Customer Reviews

The View from Bald Hill: Thirty Years in an Arizona Grassland (Organisms and Environments)

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THE VIEW FROM BALD HILL: THIRTY YEARS IN AN ARIZONA GRASSLAND, Carl E. Bock, and Jane H. Bock (University of California Press, Berkeley CA 94720, 196pp.): For about twenty-five years, Drs. Carl and Jane Bock (both of them professors at the University of Colorado) have spent their summers in research at the National Audubon Society's 7,800 acre Appleton-Whittell Research Ranch 60 miles southeast of Tucson. Originally part of the Babocomari Grant, the Research Ranch and the land surrounding it had been heavily grazed by cattle for many years until 1968, when the Appleton family, who owned it at the time, removed the cattle altogether and dedicated the Ranch as an environmental preserve and as a lab for ecological research. The Bocks arrived soon afterward. This very readable book relates what they have learned over the years about an arid grassy region left entirely alone to be its natural self. Their book tells an exciting story about an increasingly rare kind of landscape.

In 1968, all cattle and other domestic animals were removed from the 7,800 acre Bald Hill ranch in southern Arizona. The authors moved to the ranch to conduct a lengthy experiment: what happens to ungrazed, unutilized, unmanipulated-by-man land? Not entirely unmanipulated, of course, natural events -- fire, flood, and drought were allowed to go unchecked and their impact evaluated. The results, the authors are quick to assert, are not all in yet -- but many of their findings and observations are interesting and subtle. For example, grazing -- or lack thereof -- has an impact on grasshopper, rodent, and bird populations, both in terms of their numbers and the species that are present. And there is no stability; a fire, a dry year, or a wet year can discombobulate what seemed a "natural" equilibrium.

"The View from Bald Hill" is a fine piece of nature writing with scientific content accumulated during 30 years of mostly passive observation of grass growing and birds buzzing on a a big chunk of semi-desert land. It tackles the long-term confrontation betweeen ranchers and environmentalists in a sensitive and fair way. The authors are environmentalists but not hostile to ranching. They tell us that they find ranchers "more interesting than lawyers, lobbyists, or legislators." Good photographs dot the text and an extensive bibliography and notes refers the reader to sources. This is an important book to read for those are interested in environmental issues in the Southwest.

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