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Desert Life Goes Into Hiding for Its ‘Winter’

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

With the arrival this week of the summer’s first 100-plus-degree temperatures, an irony is taking hold of the High Desert.

It is a kind of winter, at least as winter is understood in colder climates, that is, as the season of slowdown, inwardness, and the conserving of resources to preserve life.

“In the desert, our summer is sort of like their January in the East,” David Numer says.

It is the middle of an afternoon earlier this week, and the heavy sun is pressing down on the desert, squeezing up the temperature in Lancaster to 101 degrees--and expectations were that it would go even higher in the ensuing days.

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Thanks to an anomalously cool, wet winter and spring, the desert is still haughty with foliage. In a normal year, it would have been humbled to dryness a good month and a half ago.

But the abundance of green leaves on the manzanitas and mountain-mahoganies, the still-moist seed pods on the Joshua trees, none of these fool Numer. He has been a ranger at the county’s Devils Punchbowl Park for 24 years, and has lived virtually all of his 48 years in the High Desert. On a tour of the park and its environs, his knowing eyes see that the season has turned, and that there will be no turning back.

The desert soil, for one thing, has paled, and the foxtail has started going to seed. “That says the surface water is already gone,” Numer says. “They’re annual plants and they have to produce seeds real quickly. They flower real quickly, they go to seed, and then they’re gone.”

Numer parts the branches of a manzanita bush. Although still dense with greenery, it has turned a few of its leaves to gold, as have nearby mountain-mahoganies and scrub oaks. The plants, sensing that the abundant water of winter and spring is disappearing, soon will begin dropping leaves to the desert floor.

They will perform a striptease of survival, “quite similar to what deciduous trees do in the East in the winter,” Numer says. The plants will not bare themselves completely, however. They’ll retain as many leaves as they can to continue photosynthesizing food for the roots, but not so many as to draw up undue amounts of diminishing water from the soil. The leaves are “food factories,” Numer says, but they also squander moisture to the demanding sun and thirsty air through evaporation.

Creatures with legs and tails also have marked the coming of the desert’s wintry summer, by their increasingly noticeable absence. The season has transformed most of them, such as lizards and snakes, which draw their body temperatures from the sun, into nocturnal beings.

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“Just a few weeks ago, you’d hear people here saying, ‘There certainly are a lot of rattlesnakes this year,’ ” Numer says. “Well, they didn’t realize they were seeing a lot merely because it was spring, when rattlers come out during the day. Now, you don’t see reptiles out on the road anymore.

“Pretty soon it’ll look really quiet. Pretty soon you can go out in the desert and not even see jack rabbits. With the heat wave we’re having now, it’s gradually happening. It’s quite similar to the plants. They have to restrict their activities so they don’t exhaust their water supply.”

Few desert predators have access to ambient water. They must rely on the moisture content of the creatures they eat, such as the kangaroo rat, which, having gained moisture from eating the seeds dropped by summer-izing desert plants, passes it on when it is itself eaten. “The kangaroo rat, really, is the water supply of most of the predators in the desert,” Numer says.

With the turning of the season, chuckwallas and whiptails and other lizards so abundant weeks and even days ago, are gone from daytime view.

Gone, too, are the bibulous desert tortoises, which gorge on greens during the spring, and essentially retain moisture from the feeding for the remainder of the year. Like other reptiles, the tortoises are still emerging from the earth after dark for now, but as temperatures climb, will depart their relatively moist and cool underground less and less frequently.

On the desert floor, Numer’s dusty hiking boots stop at the entrance to a hill of harvester ants. The opening is ringed thickly with seeds from wildflowers, and bespeaks furious effort in cooler days by the mound’s inhabitants. In today’s midday heat, however, the red, stinging ants are nowhere to be seen.

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Several paces away, Numer comes upon the finely pebbled entrance of a hill of honey ants. During the annual springtime explosion of desert wildflowers, which extended for an unusually long stretch of time this year, workers from the hill assiduously collected nectar, and regurgitated it into specialized ants known as repletes until the quarter-inch-long creatures swelled to the size of small peas.

With only a few tiny, forlorn blue flowers adorning the desert floor, the honey ants, too, have gone subterranean. The repletes, Numer says, now hang from the roofs of small underground caverns, living larders safely away from the dehydrating sun. For the rest of the year, the entire colony will depend for its survival largely on nectar re-regurgitated by the repletes. Numer is a desert creature, too. Like his fellow creatures, he senses a change in the rhythms of his own life that is in concert with the changed season.

For one thing, he says, he finds himself being more diligent about covering his skin after its annual recuperation in winter from the previous summer’s saturation barrage of UV rays.

For another, he’s adapting to changes in the flow of visitors coming to the Devils Punchbowl to view the unusual geologic formations and hike the park’s trails.

“Most parks and recreation facilities slow down in winter and become busiest in summer,” he says. “With us, it’s just the opposite. Our daytime crowds are drying up. Like with the reptiles, the activity of people here is becoming greater at night. Which all makes sense. We’re just a part of the desert environment, too.”

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