Jerome

Look deep, deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

Albert Einstein 1951

Visiting Jerome, AZ is a little bit of a culture shock. While it is also a desert in the southwest with different biomes, those biomes are clearly different than Corrales, NM.

After the flatlands of the river valley, the hills and mountains look familiar, but different.

Saguaro cactus are clearly different. These plants of the Sonoran desert abuptly disappear when grassland mesa views pop up in the foothills. For the geology buffs; when we climb onto the Colorado plateau via the Mongolian rim, the Saguaro vanish instantly.

There is a huge number of animals that rely on saguaro to produce shelter, just like cavity nesters need cottonwood trees. I had not expected to see a feral lovebird nesting in one, however.

This common plant is desert ironwood. However, any wood denser than water tends to be labelled as an ironwood, so I prefer the Spanish name; Palo fierro. This heavy wood is sought after for use as knife handles. Looking at the prices it fetches in the tourist trap shops in Sedona, I have trouble believing it is the same "rare and sought after desert ironwood" I'm seeing everywhere. Exotic woods is a strange trade to be in.

I have never seen this flower in New Mexico, but in the suburbs around Prescott, AZ it seems very prolific. It is a chuparosa and well liked by many birds.

The octotilo plant is very distinctive and only found cultivated in New Mexico. While not prolific, is is pretty easy to find in Arizona. While it looks and acts like a cactus, this plant is apparently related to blueberries?!

This tree is a Palo Verde. It has distinctive green trunks and branches that photosynthesize all year round. I have read a few studies looking into this using stable carbon analysis of "cortisol photosynthesis" and basically, no one is sure why this would be helpful.

Seeing leaves on plants growing in the desert is always odd, and many plants in the southwest are spiky. The oaks take this to another level. Oaks in New Mexico are high altitude species, found in the north of the state. There seems to be a wide variety of species of oaks in Arizona, most of their leaves are spiky and the acorns are tiny.

Looks are deceiving, however. This plant is a barberry and have small yellow flowers that are being well pollinated right now with butterflies, flies and bees.

In the high desert meadows around red rocks state park, there are actually many flowers about after the recent rain squalls, in site of the still pretty cold temperatures. This is a mock vervain, growing while but easily cultivated in containers.

The small lizards warm up fast and are locally abundant. These are not the fence lizards that are common in Corrales in the summer, but ornate tree lizards that have adapted to living in rock crevices in a local park, where there are practically no predators.

I found many in the center of busy shopping malls, but always near water sources like drip irrigation. This brave one is displaying to others nearby, when it wasn't dodging people's feet.

Near a spring in Jerome I happened to look up and see some very quiet mule deer, so many other animals are found where humans are kind enough to meet all their needs. Basically water, food and shelter.

This paper wasp is a different species that I find in Corrales, and looks a lot bigger. While still not as aggressive as legends suggest, I noticed they prefer holes in concrete, rather than producing the familiar paper nests.

In Arizona, the butterflies seem to prefer high altitude and solitude. There are still very few around gardens, but up on the mesas in the state parks they were very abundant (and still hard to get a good picture of). This one is a grey buck-eye.

We see many giant swallowtails in New Mexico in the summer. This one seems to be in the same family, but smaller, maybe a black swallowtail.

There is a whole bunch of stuff I could blog about on ladybugs, but most people already have. Some of the interesting bits are that they overwinter under logs in large swarms and are really to chase aphids as soon as the weather warms up.

Actually many insects in Arizona seem ready for spring, which seems early from a New Mexico point of view. This shield bug is already laying eggs on the Miller visitor center. The familiar red box elder bugs are already all over the surrounding leaf litter and mating.

I don't know which butterfly this larva is, some can overwinter, but those eggs must have been laid a while ago for this caterpillar to have grown so much. The spines and bright colors are warning predators to stay away.

This spiky, green stemmed plant is a canotia. It is also known as the crucification thorn, but then so are a bunch of other, unrelated, plants. There is something about the threat of excoriation that puts people in a religious frame of mind.

This plants looks similiar, but is unrelated. This is a male ephedra species that used to be used for it's stimulant properties commercially until recently.

This is a banana yucca, a common plant often grown in xeric landscapes.

This is a cultivated tree in Jerome that I think is a plum. Their blooms are all over the hillsides here right now. As a cultivated species they are definitely popular. Their blooms are so early though.

Jerome for a an odd little town that has reinvented itself from a mining town into a tourist attraction, successfully it seems. COVID has not dented it's growth much. It feels a lot like the town of Madrid, or maybe Silver City. Yet it is also so different. I guess travelling helps a person notice what they have at home more...