2 MILLION BLOSSOMS A


seed blows along the sand and you watch it. A  color of amber, and your eye tracks it through creosote bush and stately saguaro.


       


that. You’re onto something. Going out and back, they are more focused than if they’d been foraging for yellow paloverde blooms or patches of sweet-red chuparo- sas. They aren’t going for nectar. You learn to tell the difference. They’ve found water.


A couple decades ago, my task in the


pale, ragged desert of southwest Arizo- na was simple: walk the mountain ranges of Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Ref- uge — named for a blackened head on  tinajas, as they’re called, record their di- mensions, and mark them on a map. It was part of a Master’s thesis I was work- ing on, studying transient natural water features in the desert. These were holes and bedrock depressions in steeply-sided mountains thousands of feet tall. To the eye, the ranges are as barren as the moon. Rainwater collects in potholes pro-


Where did the bees manage to  this endlessly dry country?


“ ”


tected by rock shadows in the outcrops of these mountains,  art around the holes, peckings and polishings from people who used these sources for thousands of years. On a wildlife refuge where endangered Sonoran bighorn sheep survive on  in, a small puzzle piece in the biological management of a low, hot desert where water is precious.


Some tinajas I found were deep-bel- lied, so full they felt oceanic. Most were little more than creases in the rock, pockets of old rainwater teeming with gossamer, pulsating fairy shrimp. The sheep — rams with brown, rutted horns like battle instruments, and spiked ewes — come down to most of the tinajas. You expect that. In the desert, life gath-        


 were coming back with loaded crops, -      


toward their destination. My map needed another star on it, another recording, and if there’s a chance of seeing water,


10


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