Unicorns and Desert Dunes

After watching a hyena devour an entire lamb and getting an extremely quizzical look from the kid serving me meat when I asked if the cow was corn or grass-fed, I've decided to try on vegetarianism for size. So far so good. I've had Israeli salad (onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, and olives) for six meals in a row. The most recent of which was epic--we ate Israeli salad and labanet (an Israeli cheesy yogurt) and pita bread and avocado and tehina (humus-like spread made from sesame seeds) under an acacia tree on a sand dune in the Samar as the sun sunk behind the Mountains of Moave. Delicious, all locally produced, fresh as can be, and with a garnish of Israeli Bedouin music.

The meal culminated our third class, Desert Biodiversity. The class was extremely rigorous...consisting of us running up and down sand dunes all afternoon and listening to a rambling, at times brilliant, lecture by Roee, one of the few desert ecologists in the region (apparently, the Israeli government isn't overly interested in salt brushes). The lecture was frequently interjected by diatribes against the ills of local agriculture which is apparently diverting water for irrigation and rapidly dehydrating and demolishing the majority of natural plant and animal life. He expounded his point as we sat on a field of emerald green lawn-grass smack in the middle of the barren dunes. The plot uses 1100 liters of local water daily in a region that saw 3 mm of rainfall this year, and is sold to local hotels who want to accommodate Western tourists.

The desert field work complemented our morning class, a lecture on the regional desert, Arava's, ecology, by Dr. Elli Groner, the academic director of the Arava institute. He does all sorts of work, including spearheading one of the first bilateral environmental projects with Jordan, LTER, that works to get Israel and Jordan to collaborate on desert ecology research, conservation, and education. He's chalk-full of answers to desert enigmas, like how such a barren environment can support the abundant plant life necessary for a healthy ecosystems. The secret? It doesn't. Instead, of plants, the desert depends primarily on bacteria to perform photosynthesis and detritus, dry leaves and remains, to supply calories. The dry leaves come from the approximately five fauna species that were brilliant enough to survive the nutrient-starved sand, killer plus-130 degree summer heat, and relentless battering wind. The plants have developed all sorts of weird adaptations like decoupling photosynthesis into night and day processes to avoid daytime blaze and growing to be abnormally tall and thin so they can absorb maximum crepuscular light and minimum midday heat. Instead of herbivores, the desert houses detritivores, relatives of the ubiquitous Palo Alto rolly polly, that scavenge the dry leaves and bacterial crust. Instead of carnivores, there are insectivores, which in the Southern Arava includes all sort of funky creatures like skinks, metallic lizards that slither and whose legs are about as useful as our appendices, sun spiders which are neither yellow nor spiders but are large enough to feed on birds and mammals, and snakes who hop sideways instead of slithering.

Yes, the desert has several herbivores and carnivores, but they are far from traditional. We got to see several up close yesterday, when we visited the Hai Bar Nature Reserve that tends injured and endangered species for rehabilitation and reintroduction into the region. All sorts of obscure animals were running around, like addaxes, ibexes, and onegers. Not to mention ostriches, which are apparently simply too irremediably dumb to ever be reintroduced to the region. The reserve attempted to release a population several years ago, and the ostriches did brilliant things like lay their eggs in the middle of the road and wander up to Bedouin encampments to chat (ostriches, as a Bedouin informed me, taste 'tayyib' just like chicken). Ah, and we got to see a unicorn! Seriously, we saw the Crusaders' white single-horned horse-like mythical creatures from far-away lands. Though, it would appear the Anglo-Saxons didn't have any good biologists in their day, for the oryxes certainly do not fly and most have two horns. (Or perhaps their sight was addled by their genius decision to march through the scorching desert in full-length chain mail).

Just because my classes have thus far consisted of watching leopards elegantly slink by isn't the only reason why this place is awesome. For one, no one bats an eye when I wander into class barefoot. In fact, my Mowhawk-totting Sasha Cohen look-alike professor Uri, who has a doctorate in anarchy from Oxford, actually gave me a rainbow drug-rug to keep me warm in the blasting air conditioning instead. Then, there's the fact that it's remarkably unusual to run into a group of Arab and Israeli kids in the evening that aren't sitting around a circle with a guitar inviting you to partake. Also, the whole lifestyle lives and breathes sustainability. We compost and recycle pretty much everything (I couldn't even tell you where the nearest trash can is) and use non-potable water for pretty much everything else (like showering with a bucket and using the run-off to hydrate the watermelon). Even the furniture is sustainable--the walls in the institute and the chairs and benches around the caravans where we live are made from hay overlain with mud. Not to mention, there's something slightly chill about being able to blog wirelessly in a wadi, a dried out stream, under the waning moon and desert stars.