Monday, March 17, 2014

Unruly Tumbleweeds Kick Up a Storm of Trouble in Southwest

Wilford Ransom woke on a Monday morning in January and discovered he was trapped inside his home in Clovis, N.M. The 80-year-old retiree tried to peer outside, but his windows were covered. He tried to open his door, but it would budge only a few inches. Frustrated, he called a police emergency hotline, asking to be rescued. Eventually, a neighbor helped dig him out through his garage. Mr. Ransom was held captive by an unruly bandit: a tangle of tumbleweeds big enough to surround his 1,600-square-foot house. A bumper crop of the stuff has sprouted across the Southwest U.S. this season, posing problems for ranchers and rural communities from Texas to Colorado. In music and movies, the solitary tumbleweed is a romantic motif of the Old West, symbolizing the free spirit of the prairie in classic cowboy songs such as “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.” In reality, “those Westerns don’t do ‘em justice,” says Mr. Ransom, a former bank security guard. “I don’t want to experience anything like that again. It was a little scary.” But the plants that are synonymous with the Wild West are actually interlopers. The two most common species, kochia and Russian thistle, are from Eurasia. And this winter, thanks to the Western drought, tumbleweeds are anything but lonesome. In summer, the bushy plants that become tumbleweeds can grow 3 to 6 feet tall. In winter, they wither and die, usually around the first freeze. When high winds blow, they get ripped out of the ground and roll away. The wiry weed carcasses often become interlocked with one another, adding to their heft, and tangle with fences and posts. In extreme cases, they snowball to such volumes that they can block entire roads. The drought created a perfect storm of tumbleweeds because it killed off grass cover, leaving plenty of bare soil for weed seeds to take root. It also forced ranchers to reduce their cattle herds, leaving fewer animals to snack on weed sprouts, says Ben Berlinger, a rangeland expert with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. When a good rain finally fell last year, the tumbleweeds “just went crazy,” says Sharon Pattee, 57, a farmer and member of Colorado’s El Paso County Forestry and Weed Advisory Commission. “This is like heaven for them.” Weedy debris was so plentiful in Clovis, a city of more than 39,000, in late January that service members from nearby Cannon Air Force Base helped remove mounds as high as 8 feet, which were trucked to a landfill. “We were expecting a couple feet of tumbleweed blocking some fences—but it was this massive flood,” says Airman First Class Dylan Updegrave, 20. “The tumbleweed came up higher than the cars. I’m 6-foot-2 and this tumbleweed was higher than me.”...more

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