The Huachuca water umbel doesn’t look like much. Its spindly green leaves grow close to the ground, sprouting from a network of underground stems along the desert springs and streams of southern Arizona. In these oases, the umbel nestles its roots in the soft earth, making itself at home alongside grasses, reeds, sedges, and the herbivores that feed on them.
My encounters with the umbel happen every Thursday morning at the Phoenix Zoo. At 7 a.m., I scan my keycard at the gate to the Conservation Center, a set of one-story beige buildings at the back of the zoo. Once inside, I head past the ferruginous pygmy-owl enclosures and the black-footed ferret breeding center to the open-air stream habitat. I grab a shovel and a kneepad, pick a spot on the bank, and put my earbuds in. Then I start weeding.
Protected by the Endangered Species Act in 1997, the Huachuca water umbel is primarily threatened by habitat destruction — the groundwater pumping and sprawling development that destroy the desert wetlands the plant depends on. The patches of umbel at the Phoenix Zoo are protected not only from development but also from rabbits, which love to feast on umbels. (Umbels are, as it happens, members of the carrot family.) The hope is that here, in safety, the umbel can be coaxed into blooming and that plants grown from its seeds can be used to establish new populations in the wild. But the zoo’s overworked employees have little time to devote care and attention to the plant, and it rarely flowers.
My introduction to the umbel did not come through the plant itself, but rather through one of the documents designed to protect it. For my Ph.D. dissertation at Arizona State University, I’ve been studying the recovery plans that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service develops for endangered species. When I volunteered to help the umbel, I looked up its plan, which had finally been completed in 2017 — 20 years after the plant first received protection under the Endangered Species Act. When I clicked on the link for the plan’s “Implementation Progress,” it was clear that very little progress had been made:
“Not started, planned, partially complete, not started, ongoing current, planned, not started, planned, not started…”
Not one of the plan’s 24 action items, which range from monitoring water availability over time to designing protections against predators like rabbits, is completed, and almost half of them are not yet underway. This isn’t unusual: Owing to funding and staff shortages, recovery plans for endangered species are piling up faster than agency employees can read them, much less put them into practice. It’s a bleak situation, but as a researcher, I take heart from the potential for recovery — the knowledge that relatively simple actions can save species like the water umbel. Working at the zoo, with living plants instead of forgotten documents, helps remind me what’s possible.
After 18 months of spending my Thursday mornings with the umbel, I had the opportunity to study abroad in Botswana, a trip that would take me out of the state for six weeks. I worried about leaving the plant for so long, but I knew it was in good hands.
In Botswana, I saw animals I knew only from zoos roaming free. The landscape was big enough to swallow me whole, but the abundance of life there swaddled and anchored me. The wind reminded me of the air I breathed; the animals reminded me of what I hope to spend my career protecting. One evening in the Okavango Delta, I watched a small herd of elephants quietly browsing, their long gray trunks caressing the leaves of the mopane trees. An email update from the zoo informed me that life was thriving there, too: The umbel had finally flowered.
But Phoenix was experiencing its hottest summer on record, with 55 days at or above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Shortly before I left Botswana, I got another update from Phoenix. The zoo’s horticulture department planned to temporarily shut off the water supply to the conservation creek, leaving it vulnerable for about 12 days.
When I returned to the zoo, the umbel’s green mat had been reduced to a wispy brown skeleton. At first, I blamed myself for leaving, maybe because guilt allowed me to maintain some illusion of control. But I couldn’t control the climate, or the umbel, for that matter. All I could do was continue to show up on Thursday mornings, and by tending the umbel tend my sense of possibility. My seemingly small actions had worked before, and I had to have faith that they would again.
For the first few weeks, then, I cleared away the dead, tending to any shoots that had managed to get through the mini drought. I made my way up and down the stream, pulling the weeds that had grown in my absence, giving the umbel room to breathe.
As summer turned into fall, giving the earth more time to hydrate, the soil began to stay wetter and the barren, muddy banks began to fill with green. Short and stubby at first, the leaves began to lengthen. Now, as the year comes to an end, they are long enough to wrap around my finger. Come spring and summer, the umbel may flower again.
Olivia Davis is a Ph.D. candidate at Arizona State University, where her dissertation research focuses on endangered species recovery planning.
This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation.
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