Sand and Scales
Sand and Scales
Nature bends time in the restoration of the Delhi Sand Dunes
Walking down a stretch of freshly harrowed sand, I was running my palm over the tops of California croton and buckwheat when I felt time shift.
I was 24 years old, following my falconry mentors and their Harris’s hawks across the Delhi Sand Dunes in Ontario in a search for jackrabbits. We stopped, crowding together in a circle to examine a tiny horned lizard.
I was 32 years old in Rialto, treading through the sand with a friend’s goshawk when a burrowing owl popped up at my feet, startling me for just a moment, my gasp quickly shifting into a smile.
I was 43 years old, walking a postage-stamp patch of sand surrounded by industrial buildings. I was flushing desert cottontails and keeping an eye on my red-tailed hawk who perched above. I stopped as a peregrine falcon lazily crossed the sky. I held my breath to watch, awed by a rarity that was becoming an increasingly more common sight.
I was also 52, walking a freshly harrowed path with the entire Rivers & Lands Conservancy team on our Angelus Block property, a 30-acre Delhi Sand Dunes restoration site. The Conservancy holds nearly 200 acres of Delhi Sand Dunes and there aren’t many more acres than that left. When I turned to gaze into a sliver of the view that remained unadulterated by industry, I felt four moments of awe across four decades fold and stack into a singular moment in the dunes.
Time isn’t just linear when you are in nature, it travels in perfect circles of cycles that stack atop each other, creating a deep well of mirrored memories. And if you stand in just the right spot, you can gaze into the richness of these depths and be in all those times at once. It’s bittersweet, but it’s also a gift.
We were at Angelus Block to collect California buckwheat seeds and seedlings that we could spread and transplant on this site and on our others. We were there to imagine what the Delhi Sand Dunes would look like restored to its natural state. We know that nothing can ever be completely restored, much a like a healed broken bone sometimes aches and a crowned tooth never quite feels right against your tongue, but we imagine all the same and get a little closer to our imaginings every year.
The Delhi Sand Dunes in Inland Southern California are a surprising ecosystem created by an intersection of wind events and geology. For thousands of years the Santa Ana Winds have scoured through the rocky Cajon Pass, depositing sand on the valley floor. Over time, the sand collected into dunes surrounded by chaparral and coastal sage scrub. And because there were dunes where no dunes should be, there were insects that evolved to live in this unique and isolated habitat.
I didn’t understand all of this until recent years. I just knew that the places I grew up hunting with my hawks were mostly gone. Now that I grasp the immensity of habitat loss, at least I can be a small part of preserving and restoring what’s left.
When I shook myself out of my reverie to be completely present, my leadership partner and I (we have co-executive directors) grabbed a shovel, a bucket of water and some pots. Then we scouted for tiny buckwheat seedlings. We exclaimed over each we found like it was an Easter egg hunt, except that the eggs were spontaneously and miraculously sprouting from sand. Look! Another. Oh there’s two more right there! I gingerly pressed the shovel into the sand, Nicole directing me to dig deep enough to get below the roots while she scooped the seedling into a pot. We were digging up our tenth or so plant when something attacked my boot and I squealed, loudly proclaiming my panic. Then I came to my senses and scooped up a large lizard in my gloved hands.
Across the dunes, focused on their own teamwork, the entire crew was staring at me. I called out an embarrassed, “It’s just a lizard.”
Nicole redirected my embarrassment asking, “How did you catch that?”
“It’s cold,” I said, because I could feel its chilly scales through the fabric gloves. “And it doesn’t have a tail.”
I must have sounded bereft because Nicole examined the area around us, commenting that she didn’t see a tail. But soon enough, she did see one and she lifted a five-inch tail from the sand. It was still wriggling.
I groaned and Nicole assured me it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t agree, but there was nothing to be done about it. So, we examined the lizard together. Her expertise is native plants. Mine is birds. So, it was a speculative identification. We agreed it wasn’t blocky enough to be an alligator lizard, that it didn’t have the markings of a side-blotched lizard and definitely wasn’t a fence lizard. Neither of us knowing what they looked like, we agreed it might be a whiptail. We took photos. I apologized to the lizard profusely, unsure how I had dislodged its tail, but feeling guilty all the same and released it in a dense patch of buckwheat.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Western whiptail before, but my herpetologist friends confirmed the identification of Aspidoscelis tigris by its tiger stripes. They also told me that our local subspecies is all female and reproduces through parthenogenesis. When I lived in Florida for a few years and collected invasive Indo-Pacific geckos for my vivarium, this aspect of the geckos had always fascinated me. How can the ability to lay eggs without external fertilization be anything short of magic?
My friend also confirmed that whiptails are indeed one of the species that will drop their still moving tail as a means of escape and diversion. “Yes, the tail will regrow, though it has lost a valuable supply of energy reserves and may lose social status as well,” he said.
Great. It’s bad enough that ex-boyfriends probably still accuse me of doing the same to them. Now there’s a lizard in the dunes who can say the same of me without a hint of exaggeration.
At noon, when it was time for Nicole and I get back to our desks, we pointed out two more whiptails, warmed up and scurrying for cover on our walk out. We talked about the impressive amount of restoration the stewardship group had already done, eliminating invasive plants that wove the sand together and bolstering the native buckwheat and telegraph weed. We examined the incredible amount of cottontail tracks across the now loose and more naturally moving sand. I told her that for a moment I had felt like I had gone back in time. I felt like I was home.
It's hard to advocate for a patch of sand. It’s hard to make people understand why construction should be halted for a federally endangered “fly” that lives in a habitat they see as barren. The Delhi Sand Dunes flower-loving fly gets a bad rap, but if it wasn’t for this unique insect found only in what’s left of the Delhi, there would be no dunes left. Yet, there is so much more in the dunes. It’s more than an insect that we know little about because it spends most of its life burrowed beneath the sand in its larval state. It’s a vibrant place if you look closely enough. (Especially if you don’t pay attention to where you dig in with a shovel.)
I know we cannot tread on the land and not have an impact, but I also know that this is true of all beings in nature. What matters, I hope, is whether we give as much as we take. We are trying to give back. In turn, the dunes are the last remnants of a habitat where thirty years of my most vibrant moments of awe could stack together and into a new moment that includes standing in the sand on a warm October morning, a whiptail lizard cradled in my hand. This I will happily I take.
I just wish I could give more. And I want to give moments like this to everyone.
xxR
EXERCISE
A Nature Biography
Remember when you were young and moments in nature spurred your curiosity and inspired you to think about what you could do when you grew up.? They made you think about where you might live and who you might become and more that what you might discover when you were finally set loose on the world.
I spent a summer at my family’s hunting camp in the woods of Pennsylvania when I only in third grade. Growing up in California, I had never been to the East Coast woods, but my grandfather flew across the country every summer to fly fish. In third grade, he took me with him. That was forty years ago and I still tell you with vivid picture in my head of porcupines, a hidden deer fawn, collecting tadpoles, catching fireflies, and tending an ant farm in a mason jar. I don’t know for sure that this moment changed what I was going to become or if it was just my family understanding who I already was and supporting it.
In my early teens, it was raising nestling birds the neighbors brought me. In my 20s it was working at the Raptor Center at UC Davis. In my 30’s it was six months in Australia. Granted, these are grand moments, but the small the ones matter too. They are an alligator lizard that I caught when I was 12, fed canned cat food too and promptly got bit so hard that to this day I have a deep respect for alligator lizards. They are the praying mantis I swatted flies for and hand-fed in my teens, blow away that something so alien would accept a gift and a connection with me.
What are your moments? A parent who taught you to look for the geese flying over? A childhood friend that terrified you with a frog? A family trip to a national park? We don’t think about it often enough, but there is a thread of indelible experiences in nature throughout our lives.
Starting from your earliest memory, make a list of the most impactful memories in nature you have had. List at least three but if you have more keep going. If you are so inclined, write a few paragraphs about the one that is most meaningful to you.
Are you surprised at how many nature moments you have already had? Do you feel more inclined to have some more? Are there young people in your life that you could help have these experiences too?