirit or deity pops up

in a number of different indigenous belief systems. So okay, Coyote agrees to help, but coyote secretly eats the child during the rescue operation and then gives the remaining bones to the child's mother and just tells her, Hey, someone must have eaten your son. This is all I could find. The mother is, of course heartbroken by this, and she asks coyote to bury the bones for her, and he does so, and from that burial spot the first sorrow arises.

passed a resolution to grant soarro's legal personhood. And also just there's a reminder, Arizona, under state law has it illegal to cut down, damage, or move a soarrow cactus without a permit, So they enjoy protection on multiple fronts within the region of what is now Arizona.

So let's come back to this harvest. So there's a lot of detail given in this paper about the harvest, what it historically entailed, and also how it changed a bit with the advent of technology and so forth. But historically it entailed setting up a camp, like a temporary camp among the suaro in the rocky foothills. So again, this is not an area where the people would be

staying year round. They would come here only for the harvest, and they'd have to bring everything they'd need to survive, including water from their winter camping locations that they had been at previously.

So they don't drink the water, they bring the water they have to bring all the water that they're going to use for their own consumption and for the processing of the fruit, which we'll get into.

of socialization and anticipation of the fruit harvest. So usually it eventually anyway, they'd use horses and wagons and still later trucks, but originally all this would be carried out on foot water to drink again water for cactus fruit preparation, dried jack rabbit beans, and then the author points out by the nineteen seventies you would have things like spaghetti and cold cuts, you know, whatever was more readily available, and the grinding stones and the poles that were important

for the harvesting and processing. These would remain at the site year round, so I think they would bury the stone and the poles would just be kind of like placed to the side, and also the olas, the ceramic pots that they'd use. I think they would also try and keep these on sites so they wouldn't have to drag these in, especially again in a time when they weren't using trucks or weren't even using horses and wagons.

pink pulpyness to it, and it's juicy. They would rip this open and then they would apply that red pulp to their heart, giving a prayer of thanks. So this like association between the fruit of the cactus and blood and the heart, you know, it's all rather striking, and it seems like other peoples surrounding peoples that would engage in some level of harvesting of the soaro fruit would

also have engage in a similar practice. Joe I included a photograph for you here various Photographs can be found online of the fruit of the soarrow being opened up. But yeah, you can see that it has a you know, it's fleshy. It looks like paint or red, and you see all those little tiny black seeds, which I'm to understand. The seeds have slightly oily taste, and the flesh is often described to you know, as you know, it sweet, and certainly once it's been processed, it takes on almost

like a raspberry jam kind of consistency. But it also can certainly be eaten like straight at harvest, to be eaten raw, and that is one way that it is enjoyed on site.

they were traditionally constructed out of sowaro ribs. Because remember, this is the Kingdom of the Suarrow, this is the forest of the Suaro. There's nothing if you're looking for tree branches or hanging around that are going to be long enough to use. I mean, there's nothing really out there as tall as the Solaro, So it makes sense to use the ribs of dead ones.

at a time during the harvest. They tend to be about twenty feet long, with a cross piece at the top of the pole that's used to hook the fruits. Cross white chairs that sometimes three ribs were used instead of two, and you know, obviously later on other materials end up being used as well if they become available, if they're brought in. But this is the traditional way, and this tradition is still practiced to this day. Now. As for the fruits themselves, Tucker describes them as a

true desert superfood full of minerals and antioxidants. But they don't last, so the bounty has to be either consumed raw on site, and apparently there's a lot of that, you know, I think I think it's She points out that the best ones you eat while you harvest, You pull down a really nice one, don't save it for process, and you just go ahead and eat it at that moment.

or vegetable or something like that. You know it might not be attractive in its whole form, but you can still turn it into some downstream processed product where you can't tell the difference.

it's the primary sweetener traditionally that they would have to take advantage of. The wine would be highly ceremonial and important, again tying into the the social, ritual community aspects of the harvest. But yeah, so the whole process involved initially like carving out that pulpy part of the fruit, boiling it, skimming debris, straining out the pulp and seeds, cooking this into a thick syrup that can you know, then be

used for various sweet purposes. Then water is added to the rest, which is fermented into the ceremonial wine, and then the ceremonial wine is later consumed, and then the seeds are used apparently for chicken feed, so like everything ends up being used for something.

as well. Yeah, and then like I said, it could be stored, you could use it throughout the winter, and Westerners who sampled it, they often compared it to something like raspberry jam. So just just super fascinating, Like you know, how it becomes this this you know, this the central like defining seasonal aspect of the society here.

interesting interesting to read about. Uh, if anyone out there listening has any connections, you know, closer connections to the practice, or certainly if we have any listeners of the that are you know, connected to the Autum tribe, certainly right in with any added details, we'd love to hear from you, please, yes, Now, before we close up this episode, I want to turn to another topic that I found really interesting that gets into the place that the sawaro has in the modern

world and a world that humans continue to change. So it's important to stress that while some trees in the world, some plants are are fire resistant, some cacti are fire resistant. The prickly pear is often thrown up. There's an example of this. You know, many trees depend on the cycles of wildfires, but the sowaro is not one of them.

They're highly susceptible to fire damage, and aspects of their Sonoran environment have seemingly protected them from widespread fire damage for quite a while, but this is changing due to human introduced factors. Oh interesting, yeppen at all point out that invasive grasses like red brome and buffal grass. I know buffal grass sounds super fun, but not outside of its original range. Red brome and buffal grass have greatly

enhanced fire threats to the sowaro. So red brome is of Mediterranean origin, likely spread to North America as a seed contaminant during the mid eighteen hundreds. It spreads, it pushes out local grasses, and once its seeds are set, it dries out and becomes this clump of fire hazard. Red brome can handle fire on its own, but not so many of the plants it thrives among in these

introduced environments in the Americas. The authors here point out that in moist Arizona deserts, range fires fueled primarily by red brome have destroyed just thousands of sworrows, among other native desert plants. Buffalo grass is African in origin and was intentionally injured introduced in the nineteen seventies by the US Department of Agriculture to improve cattle forage. And this

one forms dense clumps of clumps of grass. And when these dry out, you guessed it, they're kindling for range fires. And once more we have a case where the alien grass evolved it depends on annual fires, so it's not negatively impacted by blazes. But the same is not true of the native Sonoran vegetation. It's another case where the introduction of an alien species leads to short term gains for farmers ranchers and then long term ecological damage.

expansion of introduced invasive species. An ecological transition from desert scrub to grassland has begun, which creates management and societal challenges as fire becomes a part of the ecology of the Sonoran Desert.

for the last century and probably longer. I you know, as I'll bring up again here, there's there's not a lot of great historical evidence of past forest fires to really lean on here, but that's everyone's best guess. So for instance, in the last episode we mentioned lightning strikes

on Solorrows. Well, if it's such a strike were to produce fire, it would, at least with a historical situation, it would be far less life to spread to the next island of vegetation in this sort of sprawling archipelago of vegetation clumps. You know, so like here's kind of like one island of some cacti and desert plants, but then there's there's kind of like a natural barrier to a to a wildfire. There's like nothing between it and

the next area. And this would be like the sort of natural built in protection that these plants have adapted

to thrive in. I see. Yeah, yeah. So the authors here point out that the fire return intervals here are estimated to exceed one hundred to one thousand years, though again these models haven't been tested due to the lack of evidence for historical fires, but they really drive home the changes that have occurred and the changes that are continuing to occur in this region, thus requiring just an evolving counterfire protocol, like what we used to do just

won't work anymore, and you know, having to do things it would not have been necessarily necessary previously they were write. Quote. In addition to fires in desert valleys and flats, a new fire mosaic is being established in the region whereby wildfires driven by invasive grasses can spread from the forested mountains to the desert valleys and vice versa. Yikes. Yeah, so just again, you throw in these these invasive plants and they just begin to change things in such a

dramatic fashion. And we've talked about invasive desert plants before. We did episodes on the tumbleweed, which is itself despite the fact that it is in many ways as iconic as the suaros, like a symbol of the American desert, but it itself, it has its origins on another continent. It is, it is not a native species.

easily be thrown out of whack. There. On top of that, you still have the threat of habitat destruction. At the time of the riding, they indicated that most of the threat was further south in Mexico. Again, we've stressed like the various protections that are in place and have been successfully put in place in Arizona for a while. But again, you had that protection in place, it doesn't protect them from things like introducing an invasive grass for cattle that

ends up being a threat. And then they also point out that you end up having illegal trade in sorrow ribs for use in furniture. So it's important to note here that dead soarrows are also protected. So just because the plant's dead doesn't mean you have right to go out and start ripping it apart and taking the ribs away.

But since the ribs have been used in furniture and have this unique look, it ends up encouraging a poaching and killing trade where people are going out and acquiring these ribs in ways they shouldn't.

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