The Mohawk Valley

I walked another 5.14 miles in San Diego today, according to my fitbit.  On the mapped route to Washington D.C., that continues my "journey" along the northern edge of the Mohawk Valley, as you can see above.

"The Mohawk Valley is a valley in the lower regions of the western Gila River Valley in southwestern Arizona in the western Sonoran Desert" (Wikipedia).  (That's where I still am in my slow trek towards Phoenix on the map.) I've been searching for why the Mohawk Valley, the town of Mohawk, and the Mohawk range are named "Mohawk," since the Mohawk Indians are in New York.  What I've found so far is that Mohawk was established as a railroad station in 1877 at the Northern end of the Mohawk mountains.  A post office was established there on June 25th, 1890, by George W. Norton, the postmaster.  Before that, in 1864, someone named, "Poston," said of Mohawk, "Mohawk station with its misplaced name," so apparently he too felt the station was oddly named.  Mohawk Valley seems to be named for Mohawk, which seems to be named for the mountains.  The Mohawk Mountains were originally named "Cerro de San Pascual" by Anza on his 1774 expedition.  But, how they came to be called the "Mohawk" mountains is still a mystery to me.  Perhaps someone from New York, where the Mohawk tribe is, decided to name the mountains in Arizona the Mohawk range.

The Mohawk Valley along the Gila River proper contains the agricultural communities of Wellton, Noah, Roll, Tacna, and Mohawk. This river stretch of the valley is mostly east-west trending, and extends northeasterly upstream to the adjacent Hyder Valley; to the west the Gila River turns northwest through the Dome Valley which lies between the Gila Mountains and the Muggins Mountains Wilderness on the northeast. (Wikipedia)

The southern portion of the Mohawk Valley is an extensive plain extending south, and uphill towards Sonora, Mexico and the valley extends, on its eastern end, southwards, ending at the Tule Desert and the Sierra Pinta on the west; the eastern side of this southern stretch of the valley is bordered by the Mohawk and Bryan Mountains. (Wikipedia)

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If you were driving in your car in my neighborhood in San Diego, you probably wouldn't even have noticed this white agapantha.  Even if you were walking, as I was, you might not have noticed another every-day detail.  Do you see it?  Here, let me magnify it a bit. Do you see it now?

Yes, that's right, the bee.  "Oh...it's just a bee," you might say.  Well, actually, it's not "just" a bee, it is also a "pollinator."  Everything we eat depends on pollinators, even meat, because without pollinators, the plants that feed the animals we eat would not reproduce.

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The crops along the way in Arizona's Mohawk valley would not reproduce either.  Here's a list of all the agricultural products that come from the Mohawk valley: Alfalfa hay, barley, sorgum (for feed lots), wheat, bermuda (for grass seed), specialty seeds (such as lettuce, okra, onion, cauliflower,broccoli, and alfalfa), cotton, citrus, lettuce, melons, nuts, safflower,cattle, and sheep.  And all of them depend on pollinators for their survival, either directly or indirectly.

For over two decades, biologists have been concerned about the decline in pollinator populations, especially those that migrate across landscapes and between regions. These flyway habitats are threatened by destruction, degradation, and fragmentation due to land conversion, herbicides, pesticides, and exotic plant invasion. The nectar corridor that extends from southern Mexico north to the Intermountain West of the U.S. and Canada is of particular concern. Lesser long-nosed bats (Leptonycteris curasoae), rufous hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus), western white-winged doves (Zenaida asiatica mearnsii), and monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus), and other migratory pollinators move seasonally along this corridor traveling between the tropics and their northern breeding/birthing grounds. These types of migrations have been termed "endangered natural phenomena." (Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum)  

So, the pollinators are not only feeding us, but we are feeding (or killing) them because of the plants we choose to grow as crops, and how we manage the land and crops, particularly with the use of pesticides.  We are all interconnected.

Pollinators are "keystone species," linking the fate of many other species scattered over large landscapes. Continued conservation of these species will inevitably benefit overall regional and global biodiversity and the future well-being of humans. There is consensus among biologists that many migrant stopover sites have already been lost, migratory corridor habitats have been converted or fragmented, invasive plant species are out-competing native floral resources upon which these migrants depend, and many of the flowering plants these migrants visit are suffering low seed set due to pollen decline. The four species of pollinators that were the focus of this project are surrogates for the countless other migratory pollinator species that will survive only if we have a clear understanding of their biology and migrations and implement effective conservation plans. (Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum) 

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