00:00:01 Speaker 1: Where the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, the Colorado Plateau, and the southwestern deserts converged to create New Mexico. There is more ecological variety than in any interior Western state. 00:00:15 Speaker 2: I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American. 00:00:18 Speaker 1: West, understanding nature in a southwestern state. In the first fifteen years of the two thousands, I spent part of my time in Montana, part in New Mexico. That experience drove home a fact of modern Western life I'd never considered, namely, how little inhabitants of any part of the West often know about the rest of their region. And a West settled relatively recently by Americans who came here from other places. I know this has something to do with the Western settlement patterns geographers have long studied. One of their insights is that as the West was settled in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, settlers almost always moved west along the same latitude lines where they had started. Texas and the Southwest were largely settled by people moving westward from the South. Colorado and Utah got peopled by Midwesterners from Missouri and Illinois, and the northern West. The Dakotas across Montana on to Oregon and Washington by people who started out in New England or around the Great Lakes. When the dust Bowl of the nineteen thirties launched millions of Oklahomas and Kansas on their migration west, their primary destination, naturally enough, southern California. Understanding the wider West obviously involves travel. It's a big place, but even tourists travel often follows those same latitude lines. Today, when Minnesota's travel west, they commonly go to Glacier National Park, are onto Washington State. Chicagoans travel to Yellowstone. Texans go to Santa Fe or Grand Canyon National Park, or they golf in Arizona. Obviously, the snowbird phenomenon has changed at migration patterns, some bringing Midwesterners south to states like Arizona for the winters. But I think those classic latitudinal patterns explain at least some of the strange lack of familiarity with other parts of the West. I found among both Southwesterners and residents of the Northern Rockies during my time in those two places. 00:02:56 Speaker 2: Told that I live. 00:02:57 Speaker 1: Part of the year outside Missoula, Montana. For example, West Texans and even New Mexicans were incredulous. How do you stand living all winter at forty below zero? For Montanas? That worked in perfect reverse. You go to Santa Fe for the summers, how can you stand that one hundred and twenty five degree heat. I never developed a good comeback about Montana, except to observe lamely that other Montanas often called Missoula and the Bitterroot Valley the Banana Belt. Over time, I did work out a fair one about Santa Fe. Though, so Denver is the mile high city and it snows there, right Santa Fe sits even closer to the rocky mountains than Denver does, and it's a half mile higher up. 00:03:44 Speaker 2: You figure it out. 00:03:46 Speaker 1: The looks I got were still and comprehending, though like I was arguing that the Sahara wasn't a desert. The Southwest struck me then and still does as the part of the West that seems most alien to Americans from elsewhere, even other Westerners with reputations for their green forested mountains and ski weather winter snows. Interior West states like Colorado and Utah, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho seem easy places to picture in the mine for most Americans living outside the West, but the Southwest, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada presents a different world to the national consciousness. The irresistible proclivity for national sports announcers to label any sporting event taking place in Arizona as being played down in the desert conveys to me at least a continuing national cinema that the imagined Southwest still falls outside the American norm. So let me take a stab at familiarizing the American West's audience with the part of the Southwest I know best the state of New Mexico and the story I've studied there, which is the discovery of the state's wildlife ecology. 00:05:09 Speaker 2: If you struggle to exactly place. 00:05:11 Speaker 1: It, New Mexico is that slice of the West situated directly below mountainous Colorado. It's the western state sandwich between the flatlands of Texas and the arid Colorado Plateau and Suaro deserts of Arizona. The Rocky Mountains extend down into New Mexico, and so do the slick rock canyons of the Colorado Plateau. 00:05:36 Speaker 2: The whole eastern. 00:05:37 Speaker 1: Third of New Mexico, though lies in the Great plains, and the entire southwestern quadrant of it is true desert, although a different desert the Chihuahuan than the ones found in either Arizona or Nevada, and New Mexico happens to be the part of the West with the oldest continuous human history In Santa Fe, founded in sixteen ten, it has the oldest European town anywhere in the West. Turns out, it's an easy thing to pick out the human beginnings of understanding nature in New Mexico. A great many millennia before today's White Sands National Monument down in the southern part of the state ever existed, a young woman who sometimes carried a child on her hip, walked barefoot along a muddy lake shore among the white sand dunes, and encountered a giant ground sloth, which reared back in alarm. We know this because the footprints from that ancient close encounter, excavated by a park service employee in twenty nineteen, had crushed grass seeds below them that radiocarbon dated to twenty three thousand years ago. That date is prior to the glacial maximum of the Wisconsin Ice Age, and it's the oldest evidence for humans anywhere in North America. The human and sloth prints weren't the extent of it either. Mammoths and dire wolves also crossed the tracks this young woman left. Ten thousand years after that, the hunting culture we've named Clovis left their spear points in the remains of multiple now to us vanished mammoths near what would become one day New Mexico's High Plains town carrying the Clovis name. There's believable evidence that the Clovis people had a significant effect on the Africa like wildlife that covered the West down to about ten thousand years ago, much of which went extinct by that time. In contrast to these Paleolithic hunters, however, subsequent native peoples in New Mexico affected a wildlife management of the area that preserved its biological divers for ten millennia down to the arrival of Old worlders. When Spaniards and Americans did arrive, travelers like Francisco Coronado, Albert Pike, George Ruxton, and Josiah Gregg, and especially William Emery of the Mexican Boundary Survey left us accounts of New Mexico when its mountains brimmed with flocks of big horned sheep and beaver down pools, and its planes were a kind of American version of the Serengetti or Massai Mara, with grizzlies, wolf packs, spotted jaguars, and jackal like coyotes trailing vast herds of bison, elk, and pronghorns. During New Mexico's brief time as part of the Republic of Mexico, New Mexicans even tried to halt the eradication of its beavers by American fur traders. The first real chance for the scientific study of the mammals, birds, and reptiles in New Mexico and the Southwest came after the Mexican War, when the far Southwest became part of the United States. There were several expeditions led by explorers called the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, and there were also parties surveying routes for a railroad line. 00:09:23 Speaker 2: To the Pacific Coast. 00:09:25 Speaker 1: Some of the topographical engineers like John Charles Fremont, for example, who became such a celebrity that in eighteen fifty six he got the New Republican Party's nomination to be its first presidential candidate became cultural stars in America from these expeditions, but as is the fate of most scientists, history has forgotten most of the naturalists who wrote about America's animals when they were novel to discovery. The most notable of these many expeditions was the Mexican Boundary Survey, which laid out a new un boundary. After the treaty ending the war forced Mexico to seede its northern territories. 00:10:06 Speaker 2: To the United States. 00:10:08 Speaker 1: Exploring that line fell to William Emery, one of the founders of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, with a young New Yorker named Spencer Baird as his assistant. Soon to be a nationalist of legendary proportion, Baird, as a teen had wanted to go west with Autubon, but his parents had demurred because of the dangers. Emory was himself an excellent field nationalist to send to the Southwest during the war. He accompanied the American Armies push from New Mexico to California, and had already added several species of desert cacti to science, including giant souaros, along with visiting ruins like Shacko, whose antiquity he suspected went back into America's deep past. 00:10:58 Speaker 2: But this was the eighteen fifties. 00:11:01 Speaker 1: Red Whiskered Emory was also a Maryland slaveholder whose closest boyhood friend was Jefferson Davis, soon to be President of the Confederacy. So when he got west this time, his time and background led him to an odd lack of appreciation about how Spanish settlers and local Indians had interacted with Western wildlife. That wild animals were still abundant around towns in the Southwest appeared certain proof to Emory of Hispanic what he called indolence and incapacity evidently has said something laudatory that back home Americans would never suffer animals within reach to survive like that. A half century after Jefferson had aimed his second major expiration at the Southwest, Emory's survey from Texas to California at last got to illuminate the animals and birds of the western deserts. This was an exotic part of North America, with a mix of familiar creatures in combination with several Central American species at the northern limits of their ranges. White tailed deer inhabited the southwest in vast numbers, and the mule deer Lewis and Clark had found also ranged widely across this region. Beavers yet dammed up the streams and shy and comparatively rare desert. Big horn sheet looked down from the canyon rims. Prairie dogs and pronghorns populated the flats, and coyotes Emory had already borrowed the Southwestern name for them, became camp followers, stealing food and snatching gear. Grizzlies were present, but Emory couldn't decide if those in the interior were the same as the bears on the coast, which were much larger. 00:12:53 Speaker 2: There were two. 00:12:53 Speaker 1: Different wolves, the red Texan wolf eastward and farther west, a gray wolf. This this was a new animal, the Mexican wolf, but scientists wouldn't recognize that for another fifty years. The unfamiliar creatures were especially intriguing. Particularly impressive and numerous were the big cats. As Bear described it. A vast number of pumas and jaguars were preying on wildlife and on the immense herds of wild horses and wild cattle, known to Spanish settlers as l tigre and to most Americans as. 00:13:28 Speaker 2: Tigers or leopards. 00:13:30 Speaker 1: Jaguars hunted the jungles of the Americas as far south as Argentina, but their northern range clearly extended into open country in North America. Francisco Carnado's early fifteen forties expiration into the Southwest had mentioned leopards, and mountain man Rufus Sage claimed to have seen such an animal on the headwaters of the North Platte in today's Colorado, Jaguars apparently were common predators of deer and wild horses, and comanches and other tribes even used jaguar hides decoratively. In Emory's report, jaguars were on the outskirts of Santa Fe at some point. 00:14:13 Speaker 2: As he worked on his. 00:14:14 Speaker 1: Survey, he discovered a literary source describing a frightening morning in eighteen twenty five in what he assumed was New Mexico's capital. A massive flood in the nearby Rio Bravo, the name for the real Grand for many people had driven out wildlife, and on opening the church, a lay brother found himself face to face with a jaguar of very extraordinary size. The big cat killed four clerics before survivors drilled a hole through a church door large enough for a rifle barrel. Jaguars would turn up in the Southern Rockies for decades to come, no question, so their presence in the area was not a miss, but the story Emory included actually referred to an incident in Santa Fe, Argentina, on the Rio Parana Bravo. Other creatures reflected a different West than Montana or even California. Emery's people saw swine like collared peckreas the southwestern Desert's native Halinas, another creature of the southern latitudes. At the northern limits of its range, they collected a bizarrely armored South American immigrant called the armadillo, exclusive to the Americas and distantly related to anteaters and ground slaws. They reported a remarkable variety of reptiles, particularly snakes and lizards, of which the most impressive were chuck Wallace. 00:15:43 Speaker 2: They acquired the first. 00:15:44 Speaker 1: Specimen and included an illustration in the report of the remarkable Heela monster, although taxonomists in Washington misidentified it and didn't realize it had a venomous bite. 00:15:55 Speaker 2: The bird life was. 00:15:57 Speaker 1: Prodigious among the more intriguing were what they called chaparral cox, the big cuckoos known as road runners. The fierce fleet road runner was a great enemy of the rattlesnake, they said, taking them in pitched battles, it usually won. And they found the so called Mexican eagle, the outsized falcon known as the carocera, extremely numerous, from the Rio Grande to the Sierra Madre. By the time all the identifications were in the Mexican Boundary Survey added a total of three hundred eleven new mammals, birds, and reptiles to America's list of native animal life. Another relatable time for early New Mexico's wildlife story is probably a century ago, when Vernon Bailey and his wife Laurence Miriam Bailey began to analyze New Mexico's biological riches and ecologies. They were followed to New Mexico a few years later by another scientist, Aldo Leopold, who rearranged the furniture in all our heads with respect to wildlife. Joining those three was the popular wildlife arthur Ernest Thompson, seton writing from Santa Fe setan penned heartbrending stories of New Mexico animals such as Tito, the female coyote, who allegorically taught coyotes how to avoid extermination, and the ratone area wolf Lobo, king of Corumpau, who possessed one fatal flaw his fidelity to his mate. 00:17:32 Speaker 2: It got him killed. 00:17:34 Speaker 1: Setan's literary theme, we and the Beasts are kin no doubt resonated with the native people of New Mexico. What Vernon and Florence Bailey, Aldo Leopold and Ernest Thompson Setan provided all of us living in the West since was simple but crucial in effect, how to understand a state like New Mexico and its wildlife story by virtue of its location on the continent. New Mexico is a Western state that possesses a riot of diverse ecologies, with more native mammal species one hundred and fifty one than any other state except California. But a century ago, it's diversity struck many observers as almost chaotic. The Baileys were essential in changing that perception. Vernon was a slight out eyed, chinless farm boy from Minnesota with seven years of education and churchy enough that until his twenties he had never even heard of Charles Darwin. He was a teetotaler his entire life, and a man as other scientists Marvel who never let fly even a mild curse. But he was such a whiz at catching animals and preserving them as specimens that he became the right hand man to Clinton H. Merriam, who, in the eighteen nineties was established the new federal agency called the Biological Survey, which became the US Fish. 00:19:06 Speaker 2: And Wildlife Service. 00:19:07 Speaker 1: Miriam's younger sister, Florence, seemed the unlikeliest imaginable partner for Bailey. She was a graduate of Smith College who'd originally planned a thesis on Darwinian evolution. But one of the environmental crises of a century ago was the destruction of birds for hats and fashion, and that diverted Florence towards writing about birds their steep decline and preservation. By the start of the twentieth century, she had also discovered Arizona and New Mexico, where as she said, the climate is wonderful. Their pairing raised eyebrows, but Florence and Vernon Bailey married in eighteen ninety nine and in nineteen hundred struck out on a camping trip across Texas and New Mexico for their honeymoon. It was a part of America that left an altogether different impression than the East. We felt everywhere in New Mexico that, while to us the country was new, in fact this land of Poco t Info is an old, old land. She wrote, very perceptive of Florence. What Vernon was working on for New Mexico was a brand new idea designed to make sense of wildlife distribution. Why were animals found in some locations but not others? Bailey and his boss Seehart Miriam believed they knew, and they pioneered a model called life zones. While Bailey is often remembered today for the role he played in designing and defending wolf eradication in the West, he left New Mexico a remarkable baseline record for wildlife in a territory where elevation ranged from twenty eight hundred feet to more than thirteen thousand feet atop its highest point, Wheeler Peak, near Taos, Bailey mapped out six life zones for plants and animals. He named them the Lower Sonoran, the Upper Sonoran, the Transition, the Canadian, the Hudsonian and the Arctic Alpine. In a nineteen thirteen monograph published in North American Fauna, he described the existing species compositions of all six of those zones in the brand new state of New Mexico and made its wildlife distribution newly intelligible. Taxonomists also credit him with realizing that our now endangered Mexican gray wolf was different from other wolves, which is why its Latin binomial carries Bailey's name. Florence Bailey's contribution was to fashion a similar baseline for New Mexico's birds. Her Birds of New Mexico was the first close study of the birds of an interior American state. Along with writing the first ever field guide for western birds in general, she added a whopping ninety four new species of birds to the ornithological list for New Mexico and the Southwest. Seton and the Baileys were experiencing New Mexico at a time when market hunting excesses were destroying numerous species that had anciently evolved in America. An industrial hunt for high leather eradicated bison on the southern plains in the eighteen seventies, sacrificing billions of animals native peoples in New Mexico had depended on for ten thousand years. Hispanic New Mexicans, called Sibal arrows, had long made pilgrimages themselves to the planes from Santa Fe and towns, and as expert horsemen had hunted bison with lances, hauling the meat and pelts back to their real grand towns and creaking two wheeled wooden carts. But by eighteen seventy five, a decade before they disappeared from Montana, bison were extinguished in plains New Mexico. Their destruction had barely taken ten years, and that was just the beginning. Exploring the Pecos river headwaters in the southern Rockies of New Mexico in eighteen eighty two and eighty three, naturalists Lewis Disch found no big horn sheep left, no elk in the country except a rare and occasional straggler, he wrote, and he neither saw wolves nor heard one. Howel he did see what he called a herd of eleven grizzly bears traversing Hamilton Mesa in the high rockies above Santa Fe, New Mexico, made an effort to save some of these animals, but following inherited fo traditions from the Old World, the state concerned itself largely with the ones called game birds and mammals people wanted to hunt. There was little appreciation for non game or even for native species that had evolved in the southwest. New Mexico Territory created its first bounty system for predators in eighteen ninety three. That list of money for scalps included wolves, coyotes, bears, lions, and bobcats. State sponsored exotic species introductions of animals like ibex Oryx and our dads particularly became a specialty of the New Mexico Game Agency. At least the new National Forests and other public lands the US federal government was setting aside in New Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century did continue to preserve wildlife habitat for future animal recoveries. When America's giant step lions and saber toothed cats had died out in the Pleistocene extinctions, jaguars had assumed the mantle of North America's most imposing big cat, with a range that stretched through most of South America. Jaguars were at the northernmost limits of their range in the southern US. Leopard like in appearance, but heavier and more muscular. Male jaguars can weigh more than three hundred pounds. In the early twentieth century, the great cats still had established territories and were breeding in New Mexico and Arizona, so this northern range was not merely a place the occasional male jaguar roamed into. Among more than sixty historical records of jaguars in the Southwest from eighteen eighty to nineteen ninety five, females and kittens are well represented. North American jaguars den and hunted in deserts, oak foothills, pinions, juniper and Ponderosa pine forests countries, strikingly unlike their jungle habitats to the south. Such open train made them vulnerable to human eyes, though especially the eyes of stock raisers and the bounty and government hunters employed to protect cows. 00:26:20 Speaker 2: In the early twentieth. 00:26:21 Speaker 1: Century, Aware that jaguars were declining, Vernon Bailey collected as many accounts of jaguars as he could find. 00:26:30 Speaker 2: From them, he concluded that the Black. 00:26:32 Speaker 1: Range in the center of New Mexico had long been jaguar territory. A bounty hunter had killed jaguars in that range of choppy vertical ridges in nineteen hundred and again in nineteen oh two, and Bailey collected several other accounts from there. Other New Mexico ranges, the Sambre de Cristo's the Southern Rockies, in other words, the Sacramentos and the San Andres also held jaguars, and into the nineteen twenties ranchers were still shooting them. There were accounts of jaguars nearly to Colorado, as well as out on the Great Plans. Arizona, where settlers reported jaguars from Saint Gray's Muggy owned Rim Country to the Grand Canyon, had a similar jaguar record. The Biological Survey's first recorded jaguar kill was there a Federal hunter shot at jaguar in Arizona's Santa Rita Mountains in nineteen eighteen. The Bureau's operatives in Arizona had few doubts about the sources of the jaguar threat, as they called it. Its position was this, and I'm quoting, all lobo wolves and jaguars will be taken as fast as they enter this state from Mexico and New Mexico, as one hundred percent of them live on livestock and game. The Bureau recorded five such renegades crossing into a supposedly jaguar free Arizona from nineteen twenty four tonight ten twenty seven. Two of those were females, all ended up killed. Jaguars were still dying at human hands even on the Gulf coast of Texas as late as the nineteen forties. In the first half of the twentieth century, another legendary figure, ecologist Aldo Leopold, spent enough time in New Mexico to shape future wildlife policy, both there and more broadly. Stationed in the territory first to manage one of its new national forests, Leopold met his future wife, Estella Bergier in Santa Fe. 00:28:42 Speaker 2: He went on to study. 00:28:44 Speaker 1: A new phenomenon called game eruptions, the unchecked growth then spectacular crash of populations of mule, deer, elk, and other ungulates that followed Americas and New Mexico's eradication of predators on behalf of the livestock industry. Leopold found almost no record of eruptions before nineteen hundred but he tracked a whopping forty two of them between nineteen hundred and nineteen forty five. His work and the growing significance of ecological science slowly began to produce an appreciation for non game, even for wolves, lions, and New Mexico's unofficial state animal, the coyote. The nineteen seventy six listing of the Mexican gray wolf and its later recovery plan under the New Endangered Species Act was an extension of Leopold's work in New Mexico. Ending coyote hunting contest on state lands in New Mexico was another, while Vernon Bailey's century old life zones model continues to have some relevance in understanding New Mexico wildlife. The science of a cology, with its emphasis today on interactive communities known as ecosystems, and subsequent work in mapping ecoregions, has advanced our understanding of whyde diverse New Mexico once seemed chaotic. In a state split by the continental divide, and where the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado Plateau, and the Southwestern deserts all converge, ecological diversity is enormous. At a fine grain level of mapping, the state features eight principal ecoregions, such as the southwestern tablelands, for example, divided into an absolutely astonishing fifty five ecological subsets like the Pinon juniper woodlands. Add in, the deep time historical dimension and the special qualities of a place like New Mexico stand evident. Twenty thousand years ago, Wisconsin ice age brought northern species like sheep and marmots far south. Then massive heat events like the Alta thermal of eight thousand to five thousand years ago expanded southern and desert species northward. When Vernon Bailey was in New Mexico seeking out remnant bighorn sheep, he discovered that in New Mexico, jaguars at the extreme northern end of a range that stretched down through the Americas, were hunting rocky Mountain bighorn sheep at the southern end of an alpine habitat extending far northward up the mountain chain to Alaska. Not many places on the continent can make a claim like that. 00:31:54 Speaker 2: Today. 00:31:54 Speaker 1: Mexican wolves, which we reduce to such tiny numbers that they now struggle with suffici. This genetic diversity to survive. Are the southwest most famous endangered animals, but a state is varied, as New Mexico has many more, sixty four of them in all. If New Mexico hopes to preserve the full suite of the animals that were originally here, it will have to save Mexican spotted owls, northern applemato falcons, Southwestern willow flycatchers, kila trout, blackfooted ferrets, meadow jumping mice, and ridge nosed rattlesnakes, among many others. The state today is working on all that. New Mexico's State Wildlife Action Plan is designing strategies now to conserve what it calls species of greatest conservation need, along with their habitats to confront human cause climate change that threatens to make an already arid state a drier and hotter version of itself. Anticipating and protecting connectivity quarters so that species able to relocate can to new habitats is part of that plan, so is preserving as much genetic diversity as we can. The state's fixed polestar is and it ought to be a future where we return as many of those original New Mexico species to the state as possible, and that includes jaguars not officially listed as a US endangered species until nineteen ninety seven. Jaguars only acquired a recovery plan in the United States in twenty eighteen. As with gray wolves, jaguar recovery depends on the nations bordering the US having preserved the big animals better than we have. The truth is that the Fish and Wildlife's twenty eighteen plan offers pretty faint hope for the return of lt gray encourage that seven male jaguars have ventured into the US since nineteen ninety six. The architects of the recovery plan didn't end vision a hard release of captive jaguars, as we have. 00:34:04 Speaker 2: Done with gray wolves. 00:34:06 Speaker 1: Their hope instead was that the cats will reoccupy their former range via two different quarridors that could connect populations in Mexico to Arizona and New Mexico. The problem is that those jaguar migration corridors reached the US exactly where our country has been erecting its border wall against human migrants. The twenty eighteen jaguar recovery proposal is a forty year proposition with delisting happening only in the event that our breeding population of female. 00:34:41 Speaker 2: Cats arrives here. 00:34:44 Speaker 1: But if we really want to restore jaguars, we're going to have to revisit that plan, and two prominent environmental groups have already done so. The Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife have counterproposed a three hundred and twenty nine square mile recovery area in New Mexico and Arizona that significantly overlaps the Mexican Wolf recovery zone. What they call for is a hard release of a dozen jaguars, as we've done with gray wolves and Yellowstone New Mexico and Arizona and now Colorado, to began recovery in an area that could eventually support one hundred to one hundred and fifty of the southwest original big felines. As for me, I'll admit I want to see muscular jaguars once again pursuing big horn sheep in the New Mexico Rockies, and if I don't get to see it, I at least want to look up at the snowcap peaks out my front door and imagine that such a spectacle will play out in the future. Arizona accepted. No other Western state than New Mexico is likely to see that kind of natural marble. 00:36:01 Speaker 3: All right, Dan, In this episode, I think that you begin at some point by talking about how most Americans imaginations sort of failed to fully comprehend the diversity of landscape and culture that is New Mexico. Yeah, and I'm wondering if that's a branding problem. We didn't go with southern Colorado or eastern California. You know, people just for whatever reason, people New Mexico. It just brings to mind a certain image and that's it. This is obviously not a serious question, but. 00:36:39 Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I think there are parts of the West that are readily accessible to people. I mean, Yellowstone comes to mind, Yosemite National Park in California, you know, Glacier. There are places that large numbers of people have been appear in calendar photographs, that appear in documentaries that you see on television, and so you know about those. I think that there are very definitely places like you mentioned eastern California. You know, hardly anybody knows much about that part of the world unless you travel through it. I mean, I would say eastern Washington and eastern Oregon, almost fall into that same category, because what everybody knows about when they imagine Oregon or Washington State, they always imagine the coastal parks. 00:37:36 Speaker 2: They imagine Seattle and Portland. 00:37:38 Speaker 1: And Eugene and all the wetter, greener part that's closer to the Pacific. I think New Mexico, and I sort of feel this about the whole Southwest. It plays a kind of an exotic role in American life because that part of the country is so unlike much of the rest, even of the West. 00:38:04 Speaker 2: I think we can people who grew. 00:38:07 Speaker 1: Up in New England or in the Great Lakes Country, you know, you can imagine Yellowstone, the Montana Rockies, the Grand Tetons, you can imagine all that, because it's not hugely dissimilar from the green and better watered world that you're familiar with. But that really arid, desert like country in the Southwest, I think it is, you know, and I'm one of the things I've laughed about a lot and watching sports is the inevitable use of the term Okay, this game is going to be played down in the desert, and it's nobody ever says that we're going to be playing, you know, up in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. We're not We're not going to do that with the Denver Broncos because that's a more familiar place. But anything that happens down in the Southwest is always prefaced by this is going to take place down in the desert. 00:39:04 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:39:05 Speaker 3: I think one of the big takeaways from this piece is just how layered New Mexico's history and culture and landscape are. 00:39:18 Speaker 2: That's good And. 00:39:21 Speaker 3: One of the things that I think became apparent to me just thinking about the script is these are they're all interrelated, and you think about how long people have been on the ground in New Mexico. Some of our oldest evidence of human occupation in the Americas is in New Mexico, and it's a place where these different types of landscapes come together. And for me, I was thinking about sort of transitional habitats and how these places where two different types of landscapes or biomes, they where they intersect. That's a good place for animals to. 00:40:03 Speaker 2: Be, right, Yeah, it is ecotones. 00:40:06 Speaker 3: Yeah, And so I think about the thought was occurring to me as I was reading this of just like how interrelated its history and its landscape are and the interplay between those two things. 00:40:17 Speaker 1: I think it's that combination of all those are so many of the big ecological zones of the West in New Mexico. I mean, as I said in the script, it's the place where the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, the Colorado Plateau, Canyon Country, and the true deserts of the Southwest all converge in that one spot. 00:40:42 Speaker 2: And I have a sneaking feeling that one of the reasons. 00:40:45 Speaker 1: We have so many early human sights from the North American story in New Mexico. I mean it's not just the Clovist site that's there and the Folesome site that's there, the original of both of those are in New Mexico, but also this recent discovery in twenty nineteen of twenty three thousand year old footprints down in the southern part of the state. Is that that combination of settings plains, Rocky Mountains, Colorado Platzau canyons, and southwestern deserts I think must have drawn people. I mean, the climate is amenable for one thing, you get off the end of the southern Rockies, and the climate is not one you have to suffer through really to get through, especially say fifteen thousand years or so ago, when it was colder than it is now, and so that country probably attracted people for that reason, but I think it was that diversity of landscapes that also did it, and that's the reason we have so many of these early sites for humans in North America that occur in that particular part of the west. 00:41:51 Speaker 3: And you speaking of sort of this bleed over of different regions, you talk in this article a lot. 00:41:58 Speaker 2: About the jaguar. 00:42:00 Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's sort of the embodiment of ecological connections between North America, Central America, South America, and it comes up into New Mexico. And there's something I don't know, there's something about that. Not only are jaguars interesting to me just as an animal, but sort of the what that represents as far as the connection across continents is interesting. 00:42:31 Speaker 1: Yeah, no kidding, because I mean the jaguar we think of, you know, I mean, it's found all the way down to Argentina and so up and down the South American continent through Central America, and we think of jaguars as being kind of jungle animals, sort of like tigers are. And yet its northern range was in the American Southwest and was now New Mexico and Arizona. And to me, one of the exciting things when I was working on this particular story in the beginning, was encountering this idea, and it's an idea that I think that really still resonates in my mind that as a result of the climate history, you know, pulling these species up from South America and Central America into what is now the United States, like jaguars, like collared peckeras have Alina's, like armadillos, and then from a different set of influences extending along the crest of the Rocky Mountains from Alaska, these species that like bighorn sheep that you think of as being very northerly kind of animals all the way down into what is now New Mexico, and having those two jaguars be hunting big horn sheep. I mean, that's just to me kind of a remarkable convergence of things that I still like to play with in my mind. And what I'm hoping for if we managed to recover jaguars, is having something like that happen again, because that seems to be a pretty magical kind of convergence of species across the continents in the Americas, and. 00:44:21 Speaker 3: Sort of along those same lines in terms of convergence, we New Mexico is such a unique place for how visible the Spanish and indigenous and not only I mean to say indigenous is to oversimplify it, you know, very different across the long span of time, Indigenous cultures, then the Spanish, then sort of the Anglo influence from the United States. I think of all the states in the West, New Mexico probably maybe where's that most proudly I. 00:44:59 Speaker 1: Think it does, and I I think you know, I mean, and I quoted Florence Miriam Bailey in this particular script too, when she was in New Mexico said, you know, unlike anywhere else I've been, I mean to us, to her and her husband Vernon Bailey on their honeymoon. This was a brand new place, but it was clear that it was a very old place. And that's one of the things you can't miss in a place like New Mexico that you often can in other parts of the West, and that is the lingering presence on the landscape of prior occupations, prior inhabitations. Chaco CanYa National Park for example, which was going enterprise in the Southwest a thousand years ago, has left ruins that. I mean, it's now National Park, of course, and a visitor designation or destination for people from. 00:45:54 Speaker 2: All the world. 00:45:55 Speaker 1: But it kind of leaves you with the sense of, Wow, we are late comers to this part of the world. This thing has been playing out, this human story has been playing out in this part of the world for a long time. And those kind of physical that physical evidence of occupation going way back into the past is more present in the Southwest, in Arizona and New Mexico than it is anywhere else in the West. So it kind of drives home to you, Wow, this is we didn't We're not starting something brand new here. 00:46:31 Speaker 2: This is a very old place. Yet. 00:46:35 Speaker 3: The phrase that kept popping into my mind as I was thinking about this more and more was one that I remember from elementary school history, which. 00:46:45 Speaker 2: Is cradle of civilization. 00:46:47 Speaker 3: Yeah, which is a term that's referred to used to refer to certain parts of the globe that have that sort of ancient gravitas. 00:46:54 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:46:56 Speaker 3: And I wonder if you think of New Mexico and those in those terms. 00:47:00 Speaker 1: I particularly think of the Chaco area in northwestern New Mexico as a kind of an American version of the Tigris euphrase river valleys in the Middle East, which when people talk about the cradle civilization, that's often what they're referring to. And yeah, I think northwestern New Mexico really gives you that sense. And if you're in Chaco Canyon National Historic Park, all you have to do is walk among those ruins and you get a powerful sense of this is kind of where North America began, you know. And there are certainly older places. I mean, we have evidence of the Clovis and the fulsome people in New Mexico as well, but boy, Chaco is really it really raises the hair on the back of your neck when you're there. 00:47:52 Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I need to make it down at some point. Yeah, you do, all right? Thanks Dan, you bet Randall. 00:47:58 Speaker 1: Thanks U

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