Nature Walk

As much as I hate living here, I can't help my interest in the flora and fauna, limited as it is. Since Dhahran is landscaped a lot like Disneyland (and heavily irrigated), our jebel jaunts give me the most "natural" perspective on plants and animals in Saudi Arabia--even though the jebel landscape has been extensively modified for the past 80 years and the animals that are there probably wouldn't be there if Dhahran, a giant source of food and water, wasn't nearby. Probably the only thing in the jebels would be a few foxes, lizards, and camel spiders.

Our weather noticeably changed about 3 weeks ago. Sure, the days have been getting shorter as you would expect, but the biggest change has been in the temperature. Several times in the past couple of weeks as I left the house at 4:30am to take the dogs on their first walk of the day, I actually considered going back in and getting a long-sleeved shirt! Really! But after a second's thought, I decided, nah, it wasn't worth the trouble. It actually dipped below 60F last weekend for a brief hour or two. But it is still shorts and Tshirt weather here. The heaviest thing I wore last winter was a sweatshirt--with shorts!

Still, we've gone from highs exceeding 110F for hours each day to highs in the low 90s, even high 80s, for just an hour or two each day.

And the changes to the plant life in the jebels over the past three weeks has been astonishing.

It hasn't rained here in 8 months. For 8 months, the dogs and I have been walking around in a landscape of tan sandstone and brown sticks. Suddenly, vistas in the jebels are sort of green, well, greenish. Okay, there are spots of non-brown!

Some plants even have flowers, barely bothering to toss out a few leaves first.

I started wondering what was driving the incredible changes in the plants. In particular, where in the hell are they getting the water from?

At first I thought it might be a slight rise in the water table caused by changes in atmospheric pressure associated with the change in high and low temperatures. But this theory was tossed when I realized that even plants on top of the jebels where the water table doesn't exist are still sprouting and flowering.

I've decided that it is caused by the dramatic change in temperature (and probably change in length of day and change in angle of the sun). And the water? I think all of these different plants store it. They manage to keep it in their tissues, probably their underground parts, during the scorching hot summer.


 Small animals and lizards like this plant because each plant makes a large clump. You can see burrows and tracks underneath and around these plants.

I call this the pickle plant. Each little leaflet is shaped like a fat pickle. The largest get about 0.5 cm in length. As they age, they turn purplish. You can see that the young stalks are a purplish color. The pickles exploded into existence in a matter of days.

 This was a bundle of dry brown sticks a month ago.

This bush is a particular nemesis. Each plant has very long, thin, light colored branches covered in very sharp thorns. The branches are very hard to see because they blend in so well with the ground. Even Mimi won't push through a group of these plants. I nearly always come back from a good jaunt with bloody scratches on my legs from these things.

Imagine how surprised I was this morning to discover tiny green leaves and even tinier purple flowers on them!

This plant doesn't have leaves. It adds greenish bits to the ends of the dry stalks it already has.