Although during my BSc I studied natural sciences in Sicily, most of my fieldwork experience during my PhD was spent in maize, wheat, and oilseed rape fields. I had some flirting with Danish beech forests that generates a couple of interesting articles, but that was somehow secondary. When I got a postdoc scholarship at Ben Gurion University of the Negev (Israel) to work on an incredibly interesting project in a desert ecosystem, I was not really sure of what to expect. I had experienced some pretty warm and dry summers in Sicily, and long hours working under the burning sun near Córdoba in Argentina, but retrospectively that was not even close to Evrona Nature Reserve.
Evrona Nature Reserve is a hyper-arid desert ecosystem. It means that on average the area gets less than 25 mm of annual rainfall. Check how much do you get in your hometown for comparison, I guarantee, that’s not a lot. Some years it does not rain at all. In such a harsh environment there are not many trees. This is why the few that are there become so incredibly important. Two species of acacias (Vachellia tortilis and V. raddiana) are the only tree species that are tolerant enough to survive the desert. Other plants, animals, and even nomadic Bedouin people depend on acacias for shade, nitrogen-enriched soil, wood, and also food, if you are a gazelle or a bruchid beetle, for example. Too much undesired interest forced the acacias to arm themselves with chemical defences and nasty thorns. Lesson #1 for every desert ecologist is to watch out for acacia thorn. Nasty stuff, take my word.
Before stepping on the desert soil, I read pretty much everything I believed I should know about deserts, including the 2nd edition of The biology of deserts by David Ward, which is more or less equivalent to the Bible of desert ecologists. I was also very much aware of the tragic oil spill of December 2014, when about 5,000 m3 of crude oil leaked from a pipeline into the nature reserve. And of the previous one in 1975, when 10,000 m3 (!!) of crude oil leaked out of the pipeline in a similar fashion. Frankly, I suspected it already, but it was one more thing on the list to convince me of how persistent can be human beings when it comes to negligence and greed.
Two days after I arrived in Israel I was already working in the field (no lie!), and my last day of fieldwork was about 25 days before my flight out of the country. I don’t know about the other postdocs, but I calculated that of my postdoc year, I spent somewhere between 1.5-2 months of effective days of fieldwork in the desert. I am telling you in case you have any doubt: it was a lot of fun. My year working in Evrona Nature Reserve was incredibly successful and I learned many things. There were, and there are still, also many things that I don’t know about desert ecosystems. I consider it a fortune, as I don’t need to invent an excuse to go back studying these ecosystems one day. One of the things that I did not know (and this is not something you often read in ecology books) is the awe that deserts generate. Animals are not necessarily rare in deserts, but they surely are special. I don’t mean it only in the sense of their adaptations to cope with the environment (which sometimes are indeed very peculiar). It is something simpler but much more astonishing when you realise it. It is the archetypical feeling of meeting another animal in a place, and what a place.
I am cutting it short because this is the first article of my blog, and I decided that I should not go much over 1 page. The things that I learned about deserts are really, really interesting. Yet, I am not going to say anything about those. Sorry, no spoilers. I still hope someone is going to read the articles I co-authored once they are out (but I promise, I am going to provide the link and a lay summary in a future post).
I am going to confess only one thing. Besides the fox in The Little Prince, not many living beings end feeling something so special for a wheat field. Deserts are different, you get attached to them. They inspire you, they make you feel new emotions, they never make you feel bored, and you can bet on it, they leave you with the irresistible desire to come back.
