SCIRPUS:

There are a couple of bands of wild horses that are at Fly Ranch. The majority of them have a long history of roaming the range.

STUART:

Feral for 500 years. 

SCIRPUS:

I had one of the bands come running at me when I was just wandering around in the morning, and they got about 20 feet away from me and they were stomping their hooves, and it was very, I just tried to make myself as big as humanly possible. Then eventually they ran off.

And then that stallion got in a fight with another stallion of the other band. And you could just feel the force of that fight, like when they kicked each other, when they were up in the air and then landed on the ground. I was several hundred feet away and I could still feel it and hear it. It was intense.  

STUART: 

Hey everybody. Stuart Mangram here, your host and Invisible friend for Burning Man Live. For now, our thoughts all turn to the animal kingdom. This year’s Burning Man theme. Well, I still prefer that beautiful Latinate animalia, animalia, which one is it? Totally doesn’t matter.

I think that’s indicative of a really good theme, that it can be interpreted in different ways, even pronounced different ways, depending on your own radical creativity, your own slant, your own viewpoint. That’s as it should be. A good theme is gonna manifest in a lot of different ways. Whether that’s posing a giant grizzly bear as Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial and covering him with pennies, or whether that’s driving a cockroach mutant vehicle, or a scurry of cockroaches, or whether that’s just dancing round in your unicorn onesie to some late night techno beats, it’s all okay. Everything is fine. Nothing is better than anything else. It’s Burning Man, right? You get to do what you want. 

I’ll tell you what I was thinking, though. If you’ve read the theme essay, and I won’t flatter myself to think that you have to because it’s really long. Of all the things I talk about, the two things that kind of stuck with me, one of them was cryptozoology, or the Cryptids, those animals that exist mostly in our heads because we want them to exist. They may or may not — probably not — exist in the real world, but we carry them around in our heads, like old friends, whether that’s Bigfoot or the Playa Chicken or whatever.

I think Cryptids are fascinating and we just did a show on that, on that and other things. If you listen to Episode 71 with Terry Schoop (“Retro”) we kind of dove into the theme from the angle of Black Rock City’s street names this year, which are all based on cryptozoology.

The other thing that is endlessly fascinating to me is the actual flesh and blood fauna of the Great Basin and of the Black Rock Desert. There is such a rich environment up there of wildlife. When you first drive up there, it’s really easy to get the impression, as in many deserts, that it’s a lifeless place, which is absolutely impossibly far from the truth. Desert ecosystems are not for you to drive by and see usually. Unless you drive at night with night vision, unless you stick to where the water is and where the game is, you’re probably not gonna see a whole lot. And when you do, it’s gonna be startling. You’re like, “What? There’s something else out here besides me?” That kind of mental approach is super interesting.

As I wrote in the theme essay, “The Black Rock Desert can appear at first glance to be lifeless, but this is far from the truth.” Anyone familiar with the high desert knows that even out on a lake bed, there’s gonna be birds and bees and fairy shrimp and all kinds of amazing life forms out there. And of course, the further you go away from the hard pan playa out into the shoreline and out past the shoreline, and into where any water might exist, it becomes incredibly rich, incredibly rich.

Still it’s easy to imagine we’re alone out there in the vastness of the desert, and to be startled when you do see something. The first time I saw a pronghorn right down by the shoulder of Highway 447, from a distance. I thought it was like, “Is that a big dog? Is that a wild Mustang? No, it’s a pronghorn antelope.” Apparently they’re very curious and he had rambled all the way over there to the shoulder of the road just to look me in the eye. You do see those mustangs out there. You see those stallions taking their stallion stance and just daring you to come close enough to kick you in the head. 

Those daredevil jackrabbits, lining up on the side of the road and daring each other to jump underneath your wheels. Yeah, it’s like some sort of teen rite of passage maybe. You never catch a jackalope doing that because, well, jackalopes are way smarter and trickier. They’re the trickiest of the lupins. 

Speaking of tricky, if you go out long enough, you may actually see the legendary coyote, or more likely hear the coyote, on a moonlit night as they sing their songs. Coyote is of course the trickiest of all the tricksters and a powerful, powerful animal. In native lore for the local Numu folks he’s the little brother of Esa the wolf who created the world, and by some stories created humans, perhaps accidentally, and brought them back to the Great Basin and to populate the place.

Mythical animals, real animals. Those that exist in our heads and in the real world both: pretty fascinating stuff. Even if you get out there in Black Rock City, far from the shoreline, nothing but packed silt around you, you’re still gonna be reminded that you are not alone and that you’re still part of the natural world.

You’re out in the great outdoors. Maybe that’s not your natural habitat, but you will be reminded, whether it’s two ravens outside your camp making a lot of noise, or those little bats that come swooping down at sunset looking for bugs. Yes, there are bats. Just like Hunter Thompson said in Fear and Loathing, “This is Bat Country!” 

Even a fly or a beetle, you see a bug out there, you’re like, “How did you get here, little bug? And, get outta my food.” It’s everywere. And the closer you get to water, the more of it there is. Another thing, if you’re just driving down the highway, you’re like, “There’s no water here.” But out in the distance, you may see that line of scrubby looking trees, those tend to be around water sources. They may be in one of the older, more established ranches around the area. One of the biggest ranches and oldest around there is an amazing piece of property called Fly Ranch, that is owned and under the stewardship of Burning Man Project.

“Fly” is special because it has not just a little water, but a lot of water: hot springs, cold pools, it has so much water that it’s become a really important spot in the flyways for migrating birds to stop over. Within the property itself, apparently, there’s some species that only exist there. It’s such a very unique and specialized ecosystem that it has developed its own very special forms of native life. Back when Burning Man Project bought Fly Ranch, I was one of the people who said, “Don’t do anything until we take stock of what’s there.” I was a big fan of Edward Abbey and his book Desert Solitaire where he spent a year out in a National Park as the only Ranger in a, at that time, very distant park in Utah and just tracked the course of the property over an entire year. Our version, much more charming, is Lisa Beers, also known as Scirpus. 

I thought, Hey, if I’m gonna talk about this year’s theme and the Animalia of the  Black Rock Desert in the area, who better to bring back on the show?

Also, I just love talking to her because she’s super smart and sweet. So, I think that’s what we should do. 

My guest today is Dr. Lisa Beers, aka Scirpus. You may recall that she’s been on the show before. We had a really awesome conversation about the flora and fauna of Burning Man’s Fly Ranch a while back. This year with the Burning Man event theme being Animaila, or Animalia — It’s a tomato tomato thing, you can say it however you want — I thought I would get a real, live biologist on the show to talk about birds and bees and all that stuff. So welcome, Lisa. 

SCIRPUS:

Thank you for having me. It is definitely nice to be back, and I’m jealous that you’re in Mexico.

STUART:

I am recording this in Baja California Sur, and if I caught you a week ago, you would’ve been recording from where?

SCIRPUS:

From Sierra Leone, a tiny village.

STUART:

Okay. You are an adventure scientist by all means, but you have to tell us what you were doing in a tiny village in Sierra Leone.

SCIRPUS:

So I study coastal wetlands, particularly mangroves. So I was training a local team on how to do mangrove surveys in preparation for a big project that they’re about to start. I was in a village of about a thousand people, no running water, no power, except for the house we were in, it had solar power. But it was definitely – I was not in Kansas anymore. Viking adventures in West Africa.

STUART:

That sounds really exciting. How long were you there?

SCIRPUS:

I was there for three weeks, and prior to that I was in Senegal and Ghana, so a whole tour of West Africa.

STUART:

I’ve got to know more about mangrove swamps. You know, here in my new home in La Paz we have mangroves, and they seem to be really rich little ecosystems, but they’re so dense you can’t really see into them. You can’t get into them. I guess that’s their survival power, right? that lots of things can live in there, like in a reef environment?

SCIRPUS:

Yeah, definitely. They’ve developed so many different mechanisms to just exist in salty environments, so I think that they’re truly the badasses of the plant world, because not only can they live in water all the time, but they can live in saltwater. And they’re nurseries for so many fish and birds. They’re like the kidneys of coastal ecosystems by filtering out nutrients and other sediments, and then also prevent big storm surges from hitting inland areas because they dampen waves. They’re amazing. They’re really hard to walk through. Like you said, most people have their mangrove experiences either with their stand up paddle board or kayaking, and they think, “Oh, this is so beautiful.”

STUART:

See them from the outsides.

SCIRPUS:

Yeah. But once you get in, you’re literally navigating a maze of roots, and more roots, and trees, and… it’s beautiful though. It’s my church, it’s where I feel the most comfortable.

STUART:

Welp, teleport to the other side of the world where water is very scarce. I want to talk about Northern Nevada and the Black Rock Desert, and this year’s theme. I want to start with the playa itself, which is most of the year, at least we see it, the most waterless, arid, apparently lifeless place. In the theme essay I started by saying that although it looks lifeless, it’s not. Of course that particularly, bugs and birds. I’ve seen lots of birds out there. Seems like the ravens are kind of top of the food chain out there.

SCIRPUS:

And there’s also crows too, so depending on the time of the year, you might get both of them. But yeah, the ravens keep a watchful eye over everything. And what’s kind of funny, so there’s an art piece that was out at Burning Man several years ago called Baba Yaga’s House, and it’s out at Fly Ranch, which is one of the properties owned by Burning Man, and there is a bird cage on the outside of the house, and there’s a raven that’s nesting in the bird cage. It just seems totally fitting that … in Baba Yaga’s house, yeah. 

STUART:

Corvids. They are so smart and so feisty, and you can really understand why they have such a mythic quality in so many traditional tales. They are tricky, and super smart. Another art piece that comes to mind was, ah, Murder Incorporated. Did you see that?

SCIRPUS:

I only saw photos of it. I can’t believe that I didn’t see that while on playa. 

STUART:

Well, it moved around. So Charlie Gadeken’s piece was actually a bunch of black sheet metal crows, but the genius part was they moved around so that every night they’d go out and move them to a different place. So this flock, this murder of crows, kept moving around. But the real ones come by all the time too. And birds and bugs. It’s like horse and carriage, love and marriage, because birds love to eat bugs. 

I never learned all my biological taxonomy. I had to brush up on that for writing this year’s theme. And Animalia is pretty much anything that’s multicellular. So it’s insects, birds, mammals, primates — everything, right? — all fit into that. So yeah, bugs count. Bugs own the planet. I think three quarters of all the species that have been identified are insect. 

I remember a few years back when we had — Ah, remember bug-pocalypse? — we had that huge hatch of stink bugs is what the common term for them is, right?

SCIRPUS:

Yeah. I think there were a couple different types of bugs that came in with all of that wood. Just a big shipment for infrastructure. Maybe it was for the Temple as well.

STUART:

So we got a bunch of buggy wood for construction timber, and it was infested with insects.

SCIRPUS:

Yeah.

STUART:

Those poor insects. They were transported from some happy lumber yard somewhere, to an arid, parched, dry lakebed. 

SCIRPUS:

The ones that didn’t bite were the stink bugs.

STUART:

So there were stinging ones and stinking ones. So take your pick, right?

SCIRPUS:

I’ll take the stink bugs.

STUART:

By the time I got there, there were still dead ones around because – not a lot for those bugs to eat out there, but there was a big flock of birds. A bunch of birds came in and ate ’em. Somebody said that some of the birds ate so much that they over-ate themselves to death, and were then eaten by the ravens. But bugs, yeah, bugs fly out there. House flies. Mosquitoes. Have you ever seen a mosquito out there?

SCIRPUS:

I have seen plenty of mosquitoes. A ton of dragonflies, speaking of mosquitoes.

STUART:

Dragonflies are super amazing. I just learned that they migrate vast distances. Some of them actually will get up in the jet stream, like butterflies.

SCIRPUS:

Yeah, I’ve heard of butterflies doing that. Yeah, there’s actually a migrating population of monarch butterflies that crosses the Sierra Nevada mountain range. And so these butterflies travel between California and Nevada, and they actually have been found out at Fly Ranch. There is quite a bit of the milkweed that they feed off of.

STUART:

Yeah, they have a big circular route that takes them from Mexico to Canada. They go up through the Sierra Nevada, they go up to Canada, they come back down the Pacific Coast. And it’s multigenerational, right? I mean obviously a single butterfly doesn’t live long enough to make that heroic journey.

SCIRPUS:

Yeah!

STUART:

That is so crazy. How do they do that? That little tiny head contains all that navigational data. Does anybody know, how, I mean birds alone? It’s hard to imagine how they can navigate like that, but how does an insect know where to go?

SCIRPUS:

Yeah, that is so absolutely fascinating to me. I know a lot of study has occurred on honeybees and how they relay information about where there good food sources. And they do this whole dance that takes into consideration where the sun is going to be at the point that the bee makes it to that place. They just do this little boogie, give the information to the other bees, and then they go off. There’s so much that we don’t know and I don’t think we’ll ever know, and I like having that mystery in studying ecology and plants and animals. There are all these unknowns that we’ll never know and I think that’s great. It keeps us on our toes.

STUART:

I am with you. I think a good question beats an easy answer every day. And most good answers lead to two more questions.

Yeah, the mystery. I’ve been trying to express for one friend of mine what it is about Burning Man that’s still special, and I think it kind of boils down to that. I find myself surprised all the time. And I’m an old dog, it’s hard to surprise me, but every year I go out to Black Rock City I see something I’ve never seen before, and that just reminds me of how much the unknown is worthwhile. That’s a path, a path to knowledge or a path to maybe never knowing, and they’re both equally valid. That’s my philosophizing part of this day. But you know what I mean. You’re a lifelong learner and you’re fascinated by puzzles and by challenges. We’re both interested in pursuing the ineffable. 

What else gets out there into Black Rock City? I know rodents show up. They ride in on people’s trailers and whatnot. There have been quite a few mice and voles that show up. What happens to those poor little furry critters?

SCIRPUS: 

Sometimes people collect them and take them to what we call the shoreline. So that’s where the playa ends and the upland begins. A lot of times they end up passing away, which is unfortunate. I had an experience with a scorpion that came in the trailer, from the Black Rock Station, putting on my hoodie in the morning, and there was a scorpion and it stung my hand.

STUART:

Oh wow.

SCIRPUS:

This one was about an inch and a half, and it hurt. It stung for a bit and my arm went a little bit numb, but not the end of the world, but absolutely not what I was expecting.

STUART:

Did your hand swell up like a catcher’s mitt?

SCIRPUS:

No. Well, what was funny is that when I had called it into the medic as a non-emergency, and he laughed on the radio thinking that there wouldn’t be scorpions on playa. Really? Speaking of ‘expect the unexpected,’ you should…

STUART:

Right! They wander in from the shoreline. You’re right. And the shoreline is a super interesting place. There’s a whole lot of activity out there. I’ve seen stuff on the shoreline, big predatory insects, solpugids, those crazy wind scorpions. Have you ever seen one of those?

SCIRPUS:

Yeah, those things are insane.

STUART:

If that was as big as a dog, it would just… you would have no place to hide. With that like four-way jaw, I guess, it looks like a four-way jaw because it’s front legs are kind of short and form two other little mandibles under the jaw. Anyway, it’s got this crazy, crazy looking business end.

SCIRPUS:

It’s what nightmares are made out of. When you look at a lot of insects under scanning electron microscopes and such, and you just see all the detail that you wouldn’t normally be able to see with the naked eye.

STUART:

There’s some big suckers out there too. I remember the only tarantula I’ve ever seen in the wild was out on the shoreline of Blue Wing Playa, and it was bigger than my hand. I don’t know if it was somebody’s runaway pet or whatever. I mean tarantulas? Did you ever see any tarantulas at Fly?

SCIRPUS:

I did not see any tarantulas. There were some holes that could have had tarantulas in them. I wasn’t necessarily keen into sticking sticks into random holes to see what would come out of it. I know that there’s some people that get a lot of enjoyment out of that, but…

STUART:

Mmhm. Yeah, no. I don’t think so. 

SCIRPUS:

I’d rather identify plants, things I know won’t attack me.

STUART:

Laying down on your belly and looking at a plant through a magnifying glass. So yeah. What else?

SCIRPUS:

Well, there’s the fairy shrimp. I mean that’s our, the poster child for conservation in the Black Rock Desert. There are very few things that actually live out there and can exist out there on a full-time basis, and that’s the fairy shrimp. But they’re only there for a short amount of time.

STUART:

Well, they’re only active for a short amount of time. Don’t they go into some kind of weird dormant sleep where they can survive? I mean they go into a hibernation mode, right?

SCIRPUS:

Well the eggs – they’re actually called cysts – they can persist for up to 17 years without any water. And then the usual fairy shrimp life cycle is about two weeks long where they just mate and mate and mate and make more eggs, cysts, and sometimes if the water persists, they just continue doing that. But I had seen some of the giant fairy shrimp that were about two and a half inches long.

STUART:

No way. Like jumbo fairy shrimp? Fairy shrimp scampi? 

SCIRPUS:

I guess in an emergency I could eat a fairy shrimp. I guess it would kind of be like shrimp.

STUART:

That’s big enough to eat, two and a half inches. That’s bigger than a cocktail shrimp. Is it legal to eat them?

SCIRPUS:

They’re not endangered.

STUART:

Are they protected?

SCIRPUS:

Nope.

STUART:

Okay. They’re just weird. Is that the same thing that – I remember when I was a kid in the back of the comic books, there used to be that ad for sea monkeys. They would send you some kind of dried hibernating egg thing, cyst, and you’d put water in it and they would grow up and have little crowns on them and act like royalty. Were those fairy shrimp?

SCIRPUS:

Yeah, that’s exactly it.

STUART:

So there was a commercial market for fairy shrimp for a while: Sea monkeys.

SCIRPUS:

You get the packet of the ferry shrimp and then the packet of all their costumes that you put in there and see what they end up choosing.

STUART:

Or if you had leftover costumes for your flea circus, they could probably wear those.

SCIRPUS:

Exactly.

STUART:

That is amazing. I mean, to me, any creature that can survive like that for such a long period of time. It makes me think of cicadas sometimes have seven year cycles or longer where they only hatch out at a time – I guess the Mormon crickets do too, right?

SCIRPUS:

Yeah, I believe so.

STUART:

They don’t get that hatch out every year.

SCIRPUS:

They’re cannibals too, so if you are, you kill one while driving, then the crickets that are passing by will try to eat that. And if they slow down, then other crickets will try to eat the ones that are eating the dead crickets. And so it just comes into this massive traffic jam of cannibal crickets.

STUART:

I understand that when they cross a road, there’s like a cricket-slick.

SCIRPUS:

Sometimes roads have to be shut down to be cleaned because it’s a danger to cars because there’s so many dead crickets that you could slide. I haven’t personally seen this or experienced this, but a researcher I was talking to last weekend said that she had seen that.

STUART:

So the swarming thing? Does that always happen? Or is there some little chemical switch that makes them go into swarms? Is it like that pheromone that gets released when people turn into a mob and sort of lose their minds? Is it something like that?

SCIRPUS:

I don’t know if it’s something that’s related to, like they have an eight or 10 year cycle or something like that where you just get the massive broods coming out, or if it’s cued in through… so this has been an extremely wet year in Nevada, like insanely wet. And so all of the plants are loving it. They’re bright and green. You smell the air and it’s so intense with rabbit brush and sage, but that’s only what we can smell. So perhaps with the insects they’re cueing into something else making them come out in full force and migrate in full force.

STUART:

Water changes everything out there. I’m sure it’ll be a big year for rodents too, which means it’ll be a big year for predators. I’m sure there’s a lot of bobcat litters.

SCIRPUS:

Yeah, we’ll likely see a cycle of a lot more jackrabbits this year. I have hardly seen any jackrabbits the past few years, and I’m not entirely sure why that is, but we’ll probably see more of those, which means there’ll be more coyotes and other predators; the sort of cycle of increases in population of one thing leads to increase in populations to the other things and decreases in other, their prey.

STUART:

Well Lisa, you spent a year out at Fly Ranch surveying things out there. What’s at the top of the food chain out there? Is it mountain lions come down and take stuff out?

SCIRPUS:

Definitely mountain lions.

STUART:

Yeah, the puma.

SCIRPUS:

I never seen… I’ve seen evidence of them, their paw prints in the wet ground, but I set up a ton of motion activated cameras throughout the property just so I would be able to get a sense for what’s there when I’m not around. I got some pretty epic photos of mountain lions.

STUART:

Yeah, they’re no dummies. They hunt at night, right?

SCIRPUS:

Yes, definitely. And there are a couple populations, or a couple bands, of wild horses that are at Fly Ranch, and you rarely see a foal make it to maturity because they’re usually hunted down by the mountain lions.

STUART:

I did not know that. I have seen the wild horses out there — all descended from a few runaways from Cortez’s cavalry, right?

SCIRPUS:

There are a few of them that I think were more recently part of a ranch or a farm, but they got let loose when there was a fire on the granite mountain range. There’s definitely some horses that are a little bit more friendly to humans, but the majority of them have a long history of roaming the range.

STUART:

Feral for 500 years. That’s amazing. And I recall they can be pretty pugnacious, too. A wild stallion, you basically don’t want to go anywhere near that beast.

SCIRPUS:

No, especially when you’re next to a water source. I had one of the bands come running at me when I was just wandering around in the morning and they got about 20 feet away from me and they were stomping their hooves, and it was very, I just tried to make myself as big as humanly possible and just wait it out. And then eventually they realized that I wasn’t going to do anything, and then they ran off, and then that stallion got in a fight with another stallion of the other band that was there. And you could just feel the force of that fight, like when they kicked each other, when they were up in the air and then landed on the ground. I was several hundred feet away and I could still feel it and hear it. It was intense. Horses have a lot of power. 

My general practice is: I don’t want to get any closer to them where my thumb can’t cover them up. You just hold your hand out, put your thumb out, and if it’s covered, the horse is covered, you’re good. You’re far enough away that you’re not going to bother them. Just keep your distance.

STUART:

I have to ask, is that where the phrase ‘rule of thumb’ comes from? Yeah, that’s good. “Okay, bear, you’re bigger than my thumb. I’m skedaddling.” — or anything that might have its way with you.

SCIRPUS:

Oh, I love that.

STUART:

So I’m sure you got a million critter stories out there, but from all that time you spent on Fly, tell us a little bit more about what it was living out there, a lot of it pretty much all on your lonesome, out there on that beautiful piece of land, kind of the middle of nowhere, past the end of the pavement, right?

SCIRPUS:

Yeah, definitely. Well, I just by nature, I like solitude. I don’t mind being by myself or a lone wolf, so having the opportunity to just explore. I had set guidelines on what it was that I was supposed to be looking for or looking at or describing, but for most of the time there it was just, “Okay, let’s just find a place to go and walk and see what I find.” I’m a botanist by training and so of course I’m drawn to the plants, and just trying to see what plants are there, how it varies over time. But having spent most of my time in California, I didn’t really know that much about the species of Nevada, so it was a great opportunity for me to get to know what’s in my home region, where I live now.

STUART:

I guess I should apologize for calling you a biologist earlier.

SCIRPUS:

That’s fine. That’s a catchphrase, for everything. You’re safe calling me a biologist.

STUART:

Okay, it’s a big enough lasso…

SCIRPUS:

Yeah.

STUART:

…catch all the wild horses. You must have had some really kind of moments of awe and surprise out there. How have you been surprised by the wildlife out there in the Great Basin?

SCIRPUS:

There is such diversity here in Nevada that you wouldn’t necessarily notice just by driving by. You do have to spend some time in a place to get to see the seasonality with it, especially with the birds. There was one bird in particular, I think it’s called Greater Yellow Legs? And it’s just a small bird, maybe like a foot tall, but this bird migrates from Canada to South America, and I just happened to catch it as it was just taking a little break at one of the reservoirs at Fly, just considering that massive migration that it was undertaking. I saw that same species both on its way going north and going south and across several years too. So there’s definitely site-fidelity for these migratory birds, and so even if they aren’t there for very long, the fact that there is all the water that’s out at Fly Ranch or in other areas of the Great Basin, it’s really important to keep these water sources flowing and available because it’s more than just humans or cattle that use the water. It’s so many other species.

STUART:

Yeah, a wetland like that in the middle of such a big desert is really kinda miraculous, isn’t it?

SCIRPUS:

Yeah. Just this past weekend we had a bio blitz out on Fly Ranch where we had members from the Spring Stewardship Institute and researchers associated with the University of Nevada, Reno, looking at the springs and other insects and birds and plants, and in particular the people that were looking at the springs were amazed at just how many small springs are on the property. The fact that there’s so many different temperatures of these springs and you can have a cold spring right next to a hot spring; there’s no rhyme or reason to it. And then there’s all this associated biodiversity with these springs, whether it’s hot or cold. And so just having these scientists there that were completely nerding out on catching swimming beetles or trying to identify the small snails that are there, all the dragonflies. It was neat. 

I tend to look at things more on a macro scale, and everyone there was looking at everything so small. It’s hard for me to get to learn the insects and other invertebrates that are out there. And there’s so much, probably so many things that are endemic to this area, and so they don’t live anywhere else, but we have no idea about that. It’s so poorly studied, especially because it’s private land. You know, you don’t – researchers don’t necessarily get the opportunity to study in private land.

STUART:

Let’s talk about the snails. There is an aquatic snail out there that is protected or endangered?

SCIRPUS:

I don’t believe that it has an official regulatory status, but I do know that it is only found, so far, found in one spring of Fly Ranch.

STUART:

What is this odd creature that only lives on one spring of Fly Ranch?

SCIRPUS:

For short we call it a pyrg (Pyrgulopsis bruesi). It is an at-risk, highly vulnerable freshwater snail that lives only at Fly Ranch. It is super tiny. Like, if you were to look at your keyboard and look at the period on your keyboard, it’s probably about half the size of that marker.

STUART:

Of the key, or of the period?

SCIRPUS:

Of the period. Yeah. They’re super small. There are a couple other species of snails that are equally as small that are out there.

STUART:

But you put it under a magnifying glass and it looks like a snail. It’s got a shell, and a little slug foot.

SCIRPUS:

Yeah, it’s actually quite a pretty shell. And there was an art piece at Burning Man 2022 where they were highlighting endangered species, or species that had gone extinct within the United States, and they actually made a large-scale replica of this Fly Ranch pyrg to be on display at the event.

STUART:

Is that the one that you can drive around in? The Snail Art Bar?

SCIRPUS:

No. It’s a different shell form. No, this is about the size of a golf cart. Massive in size in respect to the actual size of the snail, but still small.

STUART:

Well, that is one of the fun things to play with is size and perspective and scale out there, right? It’s just the nature of the place tends to make little things big and big things little, and you just don’t know what’s going on.

SCIRPUS:

What was surprising to me was that, so one of the first art pieces that came out to Fly Ranch was The Pier. On playa it seemed so huge and so tall. In this perspective, once you walk up this, I don’t know, maybe a hundred foot long pier, you’re about 10 feet off the ground when you’re at the edge, and it just seemed, you know, since there’s nothing really else out on the playa, that piece is really impactful, but once you get it out at Fly Ranch where there’s more… the geology, there’s more like elevation change and plants and other things. The pier just seemed so small in comparison to how it felt out on playa. Still neat to have it out there; can make a lot of jokes with people who are there for nature walks that that was around since when it was a, Lake Lahonton , that pier was there.

STUART:

It was still Lahonton Marina.

SCIRPUS:

Yes. Circa 10,000 years ago, or however long that was.

STUART:

Yeah. I wanted to talk about native versus invasive species, because I know that’s a big concern at Fly, at least with plant life, that so much of the flora out there is – the Russian olive and all these other species that aren’t native to it. Are there any non-native animals?

SCIRPUS:

Yeah, there are actually quite a few. Well, the horses, the cattle that are on the property.

STUART:

Horses were native 10,000 years ago and then they died out, right?

SCIRPUS:

Right.

STUART:

Yeah. Until Cortez, right? So horses, cattle, foxes? I know that one of the foxes, I think it’s the red fox, was imported for hunting by somebody who wanted to ride to the hounds.

SCIRPUS:

I haven’t seen any red foxes there. I’ve seen little kit foxes, and those are ridiculously cute, but those are native.

STUART:

They really are.

SCIRPUS:

Pretty much everything that I saw while I was out there was all native. I saw a badger. Luckily I was in my car just driving by, but those things always look mean. I want nothing to do with a badger.

STUART:

I can’t blame you for that. I just read somewhere that dachshunds were bred to kill badgers, and I just can’t imagine a dachshund going up against a badger and winning.

SCIRPUS:

Wow, I’m going to spend some time thinking about how that would work. Because badgers have short legs too, so it’s not like, yeah. Oh my goodness. That’s insane.

STUART:

I think nobody would ever see that fight because it would all be down in the badger’s burrow, right? 

SCIRPUS:

Right. 

STUART: 

You couldn’t get it on cable, the pay-per-view.

SCIRPUS:

But there are a lot of pronghorn antelope that come onto the property, and I think they’re my favorite mammal. They look like they’re an alien species if you really stare at their faces are really unique, and they’re extremely inquisitive, and if you pose no obvious threat to them, they’ll follow you around — or at least there was one that kind of followed me around, kept it distance, but wasn’t threatened at all. And I was equally as curious about it as it was about me. 

When you have the opportunity to exist without having a lot of other human interference like sounds and generators and that sort of thing, and you’re just in their territory walking around, I think animals can sense what your intention is.

STUART:

The fact that you’re not carrying a gun I think is probably big too.

SCIRPUS:

Well, actually, I did carry a gun when I was out there. Just a small revolver that the majority of it had a snake shot in it. I never shot it, not even once, but just the fact that most people in Nevada would have a gun on them if they’re wandering around. It just seemed like a necessary tool.

STUART:

Sure. Rattlers sometimes cannot be reasoned with.

SCIRPUS:

And oddly enough, I did not see a single rattlesnake when I was out there.

STUART:

Not one?

SCIRPUS:

I saw them on the roads, but not one at Fly. There have been several people that have seen them this year, like in the operations center, but I have yet to see one.

STUART:

Probably Western Diamondbacks would be the native one out there.

SCIRPUS:

Yup. I have seen some awfully large bull snakes. One was about six feet long, and it was not happy at all that it was anywhere close to it, that it actually did the curling up like it was getting ready to strike.

STUART:

A six foot snake. Yeah. They’re not poisonous though, are they?

SCIRPUS:

No, they’re not poisonous.

STUART:

Yeah, I’ve seen king snakes that big, or bigger. The same thing: at first glance to the uninitiated, it looks like a rattlesnake.

SCIRPUS:

Yep.

STUART:

They’re much cooler.

SCIRPUS:

Yeah.

STUART:

The pronghorn. I mentioned guns because I know they were, through a lot of the west, they were hunted nearly to extinction, right?

SCIRPUS:

Mmhm.

And so I think they must have it in their, in their brains too, when they see a long gun to go the other way. Or maybe like other species, they know when the season is.

SCIRPUS:

Yeah, definitely.

STUART:

I’ve heard tales of deer having it dialed in pretty precisely when the season opens and where they can be in a particular place before they have to, like, get out of bounds. Who knows? But yeah, prongies are gorgeous. My last visit up there, I saw some right down next to the fence on 447. Stopped, and then they didn’t run away. They just, you’re right. They’re curious. They just sort of stared at me, and I stared back and then we went our separate ways. 

And then the cows, man, there’s so many free range beef out there, and that is of course, for our listeners, we should caution that, more dangerous than any rattlesnake, or mountain lion is the prospect of running into a free range cow on Highway 447, because they’re out there. There’s fences and then there’s those cattle guards, and then there are those cattle guards that are just painted in the road instead of actual cattle guards. If you think about that too long, you’ll go crazy. Are there the equivalent of that in my, is that a metaphor for something? If I just see that barrier, I won’t cross it even if it’s not dangerous to me?

SCIRPUS:

Definitely.

STUART:

But yeah, number one reason not to get too carried away with the lead foot, on the highways out there. One close encounter with a free range bovine will definitely ruin your day and your car, and who knows what else.

SCIRPUS:

Yes, my great late friend, Cowboy Carl said, if you wanted to get somewhere faster, you should have left sooner. There’s no need to rush anywhere that you’re going in the desert. There’s no need to drive at night, no need to speed, because you never know what’s going to be around the corner. And cows don’t move. If they’re in the road, they don’t move. If you honk those little whistles that you put on your car, like the deer whistles, that doesn’t affect cows. They just stare at you. Chew their cud. 

STUART:

So they’re like, “What? You looking at me?” Unless you run into the occasional angry bull and then, yeah, they’ll treat you like a wild stallion, only bigger. No. Are there any wild cattle? Do they do roundups of the dogies? They must have rodeo.

SCIRPUS:

There is a ranch that’s right next to Fly Ranch that the Jacksons own, and the Jacksons have been ranching there for, I don’t know, well over a hundred years, but their cattle are somewhat free range. They don’t really necessarily have anybody that’s guiding them, but they just seem to know where they want to go during the summer up into the mountains, and then they just slowly start to make their way back, where they know that there’s going to be food during the winter. Sometimes you see some cowboys kind of wrangling them up, but for the most part, they inherently know where to go. Like a big cow migration. It’s pretty fascinating to me. I don’t really know anything about cows, but just the fact that they just know, just like the birds, they know where to go when to go there.

STUART:

Yeah, and it’s a very, very long, ancient relationship between humans and cows. When I was doing the research for the theme essay, I ran across some indications of the orax. The wild ancestor of cattle who was worshiped as like a deity. Think about all the crazy mythology, the minotaur is a good example of that, or that whole culture of jumping over bulls, or bull fighting, or whatever. It’s like it goes way back, our sort of love-hate, master-slave, predator-prey relationship with cows. So the cow you see today on 447 is a faint echo of I guess what the wild one used to be, but it will still destroy your car. So. Don’t let it.

SCIRPUS:

And it’ll still destroy the vegetation too. It’s amazing the impact that cows have on the sagebrush steppe.

STUART:

Tell me more about that.

SCIRPUS:

Cows will just eat and eat and eat, and they will just roam around and they’ll eat any of the forbs; so those are the nice leafy greens of the plant world, so they reduce biodiversity. They tend to bring in other invasive species because they eat them, and then they, as they’re wandering around, they defecate, and then the seeds will grow or germinate within the cow patties. So they’re excellent distributors of invasive species. But just over time, depending on how many cows are being grazed in a given area and where they’re coming from, they can completely change what the vegetation landscape looks like. I’ve kind of grown accustomed of just seeing the many parts of Nevada looking the way they do just because, I mean, that’s just the way it is, but there are so many smaller species of plants that have just been eradicated from areas that are grazed.

And as part of the bio blitz that happened last weekend, there were some of the researchers that were hoping to see wildflowers were feeling sort of disappointed of how barren the landscape was out at Fly. Like, there are a ton of plants there, but the diversity is gone. One of the pushes that we should do, or next steps at Fly, is to try to introduce some of these pollinator species, some of these smaller species that used to be there, but are no longer there because of the cattle, over a century of grazing, or 150 years of grazing, they just eradicated.

STUART:

Yeah, I know that those desert pollinators evolve in various specific ways for that. I spent a lot of time in the deserts of Baja, CA. And when it rains there, a little tiny flower? You can smell it like a hundred yards away, that they have to broadcast that scent further because there’s so much open space and there aren’t as many bees or whatever to come and pollinate it. My wife likes to pick a few plants here and there when we go traveling and take them home. She took a couple of the wildflowers from the Baja Desert, brought them home, and they grew ten times the size and had one 20th of the odor.

SCIRPUS:

Oh, wow.

STUART:

You got them in a wet environment and it totally changed their phenotype. It’s pretty interesting.

SCIRPUS:

God, I love plants. And chances are… were they white flowers.

STUART:

White flowers or yellow flowers. Yeah.

SCIRPUS:

White flowers tend to be pollinated by beetles and bats.

STUART:

Then came the bats.

SCIRPUS:

Yes.

STUART:

Now we’re back to talking about mezcal, aren’t we?

SCIRPUS:

We are.

STUART:

Every conversation with you Lisa always comes back to Mezcal.

SCIRPUS:

I should have poured myself a little calita.

STUART:

No Mezcal in Sierra Leone? They probably have some local hooch of some kind there.

SCIRPUS:

Yeah, there was fermented coconut water. And I mean, it tasted a little fizzy. Like, it was probably not the best thing that I’ve ever had, but still it tasted live… alive.

STUART:

We think about bees as doing all the work, at least those of us in the U.S., but yeah: beetles, birds, bats. What else do bats pollinate besides agave plants?

SCIRPUS:

Well, a lot of the desert species are pollinated by bats. More like southern desert species, not up here in Nevada. I’m trying to think about what would be pollinated by bats up here. Mostly I just see the bats hunting insects at night.

STUART:

Yeah. Bats are definitely playa. They’ll come out on the playa in chase of prey. So the bugs will come out looking for us, the mosquitoes or whatnot, the flies. And the bats will come in. So this is another note to potential Burning Man participants: If you’re on a lot of acid and you feel like you’re being swarmed by bats at sunset, they actually might be bats.

SCIRPUS:

That’s real!

STUART:

“We can’t stop here. This is bat country.” No. You know what I’m saying? The bats are real, so…

SCIRPUS:

Luckily there aren’t too many frogbats that exist on playa, but…

STUART:

What’s a frogbat, Lisa???

SCIRPUS:

It was an experiment that went extremely wrong, where a bat and a frog met with some explosives and turned into this creature that likes to eat hippies. And there’s a group of people that try to eradicate them before the event happens, to make sure that the hippies are nice and safe.

STUART:

I believe the frogbat is a fairly large hybrid, and so what, six feet tall? Something like that?

SCIRPUS:

Yes.

STUART:

Fangs?

SCIRPUS:

Big fangs.

STUART:

Okay, come on. Really? What’s a frogbat? I mentioned it rather facetiously in the theme essay, but I think we can lift the curtain there today and say what the frogbat really was. This is an explosive target.

SCIRPUS:

Yes.

STUART:

…built by a friend of ours. Should he be named or no?

SCIRPUS:

unnamed…

STUART:

An unnamed person. And there’s a long, long and chequered history of shooting at explosive targets out in that part of the world — not at Burning Man, but in the vicinity, in the desert, far from the road, with a good, healthy firing line, way, way back. Okay. Maybe not that far back. Maybe further back once it starts going anyway. And the frogbat had a propane body and a tannerite head, if I remember correctly.

SCIRPUS:

Yes. And all sorts of other little explosives built in, fireworks with the lift charge taken off.

STUART:

Don’t try this at home, kids.

SCIRPUS:

Yeah. I never take part in the, the eradication of the frogbats. I like to have a meat shield in front of me, like a couple people in front, just in case something happens.

STUART:

It’s dangerous, dangerous work, but it’s got to be done. All right. Well, I don’t know if we want to actually tell that tale. Maybe it’s better just left a mystery because we love mystery, right?

SCIRPUS:

We do. We can’t tell everything. 

STUART:

Well, it was lovely talking with you Scirpus. Thanks very much for joining me.

SCIRPUS:

Always happy to chat with you, Stuart. Next time we’ll make sure that I have a little Mezcal, so as we are talking, just slightly sip a beautiful beverage. 

STUART:

That’s it for this one. You have been listening to Burning Man Live, which is, was and will hopefully always be a non-profit production brought to you commercial-free by Burning Man Project. Thanks to all of you who listened. Thanks to all of you who tell a friend. Thanks to all of you who send us email at live@burningman.org. And thanks to all of you who put a donation, possibly tax deductible donation, into the coin slot at donate.burningman.org. 

We are here until we turn the lights out and go to Black Rock City. I hope you’ll listen. I’ve heard that it’s not bad listening on your way out to the desert if you happen to have tickets to that thing in the desert. 

I want to thank everyone who made this episode possible. Thank you to my friends Vav-Michael-Vav, kbot, Rocky, Actiongirl, Deets, Kristy, the whole Communications team at Burning Man. And, thanks, Larry.

 

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