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Third in a four-day series
CANANEA, Sonora — Eduardo Hinojosa, monitoring and research coordinator for the Ajos-Bavispe National Forest and Wildlife Refuge’s San Pedro Basin project, squeezes through the barbed wire strands of a cattle fence, takes a couple of steps and pauses at the edge of a bank looking down over the San Pedro River.
At this secluded section of the river, just downstream from the village of Ejido San Pedro, about six miles south of where the north-flowing waterway crosses the U.S.-Mexico border into Arizona, the riverbank is richly vegetated with tall, sprawling cottonwoods and healthy patches of grass.
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The cattle fence, built three years ago by a state environmental agency with the blessing of the landowner, appears to be doing its job, Hinojosa said. Though a scattering of cowpies suggest an occasional breach, vegetation-munching bovines are, for the most part, being kept off the riverbank. In this way, the fence is helping to create a healthier riparian area that, among other benefits, serves as an inviting habitat for wildlife.
In fact, Hinojosa said, it was right in this area that, while on a river-mapping expedition toward the end of June, he first saw signs that beaver had returned to the Sonoran San Pedro.
The 24-year-old researcher, clad in a black baseball cap and Coronado National Memorial T-shirt, scrambles down a steep embankment to the narrow shoreline, turns and makes his way a few dozen yards up the muddy bank. He stops under a tree and points to a chewed-away patch of the trunk.
“That was the first sign we saw that made us think we might have a beaver,” he said.
Hinojosa knew the aquatic animal had not been seen on the Sonoran San Pedro since the degradation of the once-marshy waterway wiped them out more than 100 years ago. But he also knew beaver dams can help rehabilitate a river by raising water tables, increasing riparian vegetation, and slowing soil erosion. So when the chewed tree trunk was followed by more gnawed branches, two apparent beaver lodges, and finally, two sets of tracks, he got excited.
“When I saw the tracks, I was like, ‘Yeah! We’ve got beavers!’ ” he said.
Now Hinojosa and his fellow conservationists are debating whether they should share the news with the residents of Ejido San Pedro.
“We’re not sure if we should tell them,” he said. “There are a lot of people around here who just like to kill things.’
In a new survey of Cochise County residents conducted by the Herald/Review and the Cochise College Center for Economic Research, nearly three-quarters of respondents said they would be more willing to protect the San Pedro River in Arizona if efforts to conserve the river in Sonora were increased.
The fact is, conservation efforts in Sonora are already increasing.
At the governmental level, a five-member team working within the organization of the Ajos-Bavispe National Forest and Wildlife Refuge — a nearby federally protected mountain area — was formed earlier this year to augment existing state and local efforts at promoting ecological conservation in the San Pedro Basin.
Meanwhile, non-governmental organizations like The Nature Conservancy, Naturalia and Biodiversidad y Desarrollo Arm—nica (Biodiversity and Harmonic Development, or BiDA) have stepped up their efforts as well — perhaps most notably with the establishment last year of a 10,000-acre private reserve in the watershed area.
But there are serious challenges to the work of conservationists in the Sonoran San Pedro Basin. Unlike in Arizona, where the riparian area is owned and protected by the Bureau of Land Management, the river runs through Sonoran land long held by private ranchers and ejidos — the farming and ranching collectives born out of the land reforms of the Mexican revolution.
As a result, efforts to promote responsible use of the river often have to confront traditions that span generations and favor immediate economic return over sustainability. Even getting permission to access watershed land for environmental monitoring can be a challenge.
On the other hand, conservationists in Sonora are dealing with issues that, at least on the surface, seem less daunting than those faced by their Arizona counterparts. Rather than trying to mitigate the pressures of growth and development on the watershed’s finite capability to sustain it, they instead have to convince ranchers to build fences to keep their cattle out of the river, and persuade rural communities that beavers should be embraced rather than killed.
“Unlike on this side, where we’ve done a lot of development of the river and tapped into the water supply, they’re in a more natural state down there,” said Kim Hall, superintendent of the Coronado National Memorial, the U.S. sister organization of Ajos-Bavispe reserve.
“So while it puts them farther behind in a lot of ways, in terms of conservation, it also puts them farther ahead.”
Reaching out
The village of Ejido San Pedro is a cluster of several dozen small, cement and cinderblock houses that sit just a stone’s throw east of the river. Columns of smoke rising from back yards reveal the continuing use of outdoor kitchens in some homes, and only a fraction of households have a modern septic system, ecologists here say.
The village streets are unpaved, and when the river and its tributary washes fill with rushing rainwater, the dirt roads connecting Ejido San Pedro with the outside world are passable only with a four-wheel-drive vehicle.
Even so, said Luis Felipe Urias, assistant director of the Ajos-Bavispe reserve, the ejidos along the Sonoran San Pedro — Zapata, Zaragoza, Morelos and San Pedro — are still more developed and accessible than many in Mexico.
“The communities here are relatively well-connected, both in terms of technology for working the land and for daily life,” Urias said. “Vehicles are easy to obtain, and the people have household apparatuses like televisions and radios.”
Such connectivity, he said, gives the ejido members ready access to information — as well as exposure to an increasing number of TV and radio spots promoting environmental sustainability.
This may be why they have shown a certain willingness to listen to new ideas about resource management.
Even so, Hinojosa added, the ejido members, known as ejiditarios, can be a tough audience.
“You tell them, ‘It’s good to get your cattle out of the river, because then you’ll get more trees and that puts more water back into the system,’ ” he said. “But then you can see them thinking, ‘How the heck are trees going to put water back? Trees take water.’ ”
Furthermore, even when the concepts are understood, it can be hard for an ejiditario to make immediate sacrifices for the long-term ecological good.
“They understand that losing their grassland and water is a bad thing, but it’s difficult for them to take the steps to prevent it,” Hinojosa said. “They think, ‘I just know that I have to feed my family, and if that means I have to put my cattle in the river, then so be it.’ ”
Recovering land and trust
The Dodge 4x4 pickup carrying Urias and fellow ecologist Luis Portillo rumbles across a barren pasture of the Ejido Zaragoza at the southeastern headwaters of the San Pedro. A heavy rain that morning in the nearby Sierra de Ajos has sent water streaming chaotically across the gently sloping and virtually grass-free field, turning it into a muddy, sloppy mess.
Then the truck pulls up to a cattle fence at the edge of the pasture and a very different landscape unfolds. On the other side of the wire barrier, the pastureland is intersected by contoured rows of dirt piled 8 inches to 12 inches high and spaced about 50 feet apart. Healthy patches of grass fill the spaces between the rows, which direct the runoff into orderly channels running horizontally against the hillside. Cows roam the pasture, munching contentedly.
The dirt rows, Urias explained, serve to contain soil erosion, retain grass seed and allow for better absorption of rainwater into the ground. They were placed in the pasture — also part of the Ejido Zaragoza — as part of a soil and grassland recovery effort started in 2003 by the Mexican forestry service.
“It’s a simple and easy technique, but it returns good results,” Urias said.
To get to the pastures, the truck must first pass through a gate guarded by a stern-looking sentry and then navigate a long asphalt roadway dotted with piles of dirt — reportedly placed there to stop drug traffickers from using the road as an airstrip. The ejiditarios can be quite protective of their land and suspicious of outsiders who might seek to exploit it.
Thanks to some overly aggressive policies within his own agency, Urias said, such mistrust has been extended to conservationists here as well.
But now with new leadership, the Ajos-Bavispe reserve and its San Pedro Basin team are employing a more subtle approach, he said. Instead of lecturing the ejidatarios or advocating that their lands be converted into a federally protected reserve, they are helping the farmers and ranchers to improve sustainability without abandoning traditional ways of life.
“They have their customs and their practices, and they have their ways of farming and ranching,” Urias said. “The key has been to work with them, not against them, and to always keep them informed of what we’re doing. Basically, we are trying to focus on conservation without harming the work of the people in the basin.”
As a result, he said, conservationists are slowly regaining the confidence of the communities of the Sonoran San Pedro Basin — and gaining better access to the land and river in the process.
Safeguarding a ci/nega
About 30 miles northwest of the pastures at Ejido Zaragoza, just across the border from the backside of the Huachuca Mountains, another ambitious effort is under way to conserve watershed resources in the San Pedro basin.
In July 2005, The Nature Conservancy and its Mexican partner Naturalia purchased a 10,000-acre private ranch in an area known as Los Fresnos.
Along with another nonprofit partner, BiDA, they are converting the ranch into a private reserve to serve as a model for low-cost and low-tech grasslands and wetlands restoration.
What makes Rancho Los Fresnos unique, said Susan Anderson, The Nature Conservancy’s Northern Mexico program director, is the family that owned the property for more than 100 years understood sustainable ranching. As a result, the number of cattle on the land was always strictly controlled, and Rancho Los Fresnos became one of the last remaining large expanses of healthy native grassland in the region.
Since it took over the land, The Nature Conservancy, Naturalia and BiDA partnership has been constructing gabion dams as examples of how to fight erosion, stop the formation of washes and arroyos, and recover the landscape. And it has begun controlled burns at Los Fresnos to demonstrate their effectiveness in improving grassland and watershed conditions by eliminating invasive, water-hungry shrubs.
“We did the first prescribed burn in northern Mexico, and it was spectacular,” Anderson said. “People from the forestry agency, the wildlife agency and the municipality came, and they were all so impressed by it. Now the state wants to use Los Fresnos as a training ground for other burns.”
Rancho Los Fresnos also is home to the largest ci/nega, or desert marsh, remaining in the San Pedro watershed area. Fed by runoff from the Huachucas, the ci/nega feeds into the main stem of the San Pedro. The Nature Conservancy calls it the most ecologically important and best protected of the river’s freshwater sources.
“We did not buy Los Fresnos for any kind of water benefit for Sierra Vista,” Anderson insists. “This is a Mexico project.”
Still, with its protected ci/nega and programs to encourage sustainability in the Sonoran San Pedro Basin, the Rancho Los Fresnos preserve is indeed a benefit for the entire San Pedro River and all of those who depend on it.
Challenge and progress
The San Pedro River still faces many challenges in Sonora.
At the far southwestern end of the basin sits Cananea, home to 35,000 inhabitants and an inefficient sewer system. And while the town’s Grupo Mexico-owned copper mine shut down its water-intensive smelter during a labor strike in 1998, the mine still uses more water that it recharges into the system.
In 1992, the Mexican government rewrote the agrarian reform law so that ejidos could grant members individual titles to parcels of communal land, which they could then rent or sell. Significant portions of ejido land around the San Pedro have already been sold, while some ejiditarios have started leasing their wells to water-hungry Grupo Mexico.
As for the river itself, it has yet to achieve a perennial flow in Mexico. Even so, there are encouraging signs suggesting that watershed conservation is moving in the right direction south of the border.
The five-member San Pedro Basin team at the Ajos-Bavispe reserve has added new energy to the ongoing monitoring, recovery, and educational outreach work of groups like BiDA and the state conservation agency CEDES. And they are reporting slow but steady progress in promoting conservation to the ejiditarios and private landowners living along the riparian corridor.
Meanwhile, Rancho Los Fresnos is serving as both a model and a teaching platform for sustainable resource management in the region.
And the return of the beavers to the Sonoran San Pedro after a more than century-long absence is a particularly encouraging sign.
Flowing across boundaries
When Eduardo Hinojosa noticed the beaver marks on the tree trunk back at the end of June, he had just returned from a participating in a river-mapping project with the Upper San Pedro Partnership in Cochise County.
While working on the project, he met Holly Richter, a scientist from The Nature Conservancy, who told him how 15 beavers had been introduced into the Arizona end of the San Pedro between 1999 and 2002. The animals had since been spotted just 10 kilometers north of the border, she told him, but had yet to make an appearance in Mexico.
And so, as he was learning river-mapping techniques, Hinojosa also was learning to keep an eye out for beaver signs.
When he got back to Sonora, he put both skills to immediate use.
“We like to get up close and see what is happening with monitoring and research efforts on the American side,” said Elvira Rogero, director of the Ajos-Bavispe reserve. “And then we try to do the same on the Mexican side so that we can have similar standards.”
Richter said this type of information and skill sharing is crucial for ensuring the viability of the cross-border waterway.
“Here’s a river that flows across an international boundary with a small barbed wire fence going across it,” she said. “We have to think across the fence and we have to flow across boundaries. That’s what the river does, and certainly all the issues related to its management do as well.”
The goals of interconnectivity and cross-border cooperation are clearly on the minds of the 73.7 percent of water survey respondents who want to see conservation of the San Pedro River on both sides of the border.
And they are vividly exemplified by the beavers who, after being introduced in the Arizonan San Pedro to help improve riparian conditions here, have now swum across the border and gone to work in Sonora.
Some of the groups working to promote conservation in the Sonoran San Pedro Basin
Government affiliated organizations:
-- The Ajos-Bavispe National Forest and Wildlife Refuge, a part of the National Commission of Protected Natural Areas, or CONANP.
-- Connected to the Ajos-Bavispe reserve is a five-member team focusing on conservation in the San Pedro River Basin. The team, formed in 2006, operates within the infrastructure of COANANP with funding from a national-level NGO, Fondo Mexicano.
-- The federal forestry agency CONAFOR
-- The state conservation agency CEDES
-- The municipal governments of Naco and Cananea
Non-governmental organizations:
-- Biodiversity and Harmonic Development, or BiDA
-- Naturalia
-- The Nature Conservancy, Northern Mexico Program
-- Various farmer and rancher organizations
Herald/Review reporter Jonathan Clark can be reached at 515-4693 or by e-mail at jonathan.clark@bisbeereview.net.
Ezai I. Martinez wrote on Jun 24, 2009 7:58 PM: