Pod Insights Gunfighters Ep. 28: Understanding Nature in a Southwestern State | The American West About this episode Not only do most Americans misunderstand the great variety in western places, but many westerners are similarly clueless. This episode makes a stab at explaining nature in a part of the West unfamiliar to many, the southwestern state of New Mexico.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 I got in my hand here. It was just clipped to my pocket, but it's in my hand right now. The Montana. It's MKC, Montana Knife Company's first folding knife. Designed, tested, built by actual hunters. The Montana is the first folder Josh Smith has built at production scale with a team of engineers and machinists who could match what he does on the bench. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. These things are great. You are gonna love this folding knife.
0:34 Speaker 01 With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans. Develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule. So you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at ChatGPT.com.
1:03 Speaker 02 Where the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, the Colorado Plateau, and the southwestern deserts converge to create New Mexico, there is more ecological variety than in any interior western state. I'm Dan Florys, and this is The American West.
1:39 Speaker 02 Understanding nature in a southwestern state.
1:46 Speaker 02 In the first 15 years of the 2000s, 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. In 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 19th and 20th centuries,
2:25 Speaker 02 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 1930s launched millions of Oklahomans and Kansans on their migration west, their primary destination was, naturally enough, Southern California. Understanding the wider West obviously involves travel.
3:10 Speaker 02 It's a big place. But even tourist travel often follows those same latitude lines. Today, when Minnesotans travel west, they commonly go to Glacier National Park or on to 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 that migration pattern 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
3:53 Speaker 02 of the Northern Rockies during my time in those two places. Told that I live 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 40 below zero? For Montanans, that worked in perfect reverse. You go to Santa Fe for the summers? How can you stand that 125-degree heat? I never developed a good comeback about Montana, except to observe lamely that other Montanans often called Missoula and the Bitterroot Valley "the banana belt." Over time, I did work out a fair one about Santa Fe, though.
4:35 Speaker 02 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. You figure it out. The looks I got were still incomprehending, though, like I was arguing that the Sahara wasn't a desert.
4:58 Speaker 02 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 mind 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
5:42 Speaker 02 as being played "down in the desert" conveys, to me at least, a continuing national sentiment 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. If you struggle to exactly place it, New Mexico is that slice of the West situated directly below mountainous Colorado. It's the western state sandwiched between the flatlands of Texas and the arid Colorado
6:26 Speaker 02 Plateau and saguaro deserts of Arizona. The Rocky Mountains extend down into New Mexico, and so do the slick rock canyons of the Colorado Plateau. The whole eastern 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 1610, it has the oldest European town anywhere in the West.
7:08 Speaker 02 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 lakeshore among the white sand dunes and encountered a giant ground sloth which reared back an alarm. We know this because the footprints from that ancient close encounter, excavated by a park service employee in 2019, had crushed grass seeds below them that radiocarbon dated
7:52 Speaker 02 to 23,000 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. 10,000 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.
8:36 Speaker 02 There's believable evidence that the Clovis people had a significant effect on the Africa-like wildlife that covered the West down to about 10,000 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 diversity for 10 millennia, down to the arrival of Old Worlders. When Spaniards and Americans did arrive, travelers like Francisco Coronado, Albert Pike, George Ruxton, and Josiah Gray, and especially William Emory of the Mexican Boundary Survey,
9:20 Speaker 02 left us accounts of New Mexico when its mountains brimmed with flocks of bighorn sheep and beaver damp pools, and its plains were a kind of American version of the Serengeti or Masai 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.
10:00 Speaker 02 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 to the Pacific Coast. Some of the topographical engineers, like John Charles Fremont, for example, who became such a celebrity that in 1856, he got the New Republican Party's nomination to be its first presidential candidate, became cultural stars in America from these expeditions.
10:45 Speaker 02 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 US boundary after the treaty ending the war forced Mexico to cede its northern territories to the United States. Exploring that line fell to William Emory, 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 naturalist of legendary proportion, Baird as a teen had wanted to go west with
11:29 Speaker 02 Audubon, but his parents had demurred because of the dangers. Emory was himself an excellent field naturalist to send to the southwest. During the war, he accompanied the American Army's push from New Mexico to California and had already added several species of desert cacti to science, including giant saguaros, along with visiting ruins like Chaco, whose antiquity, he suspected, went back into America's deep past. But this was the 1850s. Red- whiskered Emory was also a Maryland slaveholder, whose closest boyhood friend was Jefferson Davis, soon to be president of the Confederacy.
12:14 Speaker 02 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, "indulence and incapacity." Evidently, it said something laudatory that back home, Americans would never suffer animals within reach to survive like that.
12:51 Speaker 02 A half-century after Jefferson had aimed his second major exploration 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. Whitetail 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 bighorn sheep looked down from the canyon rims.
13:33 Speaker 02 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. There were two different wolves: the red Texan wolf eastward, and farther west, a gray wolf. This was a new animal, the Mexican wolf, but scientists wouldn't recognize that for another 50 years. The unfamiliar creatures were especially intriguing. Particularly impressive and numerous were the big cats.
14:16 Speaker 02 As Baird 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 "El Tigre," and to most Americans as "tigers or leopards," 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 Coronado's early 1540s exploration 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.
14:59 Speaker 02 Jaguars apparently were common predators of deer and wild horses, and Comanches and other tribes even used jaguar hides decoratively.
15:08 Speaker 02 In Emory's report, jaguars were on the outskirts of Santa Fe. At some point, as he worked on his survey, he discovered a literary source describing a frightening morning in 1825 in what he assumed was New Mexico's capital. A massive flood in the nearby Rio Bravo, the name for the Rio Grande 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.
15:49 Speaker 02 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 Piranha Bravo.
16:09 Speaker 02 Other creatures reflected a different West than Montana or even California. Emory's people saw swine-like collared peccaries, the southwestern desert's native javelinas, 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 sloths. They reported a remarkable variety of reptiles, particularly snakes and lizards, of which the most impressive were chuckwallas. They acquired the first specimen and included an illustration in their report of the remarkable
16:50 Speaker 02 Kila monster, although taxonomists in Washington misidentified it and didn't realize it had a venomous bite. The bird life was prodigious. Among the more intriguing were what they call chaparral cocks, 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 Falcon eagle, the outsized falcon known as the caracara, 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 311 new mammals,
17:35 Speaker 02 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 Lawrence 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 and all our heads with respect to wildlife. Joining those three was the popular wildlife author Ernest Thompson Seton. Writing from Santa Fe, Seton penned heartrending stories of New Mexico animals such as Tito, the female coyote,
18:19 Speaker 02 who allegorically taught coyotes how to avoid extermination, and the Ratone area wolf Lobo, king of Carumpa, who possessed one fatal flaw: his fidelity to his mate. It got him killed. Seton'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 Seton 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.
19:04 Speaker 01 With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans, develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule, so you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at ChatGPT.com.
19:32 Speaker 00 You guys have heard me talk all about Montana Knife Company for a few years now on the podcast. Hands down, these are my absolute favorite hunting knives. Every blade they make is a high-performance durable tool that you can rely on whether you're butchering, hunting, working on the farm, out in the field, doing chores, whatever. And I've got a massive update for you. People have been asking for this forever. MKC finally did it. I've been asking it forever. The wait is over. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It's going to be dropping very soon. I'm telling you right now, these things are going to sell out fast. If you aren't ready the moment they go live, you're probably going to miss out. So here's what you need to do. Get over to MKC.com right now. Make
20:15 Speaker 00 sure you sign up for their email and text message notifications so you get the alert the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders.
20:35 Speaker 02 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, 151, than any other state except California. But a century ago, its diversity struck many observers as almost chaotic. The Baileys were essential in changing that perception. Vernon was a slight, owl-eyed, chinless farm boy from Minnesota with seven years of education and churchy enough that until his twenties, he'd never even heard of Charles Darwin. He was a teetotaler his
21:15 Speaker 02 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. Miriam, who in the 1890s was establishing the new federal agency called the Biological Survey, which became the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
21:40 Speaker 02 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 20th 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 1899 and in
22:22 Speaker 02 1900 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 Tiempo 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?
23:04 Speaker 02 Bailey and his boss, Seahawk 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 2,800 feet to more than 13,000 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.
23:51 Speaker 02 In a 1913 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 credited 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
24:34 Speaker 02 for western birds in general, she added a whopping 94 new species of birds to the ornithological list for New Mexico and the Southwest.
25:01 Speaker 02 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 hide leather eradicated bison on the southern plains in the 1870s, sacrificing billions of animals native peoples in New Mexico had depended on for 10,000 years. Hispanic New Mexicans, called Sibeleros, had long made pilgrimages themselves to the plains from Santa Fe and Taos, and as expert horsemen had hunted bison with lances, hauling the meat and pelts back to their Rio Grande towns and creaking two-wheeled wooden carts.
25:42 Speaker 02 But by 1875, a decade before they disappeared from Montana, bison were extinguished in plains New Mexico. Their destruction had barely taken 10 years. And that was just the beginning. Exploring the Pecos River headwaters in the southern Rockies of of New Mexico in 1882 and 83, naturalist Louis Dyche found no bighorn sheep left. No elk in the country, except a rare and occasional straggler, he wrote, and he neither saw wolves nor heard one howl. He did see what he called "a herd of 11 grizzly bears traversing Hamilton Mesa in the high Rockies above Santa Fe."
26:26 Speaker 02 New Mexico made an effort to save some of these animals, but following inherited folk 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 1893. That list of money for scouts included wolves, coyotes, bears, lions, and bobcats. State-sponsored exotic species introductions of animals like
27:07 Speaker 02 ibex, oryx, and al-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 20th century, did continue to preserve wildlife habitat for future animal recoveries.
27:33 Speaker 02 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 300 pounds. In the early 20th century, the Great Cats still had established territories and were breeding in New Mexico and Arizona.
28:13 Speaker 02 So this northern range was not merely a place the occasional male jaguar roamed into. Among more than 60 historical records of jaguars in the southwest from 1880 to 1995, females and kittens are well represented. North American jaguars dinned and hunted in deserts, oak foothills, pinyon juniper, and ponderosa pine forests, countries strikingly unlike their jungle habitats to the south. Such open terrain made them vulnerable to human eyes, though, especially the eyes of stock raisers and the bounty and government hunters employed to protect cows in the early 20th century.
28:55 Speaker 02 Aware that jaguars were declining, Vernon Bailey collected as many accounts of jaguars as he could find. From them, he concluded that the Black 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 1900 and again in 1902. And Bailey collected several other accounts from there. Other New Mexico ranges, the Sangre de Cristos, the Southern Rockies in other words, the Sacramento's, and the San Andres, also held jaguars, and into the 1920s, ranchers were still shooting them. There were accounts of jaguars nearly to Colorado, as well as out on the Great Plains.
29:40 Speaker 02 Arizona, where settlers reported jaguars from Zane Gray's muggy on-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 a jaguar in Arizona's Santa Rita Mountains in 1918. 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 100% of them live on livestock and game."
30:24 Speaker 02 The Bureau recorded five such renegades crossing into a supposedly jaguar-free Arizona from 1924 to 1927. 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 1940s. In the first half of the 20th century, another legendary figure, ecologist Aldo Leopold, spent enough time in New Mexico to shape future wildlife policy, both there and more broadly.
31:05 Speaker 02 Stationed in the Territory First to manage one of its new national forests, Leopold met his future wife, Estela Berger, in Santa Fe. He went on to study a new phenomenon called game eruptions, the unchecked growth then spectacular crash of populations of mule deer, elk, and other ungulates that followed America's and New Mexico's eradication of predators on behalf of the livestock industry. Leopold found almost no record of eruptions before 1900, but he tracked a whopping 42 of them between 1900 and 1945.
31:46 Speaker 02 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 1976 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 contests on state lands in New Mexico was another.
32:22 Speaker 02 While Vernon Bailey's century-old Life Zones model continues to have some relevance in understanding New Mexico wildlife, the science of ecology with its emphasis today on interactive communities known as ecosystems and subsequent work in mapping eco-regions has advanced our understanding of why 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.
33:02 Speaker 02 At a fine-grained level of mapping, the state features eight principal eco-regions, such as the southwestern tablelands, for example, divided into an absolutely astonishing 55 ecological subsets, like the pinyon 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, the Wisconsin Ice Age brought northern species like sheep and marmots far south. Then massive heat events like the altothermal of 8,000 to 5,000 years ago expanded southern
33:47 Speaker 02 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.
34:26 Speaker 02 Today, Mexican wolves, which we reduce to such tiny numbers that they now struggle with sufficient genetic diversity to survive, are the southwest's most famous endangered animals. But a state as varied as New Mexico has many more, 64 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, gila trout, black-footed ferrets, meadow-jumping mice, and ridge-nosed rattlesnakes, among many others. The state today is working on all that. New Mexico's
35:08 Speaker 02 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-caused climate change that threatens to make an already arid state a drier and hotter version of itself. Anticipating and protecting connectivity corridors 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
35:51 Speaker 02 jaguars. Not officially listed as a U.S. endangered species until 1997, jaguars only acquired a recovery plan in the United States in 2018. As with gray wolves, jaguar recovery depends on the nations bordering the U.S. having preserved the big animals better than we have. The truth is that the Fish and Wildlife's 2018 plan offers pretty faint hope for the return of el tigre. Encouraged that seven male jaguars have ventured into the U.S. since 1996, the architects of the recovery plan didn't
36:32 Speaker 02 envision a hard release of captive jaguars as we have done with gray wolves. Their hope instead was that the cats will reoccupy their former range via two different corridors that could connect populations in Mexico to Arizona and New Mexico. The problem is that those jaguar migration corridors reach the US exactly where our country has been erecting its border wall against human migrants. The 2018 Jaguar recovery proposal is a 40-year proposition with delisting happening only in the event that a breeding population of female cats arrives here.
37:16 Speaker 02 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 counter-proposed a 329,000-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 in Yellowstone, New Mexico and Arizona, and now Colorado, to begin recovery in an area that could eventually support 100 to 150 of the southwest's original big felines.
37:58 Speaker 02 As for me, I'll admit, I want to see muscular jaguars once again pursuing bighorn sheep in the New Mexico Rockies. And if I don't get to see it, I at least want to look up at the snowcat peaks out my front door and imagine that such a spectacle will play out in the future. Arizona excepted, no other western state than New Mexico is likely to see that kind of natural marvel.
38:33 Speaker 01 With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans, develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule. So you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at ChatGPT.com.
39:00 Speaker 00 You guys have heard me talk all about Montana Knife Company for a few years now on the podcast. Hands down, these are my absolute favorite hunting knives. Every blade they make is a high-performance, durable tool that you can rely on, whether you're butchering, hunting, working on the farm, out in the field, doing chores, whatever. And I've got a massive update for you. People have been asking for this forever. MKC finally did it. I've been asking it forever. The wait is over. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It's going to be dropping very soon. I'm telling you right now, these things are going to sell out fast. If you aren't ready the moment they go live, you're probably going to miss out. So here's what you need to do. Get over to MKC.com right now.
39:44 Speaker 00 Make sure you sign up for their email and text message notifications so you get the alert the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders.
40:04 Speaker 03 All right, Dan, in this episode, I think you begin some point by talking about how most Americans' imaginations sort of fail to fully comprehend the diversity of landscape and culture that is New Mexico. Yeah. And I'm wondering if that's a branding problem. If 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.
40:41 Speaker 02 Well, I, 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 that appear in, 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.
41:25 Speaker 02 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 parts. They imagine Seattle and Portland 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.
42:07 Speaker 02 I think we can, people who grew 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 is, you know, and I, one of the things I've laughed about a lot in watching sports is the inevitable use of the term, okay, this game is going to be played down in the desert.
42:47 Speaker 02 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, they're not gonna 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.
43:07 Speaker 03 Yeah. I- I think one of the big takeaways from this piece is, is just how layered New Mexico's history and culture and landscape are.
43:21 Speaker 02 That's a good, good.
43:22 Speaker 03 And, and one of the things that I think became apparent to me, just thinking about the, 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, of human occupation in, 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, where they, where they intersect, that's a good place for animals to be, right?
44:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, it is. Eco-tones.
44:08 Speaker 03 Yeah. And so I think about, I, 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.
44:19 Speaker 02 I, I think it's that combination of all those, of so many of the big ecological zones of the West in New Mexico. I mean, as I said in the, 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. And I have a sneaking feeling that one of the reasons we have so many early human sites from the North American story in New Mexico, I mean, it's not just the Clovis site that's there and the Folsom site that's there, the original of both of those are in New Mexico,
45:02 Speaker 02 but also this recent discovery in 2019 of 23,000 year old footprints down in the southern part of the state, is that that combination of settings, plains, rocky mountains, Colorado Plateau canyons and southwestern deserts, I think. Must have drawn people. I mean, the climate is 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 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
45:46 Speaker 02 so many of these early sites for humans in North America that occur in that particular part of the West.
45:54 Speaker 03 Yeah, and you, speaking of sort of this bleed over of different regions, you talk in this article a lot about the Jaguar.
46:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
46:04 Speaker 03 And it's sort of the embodiment of ecological connections between North America, Central America, South America, and it it comes up into New Mexico. And there's something, I don't know, there's something about that. Not not only are Jaguars interesting to me just as a as an animal, but sort of the the what that represents as far as a connection across continents is is interesting.
46:34 Speaker 02 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
47:14 Speaker 02 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 peccaries, javelinas, 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 bighorn
47:58 Speaker 02 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, and what I'm hoping for, if we manage 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.
48:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, and 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, to say indigenous is to over simplify it, you know, very different across a 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 wears that most proudly.
49:01 Speaker 02 I think it does. And I think, you know, I mean, I quoted Florence Marion 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 habitations. Chaco Canyon National Park, for example, which was going enterprise
49:46 Speaker 02 in the Southwest a thousand years ago, has left ruins that, I mean, it's now a national park, of course, and a visitor designation or destination for people from all over the world. But it kind of leaves you with the sense of, wow, we are latecomers to this part of the world. This thing has been playing out, this human story's been playing out in this part of the world for a long time. And those, 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
50:30 Speaker 02 to you, wow, this is, we didn't, we're not starting something brand new here. This is a very old place.
50:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, 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 is cradle of civilization.
50:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
50:50 Speaker 03 Which is a term that's referred to, used to refer to certain parts of the globe that have that sort of ancient gravitas.
50:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
50:58 Speaker 03 And I wonder if you think of New Mexico in those, in those terms?
51:03 Speaker 02 I particularly think of the Chacoan area in northwestern New Mexico as a kind of a, an American version of the Tigris, Euphrates River Valleys in the Middle East, which, when people talk about the cradle of 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.
51:30 Speaker 02 All you have to do is walk among those ruins and, and you get a powerful sense of this is kind of where North America began.
51:40 Speaker 03 Mm hmm.
51:40 Speaker 02 You know, and there are, there are certainly older places. I mean, we have evidence of the Clovis and the Folsom 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.
51:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, I need to make it down at some point.
51:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, you do.
51:59 Speaker 03 All right, thanks, Dan.
52:00 Speaker 02 You bet, Randall. Thanks.
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Previous Ep. 27: Messages From the Past - The Rock Art of the American West | The American West Next Ep. 29: What Were Charlie Russell and L.A. Huffman Trying to Tell Us? | The American West Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated