My class was busy looking for aquatic insects in the pools and sometimes flowing parts of Clanton Creek in Clanton Draw (Yes- those Clantons!) on the east side of the Peloncillo Mountains. This is a little known gem of a canyon in the Coronado National Forest and its biodiversity is amazing. In the pools one could find large giant water bugs, waterstriders, mosquito wigglers, water boatmen, backswimmers, sunburst diving beetles, creeping water bugs, and waterscorpions. We had permission from the Coronado National Forest to collect there, as we did when I taught arachnology. Arachnids were also abundant, especially when the summer rains were good. I had loved the area ever since I had first seen it when I got permission to do research on the Gray Ranch, which abutted on the Coronado National Forest to the east, in 1990. I visited Clanton Draw regularly for years, always finding something of interest. Sometimes I was alone and would also visit the area of San Luis Pass, hiking into the Animas Mountains. After ten years or so new management came to the Gray and I no longer had access, but I could still enter the National Forest at Clanton Draw.
My last visit was in 2015, when I was a co-teacher of a field course in spider identification for the American Museum of Natural History, based at the Southwestern Research Station at Cave Creek in the nearby Chiricahua Mountains. By the last trip Clanton Draw was depressingly dry, except for some seep areas in the upper part of the canyon. It was a far cry from the visits I had when the creek was running and it made me worry about the state of the area as global climate change ramps up.
Clanton Draw is only one part of the fascinating ecosystems of the Peloncillo range, which stretches from nearly the Gila River in Arizona nearly to the Mexican Border in New Mexico. I never visited the northernmost part, but I did see a lot of the southern part. This included visits to the other side of Clanton Draw (over Geronimo Pass and past Skeleton Canyon, where Geronimo surrendered to General Nelson A. Miles in 1886, and Old Man Clanton and his gang killed a group of Mexican smugglers; the Mexican Rurales ambushed and killed him and several of his gang later in Guadalupe Canyon as they were camped with their stolen heard of cattle, both events occurring in 1881), Granite Pass where the road to Rodeo goes through the mountains, Owl Canyon near Rodeo, and the now defunct “town” of Cloverdale.
As to the biodiversity, only a relatively few taxa have been examined at all. Here follows a rather nerdy account of what I know about the fauna and flora. Dr. Richard Worthington of UTEP documented over 850 species of vascular plants and mosses in the mountains (personal communication). Other taxa have not been studied to my knowledge, but Cook (1986, Occasional Papers of the Museum of Southwestern Biology 4:1-45) listed 76 species of mammals in the nearby Animas Mountains (52% of all known New Mexican species.) The insects and arachnids are very poorly known, but at various times my associates, students and I have found in the Peloncillos all of the aquatic insects listed above, plus the arachnids Aphonopelma peloncillo (tarantula), Diplocentrus peloncillensis (scorpion), Centruroides sculpturatus (Arizona bark scorpion), Euagrus chisoseus (tiny diplurid funnelweb tarantula), Diguetia canites (coneweb spider), Dipoena nigra (one of the comb-footed spiders), Euryopis sp. (another comb-footed spider), Latrodectus hesperus (western black widow), Steatoda sp. (yet another comb-footed spider), Allocosa subparva (a wolf spider), Pardosa valens (another wolf spider), Schizocosa mccooki (yet another wolf spider), Calilena arizonica (a funnelweb-weaver), Cicurina sp. (a dictynid spider), Selenops actophilus (a wall crab spider), Metaphidippus chera (a jumping spider), Pellenes sp. (another jumping spider), Phidippus carneus (yet another jumping spider), Sassacus papenhoei (another jumping spider that looks like a leaf beetle). As the spider fauna of the nearby Chiricahua Mountains tops 400 species (one third of the total fauna of Arizona, New Mexico and Trans-Pecos Texas) these are just a sampling of the biodiversity just of the arachnids. Incidentally, not far from Clanton Draw in the Animas Valley, we trapped Anopheles freeborni , the western malaria mosquito and around lights I picked up at least two species of male army ants (Neivamyrmex spp.) On the other side of the Peloncillos at Owl Canyon, I collected a series of leaf-cutting ants (Acromyrmex versicolor.)
In just the New Mexico part of the Peloncillo Mountains, 74 species of short-horned grasshoppers (Acrididae and Romaleidae), have been documented (Richman et al. 1993. A Manual of the Grasshoppers of New Mexico, NMSU Cooperative Extension.) This is over a third of the species known for the state and includes several Sierra Madrean species. Otherwise we know little of the insect fauna- the Hemiptera, Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Diptera, most of the Lepidoptera, minor orders, and the rest of the Orthoptera. The harvestmen, mites and ticks, and pseudoscorpions are likewise little known. Anything in the microscopic biota is pretty much totally unknown.
Even though I have spent many hours in the Peloncillos, I cannot say that I know them well. The drug war hit the area south of the border hard and I sometimes heard small planes skirting the Animas Mountains prior to the hostilities. I was not sure if the planes were Border Patrol or drug smugglers. I applied for a grant to study the arthropod fauna, but lost out because I did not propose to continue the study below the border. By that time the drug war was starting and I was not going to risk the life of our potential post-doc south of the border.
Now we have the proposed border wall and the real fact that as global climate change continues the area may well become even dryer. Since I have little control of what is happening on the border I can only grieve for the mountains and their current flora and fauna. Some things will obviously hang on, but the changes that I have seen there and in the nearby Chiricahua Mountains do not bode well for the area. I will almost certainly never see Clanton Draw again, but I had about 15 years of access, even if I could not get there often.
Following are some of the photographs I took there during my last two visits and a few from other parts of the mountain range during various trips.