What is a “guzzler?” The answer to that question depends on context, of course, but if you’re working on big horn sheep management in Desert National Wildlife Refuge (DNWR) the word refers to modified springs and natural catchment areas or rainwater catchment systems intended to restore water access in landscape
Working alongside the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and DNWR staff, a number of GBI research associates have been working to support this system of water availability to help facilitate bighorn sheep management. Among these is Audrey Martin, who has split her time on the refuge conducting excursions to assess guzzlers and designing data management tools. DNWR, the largest National Wildlife Refuge in the contiguous United States, is located only fifteen miles from Las Vegas, and this metropolis’s growing population poses the potential threats of groundwater depletion and habitat degradation. Consequently, this work is crucial to helping land and wildlife managers achieve their key objective of strengthening the desert bighorn population
Hiking in on both well-traveled paths and previously undocumented routes, crews documented and assessed guzzlers, digging out blockages and replacing parts, as necessary. Additionally, spring flow levels were measured and trail cameras installed or serviced. And the whole process, including locations and actions taken, were recorded. With this data in hand, the other component of Audrey’s work began, the designing of a new database for storing and summarizing guzzler infrastructure and maintenance. This new database needed to not only represent the information gathered from the field, but also older data, creating a comprehensive system that will continue to document the developing status of specific guzzlers.
Audrey kindly answered some of our questions about her experience working on this important project.
Describe your relationship with other participants, GBI or USFWS partners.
We have several GBI research associates here, and we cooperate on projects when someone needs an extra pair of hands (four different projects with only one of us on each one). Our USFWS partners and supervisors are very supportive of the things we need to get the jobs done, helping to find materials or coordinate schedules so that assistance is available when we need it. I quite enjoy working here and have also been enjoying getting to know the people I’m working with (both employees and volunteers). In addition, we’re included in the partnerships that our USFWS refuge and complex have made with state and other local entities, which is an amazing opportunity to see how collaborations work. I am particularly impressed at how well the various agencies (or at least these representatives of them) work together.
Are there any moments/stories from the field that stand out to you?
There are so many beautiful landscapes out here, and I love hiking through them and finding both the large-scale vistas and the plants and animals that thrive out here. It sometimes seems like everywhere I look there’s something cool that catches my attention. Walking in washes or hiking on mountainsides I’ve found a variety of fossils in the rocks, not to mention the varied minerals of the rocks themselves, and the wet winter means there’s flowers everywhere. One of them is a type of hedgehog cactus with some of the most vibrant red flowers I’ve ever seen (most of the cactus flowers are an equally vibrant pink, plus I found some yellow ones yesterday), and all of the Joshua trees seem to have bloomed this year which was spectacular. Last week on a hike back from repairing a guzzler, we flushed a nighthawk-like bird from a ground-nest, and before we hurried on we saw that she had two very young downy chicks (I looked that up and it was a common poorwill, based on my glimpse of the adult and a fragment of eggshell in the photo of the chicks). Looking up to see a ram directly above the apron for the guzzler was a cool experience, and he stood there and watched us work for a little while. Almost all of the guzzlers I’ve been to so far have amazing views (since sheep like high places where they can see threats coming at a distance or with rugged cliffs they can use for escape), and the ones that don’t are typically springs that are tucked away in canyons or fragments of forest that are amazing in their own ways.
What do you feel you are getting out of the experience, professionally and/or personally?
I am learning a lot about what it takes to manage an area like this, both on the small scale of my own position and on the larger scale of watching my supervisor and the other managers network and interact with the other agencies. The excel database functionality is slightly new for me (I’ve done similar things with R in the past, but that’s not really something that I can set up to run autonomously for other people without being around to troubleshoot), and it turns out there’s a lot of cool stuff I can do with excel formulas. The photo processing is something I haven’t really been able to dig into much yet, but I’m looking forward to exploring AI photo identification tools and further adapting my existing photo processing pipelines to suit the needs of this project. I had never given much thought to rainwater catchments in the past, but I’ve learned a great deal about using them to make up for water being removed by human uses and also to increase habitat availability in more marginal areas so that wildlife can persist despite heavy human modifications to landscapes. I am also really enjoying being able to work in desert wildlands in general, as that’s always been a goal for me.
