Joshua Trees Are in Trouble

Too hot; too dry:

When we visited, dry limbs drooped.

Some barrel-shaped, dead leaf clusters dangled while others had fallen onto ground as dry as death. In decades past, those clusters dropped seeds that sprouted after rains.

“There’s no recruitment” now, Cornett said, scanning an area without a single sprout.

A drier climate means more vulnerability to fires caused by lightning or vandalism.

There’s no more devastating example than last year’s Dome fire at the Mojave National Preserve, an hour or so to the north. The fire, ignited by lightning, incinerated more than 1 million Joshua trees.

At the Queen Valley site, Cornett examined the stems of the four surviving trees and discovered yet another assault on their health.

“This is the first time I’ve seen signs of rodents attacking stems on this site,” he said, pointing out some gnawed branches. As with the ocotillo, the problem seemed to be that the plants usually found around the trees were dead or dying, leaving virtually no moisture for rodents.

They appeared to have dug their teeth into Joshua trees in a last-ditch effort to survive.

At the base of one tree, whose age Cornett put at about well over 100, he noticed another threat: A patch of bark had been scraped away.

Cornett crouched, inspected, harrumphed. It looked like the work of a jack rabbit, he said, which must have been trying to get at the moisture in the stem. 

“To chew through bark like that,” he said, “that is one desperate jack rabbit.”