Barren Hot Desert

To the casual observer who is walking in the month of June, out in the Chihuahuan Desert during the heat of the day, it can look like a pretty bleak place. They see some very hardy drought resistant plants and lots of stickery things that look pretty nasty and aggressive. Some pretty rocks and sand dunes, but not much else.

But looks can be very deceiving. If you get out there not long after sunrise you will see an immense number of tracks in the sand. If you keep your eyes open you may well even see some pottery shards left by the stone age native Americans who were living here a long time ago.

There are many kinds of birds, rodents, hares, rabbits, lizards, snakes, and insects many of which are primarily nocturnal. If you walk around a bit you may smell the odor of a skunk. Just after sunset I once had a dog return with his mouth full of porcupine quills. There are big horn sheep, pronghorn antelope, and coyotes. Once at night while driving slowly down a poorly maintained dirt road, I saw a swarm of what seemed at the time to be thousands of tarantulas, and one time I witnessed an enormous swarm of millions of desert locusts, Schistocerca gregaria which took hours to pass by.

I guess many things in life are this way. At first glance things often look much simpler than they really are.
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