The Saguaro, Part 3

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the saguaro cactus of the Sonoran Desert.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with Part three
in our series on the Swaro cactus of the Sonoran Desert.
Now this is part three. This is a series where
this episode will make a lot more sense if you
go back and listen to the previous two episodes first,
but do briefly refresh. In the past couple of episodes,
we talked about the natural anthromorphism of the swarrow, We

(00:38):
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

(01:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yes, a couple of times? Yeah, Okay, so.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
You're out in sorrow country. They're all around, Yes, yes, yeah,
And I asked if you noticed the cacti making any
noticeable sounds. The main thing I was actually wondering was
do they creak like trees in a forest when the
wind blows. I couldn't get a very clear answer on that.
Some people kind of say they do, just googling, But

(01:33):
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

(01:56):
or high whistling sound, which is apparently caused by the
wind into flowing around its ribs and through its spines.
Sot a whistling cactus.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah, yeah, I wish I had thought to listen for this. Namely,
the soundscape that I remember is, you know, more like
the you know, we would hear the wind and the breeze, rather,
you know, the crunch of rocks and pebbles beneath one's feet,
that sort of thing. Bugs, insects, sometimes bees.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
I don't know if this is generally true about the desert,
but just from personal experience, I remember being in the
desert in the American Southwest was one of the quietest
places I ever remember being in nature. So I, you know,
did some hikes when we were in Big Ben National
Park in Texas, and that's a beautiful desert landscape, but

(02:48):
I remember it being quite striking. There were times when
I would like hike out and you know, the middle
of a trail out there'd be very hot and I
heard just like nothing. It was like more quiet than
I ever remember anything being anywhere outside.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
Yeah, there is a stillness and to it, for sure,
And you know, some of the hikes we were doing,
we were not that far from civilization and you could
you could see it. You could see like the housing
developments in the distance and so forth. But even then
there was still something secluded feeling about it. And some
of that might tie into some of the details about

(03:25):
the environment that we'll get to here in a bit.
Oh cool.

Speaker 3 (03:29):
So I know, later in today's episode, we wanted to
focus on human uses of the sorrow and its many products,
but before we get to that, I wanted to briefly
take a detour to look into a biological mystery about
the soorro and some atypical soorrow anatomy, and this concerns

(03:49):
what's known as the crystate or crested soorrow. So in
the first episode we talked a lot about the anthropomorphic
shape of the cactus. Who's got this straight column in
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

(04:12):
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

(04:35):
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

(04:56):
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

(05:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
Yeah, it's very impressive looking. It almost kind of takes
on a more of a coral appearance, or I guess
you could compare it to psychedelic art in some respects
as well.

Speaker 3 (05:37):
Yeah, a kind of wild, fractal radiating pattern. So interesting
historical fact, the first known photograph of a crested suarrow
comes from an unexpected place, not Arizona, but Chicago in
eighteen ninety three at the World's Columbian Exposition, also known

(05:59):
as the eighteen ninety three Chicago World's Fair, which we've
done whole episodes about in the past. So this was
a weird, fascinating historical event with lots of strange exhibits,
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.

(06:24):
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

(06:47):
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

(07:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
So yeah, yeah, I mean just the process of moving
it and trying to replant it as almost certain doom.
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,

(07:43):
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.

Speaker 3 (07:54):
So yeah, rip to that crested tomorrow.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
But I mean you can see they're like roped in place, really.

Speaker 3 (08:02):
Shackles around it. Yeah. But fortunately, despite the fact that
they are pretty rare, this was not the only one.
There are you know, hundreds or maybe thousands of these
things out there, and they are actually people who they
make it a hobby. They're like crested toorrow hunters. So
they go out hiking in touarrow country and try to

(08:23):
find and document the locations of known crested plants. And
we should note that suarrows are not the only species
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

(08:46):
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

(09:06):
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

(09:27):
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

(09:52):
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,

(10:14):
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

(10:35):
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?

Speaker 2 (10:54):
You know?

Speaker 3 (10:54):
What goes back one step from that. Peache argues that
the reason the fleet growth goes out of control is
due to a hormonal malfunction. So he thinks that the
growth batter, the original growth pattern is determined by like
a hormonal balance, and sometimes that hormonal control malfunctions. And

(11:15):
the reason he cites for thinking this is that the
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

(11:36):
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

(12:00):
actually branching to what looked like normal branches or central trunks.

Speaker 2 (12:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:07):
Yeah, so that's Peachey's theory. But again, from what I
can tell, experts still do not fully agree on the explanation.
So there remains something of a mystery about the crests.
But one thing that we do know is it's not
a fatal condition. So you know, you might think a
cactus like, oh, it's doing something very rare and strange

(12:29):
that's causing alterations of its growth. You might think, well,
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.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, they just kind of look like the zombies in
the Last of Us.

Speaker 3 (12:52):
Yes, yeah, yeah, the clickers. Yeah yeah, crest on the head. Now,
there's one more thing I wanted to mention. That was
you actually gave me the idea to look into this,
rob It's the so called soworrow boot. If you see
one of these things on its own, you might wonder

(13:13):
how does this come from a cactus. You might not
understand how it fits into cactus biology because it looks
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.

(13:39):
So they are a defense mechanism that forms in reaction
to tissue trauma that later can take on lives of
their own.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
And this is definitely something that you see a lot
when you walk among the soaro as you see this
tissue damage from and you see actual sites of birds'
nests in the cactus yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:59):
The way this works is many birds make nests in
the flesh of the swarow, for example, the HeLa woodpecker
or the gilded flicker. These birds will pick a spot
high up on the trunk or on a branch, and
they use their beaks to dig out a hollow in
the plant's flesh. So the souarro is tough, but these
birds they've got specialized tough beaks and they dig into

(14:22):
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

(14:44):
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

(15:06):
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

(15:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
However, the plant responds to this attack on its tissue
by the birds, so it can't stop the bird from
digging a hole in its side, but it reacts to
a hole being dug by forming this dense, hard layer
of what the authors call callous or scar tissue around
the inside surface of the cavity.

Speaker 2 (16:07):
So it's like, you know, the bird digs a.

Speaker 3 (16:09):
Hole in the cactus, and then all around the inner
skin of that hole, the cactus is like, I'm going
to make tough tissue now, you know. So this hard
or tough inner layer of woody flesh remains after the
bird leaves, and then it may be subsequently repurposed by
other wildlife, like another bird comes along, like an owl

(16:31):
or a kestrel and makes a nest in this vacated
sawarow boot. But then after the cactus itself dies, this
tough inner cavity remains as a kind of bark like
jug or bowl. And this is this is what we
end up calling the cactus boot. So the barkie boot

(16:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (17:14):
Yeah, not as boots, to be clear, but we call
them boots. I don't think anybody's wearing these on their feet,
but yeah, it's like it becomes a natural water reservoir.
By the way, the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, located near Tucson,
is excellent. I've been there a couple of times. It
is a museum, but you might think of it more

(17:37):
as a botanical garden in a way like it's mostly
outdoors and you're walking among the different plants. There's some
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,

(18:05):
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

(18:25):
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

(18:49):
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

(19:10):
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

(19:31):
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,

(19:52):
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

(20:14):
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

(20:37):
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.

(20:59):
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,

(21:21):
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

(21:43):
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

(22:05):
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

(22:27):
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,

(22:48):
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,

(23:11):
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

(23:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (23:48):
Interesting, so this creates some deep essential connection between humankind
and the sorrows, like the human being is at the
roots of the cactus.

Speaker 2 (23:58):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and so so this seems to like
tie in rather deeply for the fauna awthhum people, where
the sonarrows are connected to human ancestors there's a human
heritage at play, like in a sense they are people
or there is a connection to us. I don't know,

(24:18):
It's one of those things that you know, English language
may be struggles to put it exactly in the right
words that would be accurate. But I was reading that
in I believe twenty twenty one, the Fauna Awpham Nation
passed a resolution to grant soarro's legal personhood. And also
just there's a reminder, Arizona, under state law has it

(24:39):
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.

Speaker 3 (24:51):
Yeah, yet yet another reason not to go into the
desert shooting them, as we dissessed in part one.

Speaker 2 (24:57):
Absolutely, yeah, I mean I thought back on that story too,
Like when you consider the idea that the native inhabitants
of this area saw these cacti as being you know,
ancestors in a certain sense, you know, is having is
being so vitally connected with people, Like it makes it
even more offensive that somebody would go out and like

(25:18):
ram their car into one on purpose, or shoot it
on purpose and try to mess with it or drag
it to a World's Fair in chicag Right. Yes, yeah,
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

(25:38):
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,

(26:00):
including water from their winter camping locations that they had
been at previously.

Speaker 3 (26:05):
So I apologize if you already said this, But would
this be in the summertime, because that's when the main
fruiting is happening. Yes, yekay, yeah, so I imagine it's hot. Yeah, yeah,
it's hot. They have to make sure they have water,
because again we already touched on, you can't drink water
from the soaro, not at least not if you're trying

(26:26):
to avoid having disastrous vomiting and diarrhea in the desert.
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.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
Yeah, and it's also pointed out that one of the
big things about it too is this is a highly
social event, so sometimes you know they're timing it so
they're arriving just a little early, so there's a lot
of socialization and anticipation of the fruit harvest. So usually
it eventually anyway, they'd use horses and wagons and still

(27:02):
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

(27:25):
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

(27:46):
weren't using trucks or weren't even using horses and wagons.

Speaker 3 (27:50):
Right, So you'd store the tools of industry because it's
not practical or even necessary to take them back and.

Speaker 2 (27:55):
Forth, right and like apparently nobody's going to mess with them,
you know, for the most part. And it's also detailed
that there was like a fascinating ritual to it here
that also gets back to this human connection with the cactus.
Apparently each person involved in the harvest was supposed to
take the first fruit they harvested, open it up, and

(28:17):
I would describe before how it's like this like red
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

(28:38):
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,

(28:59):
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

(29:20):
can certainly be eaten like straight at harvest, to be
eaten raw, and that is one way that it is
enjoyed on site.

Speaker 3 (29:28):
But in some of the pictures you can see the seeds.
It's not like a few large seeds like you might
I don't know in watermelon or something. It's like swarming
with many smaller seeds, so it can look kind of
like ants.

Speaker 2 (29:42):
Yeah, yeah, a lot of seeds in there. Now, the
I mentioned the poles because again, these the fruit are
high up on the cactus, so how are you gonna
get those down. You're not bringing step ladders out, you're
not bringing scaffolding out. You climb, you can't really climb
the cactus, So what are you going to do? Well,
they had these poles and they were called I think

(30:04):
coupad is the word. And according to the National Park Service,
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

(30:25):
there as tall as the Solaro, So it makes sense
to use the ribs of dead ones.

Speaker 3 (30:31):
Makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
Yeah. Yeah, included a picture here for you to refer to, Joe,
but you people can find picks online. There's a Good
Trust for Public Land article from twenty twenty five detailing
the practice, leaning heavily on the multi generational knowledge of
Thana Atham Member A Nation member Tanisha Tucker, and the

(30:57):
article describes that these poles were lightweight, which is good
because you're going to be holding them up for hours
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

(31:19):
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

(31:41):
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.

Speaker 3 (31:56):
Oh yeah, I mean that makes sense with a lot
of you know, fruits and crops, right like yeah, like
a like a good crisp apple is great on its own.
If there's one that's not so good, that can be
apple sauce or apple juice or whatever.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
I always feel bad doing this harvesting strawberries, like recreational
strawberry harvesting, you know where you go out to the
strawberry farm and you pay them pick your own with
a bucket. I always feel bad if I eat a
really juicy one, like on the spot. I don't know,
because I guess I haven't paid for it yet either.
There's that, but but that is also the temptation, and
I think maybe it speaks to something deeper in us,

(32:29):
in our our fruit gathering past.

Speaker 3 (32:32):
Yeah, but I mean thinking about it these days, usually
when people talk about processed foods, there that's spoken with
a negative connotation because you're talking people are talking about
nutritional concerns about ultra processed foods or something. But I
would say, you know, across all different food traditions, in
a way, processed foods are a great way to make

(32:54):
use of less than ideal you know, pieces of fruit
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.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
Yeah. And also the key thing too here being that
it's something that will keep because the primary sowarow fruit
products end up being like a kind of a jelly
or syrup as well as candies and a ceremonial wine,
and the syrup slash jelly in particular, like that is
something that they can store away in earthenware containers, which

(33:30):
can then be buried or stored up on a like
a high beam or something, and this is something they
can continue to eat even through the winter months, and
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

(33:52):
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

(34:15):
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.

Speaker 3 (34:25):
Oh okay, yeah, I was actually just scoogling something on
the side because I remembered reading something about thal authum
use of the seeds, not just the pulp of the fruit,
but used of the seeds. I think like they could
be ground down and used in like a porridge or
something as well.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think, Yeah, there are multiple purposes
that are in play here. I've only highlighted some of
the key ones. And then at the same time, you know, birds, squirrels,
various organisms that we've mentioned. They're also trying to take
advantage of the fruit. So there's a lot of activity
around all of this. The jam crossway point shares with

(35:01):
their primary traditional sweetener, the wild honey, could sometimes be
acquired and this could sometimes be added to the syrup
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,

(35:23):
how it becomes this this you know, this the central
like defining seasonal aspect of the society here.

Speaker 3 (35:31):
Yeah, that that social celebration aspect is interesting, especially in
that what you were just talking about, in that it's
a it's a fruit harvest that is not purely like
work to store up things for later. Like you are,
you are celebrating and enjoying a lot of the fruits
right now in the moment of harvesting, but also gathering
stuff for later.

Speaker 2 (35:52):
Yeah, yeah, so so yeah. I just found it super
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,

(36:23):
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.

(36:45):
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

(37:05):
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

(37:27):
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

(37:52):
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

(38:13):
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

(38:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (38:51):
Now, I apologize if this just went over my head,
but what is the main mechanism that these grasses make
the fire more threating to the suaros? Is it just
the fact that they allow fire to spread in areas
where it wouldn't spread normally.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
Right, And then also we'll get into this in just
a second, but it also comes down to how it
in a broader sense, it disrupts the sort of natural
spacing that prevents wildfires from raging in the Sonoran desert. Okay, yeah,
So I was reading a bit about this on the
website of the Southwest Fire Science Consortium and they write, quote,

(39:29):
unprecedented large scale fires in recent years, especially in twenty
five and twenty twenty, have been driven by the exponential
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

(39:51):
the Sonoran Desert.

Speaker 3 (39:52):
Okay, so these invasive grasses and other invasive plants change
the spatial arrangement of fuel sources in the landscape exactly.

Speaker 2 (40:02):
So Traditionally, they point out, the Sonoran Desert is characterized
by quote an openness of inherent patchiness and vegetation. So
you have, you know, like I was saying, there's a
lot of life out there, and you know, you can
compare to the bottom of the sea or what have you.
You have large areas of bare ground between vegetation areas

(40:24):
which provide quote insufficient continuity of fuel for fire. And
this has seemingly protected the desert habitat here at least
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

(40:48):
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

(41:09):
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

(41:32):
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

(41:52):
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

(42:16):
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

(42:36):
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.

Speaker 3 (42:52):
It's funny that connection because the tumbleweed also plays an
interesting role in the spread of fire and like prairie
areas where it can be known as a fire break jumper,
where like, you know, a tumbleweed can catch fire and
then leap over fire breaks to you know, set flame
to new areas.

Speaker 2 (43:11):
Yeah yeah, so, uh yeah, I found this very fascinating. Now,
on top of this, this is not the only threat in
place yet. Men and all also point out that, of course,
climate change is a big one. We've touched on that already.
We've talked about how you know, despite the fact that
the Souarro is doing well, and you know it has
its its niche and is the you know, kind of

(43:32):
the king of the Sonoran Desert. At the same time,
you know it's it's sensitive, it can things can easily
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

(43:52):
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

(44:15):
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

(44:39):
and killing trade where people are going out and acquiring
these ribs in ways they shouldn't.

Speaker 3 (44:44):
Right, So if there's an active market for it, even
just created by dead ribs that have been scavenged, that
creates an incentive for poaching of live ones.

Speaker 2 (44:54):
Right, And you know I would I'm just guessing here.
I don't think they mentioned the sowarrow boot, but obviously
the Suarro boot is an interesting curio that is left
over from a dead sarrow, and I could see that
being impacted as well, certainly if there was some sort
of demand for those.

Speaker 3 (45:13):
And like the craft market, Yeah, we're all but I
think we're sort of coming to the end here. But
I've really enjoyed this look at Souorrow is something I
didn't really know much about it all going in. But
they are strange, beautiful, majestic human so so many things,
and there I didn't know how much I didn't know

(45:34):
about them.

Speaker 2 (45:35):
Yeah, I feel the same way. I mean, I've walked
among them and I've learned about them, you know, I've
read about them in the past, but I still discovered
things in the research here that were entirely new to me.
And so it's going to make the next time I
walk among the soaro even more rewarding. All right, then, yeah,
we're going to go and close it out. We're just
gonna go ahead and remind everyone out there that Stuff

(45:55):
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(46:17):
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Speaker 3 (46:24):
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Speaker 1 (46:46):
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