desperate measures

Its juniper time. Although we can breathe a sigh of relief that some warm weather has finally arrived, that breath is hampered for some by the heavy pollen loads in the air. Right now, the main culprit is Juniperus monosperma, the one-seeded juniper. This native plant is wind pollinated, which means that instead of having sticky bundles of pollen for bees or other vectors to carry the pollen to the female flowers, it produces dry fluffy pollen that the wind distributes.

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Randy little pollen grains by the billions, looking for females.

Since it is only a chance encounter that will result in pollination, the male trees take the somewhat desperate measure of producing enough pollen to coat every surface for miles around. On a warm still day, if you find a vantage point where you can look over the juniper-pinyon forest, you can see puffs of pollen as a tree here, then a tree there, literally explodes with pollen. It looks like smoke from a fire.

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A haze of what looks like smoke floats away from a tree.

Unfortunately, it is the pollen that produces allergies. The City of Albuquerque has a website that is like a weather forecast in indicating pollen load, called the pollen count (see the website for more info). It is helpful for those with allergies to pollen. A low count is 1-15. A medium count is 16-90. A high count is 91-1500. A very high count is over 1500. Yesterday the count was over 3300. It was an orgy out there.

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Unfortunately it is causing misery as well (as those pollen grains try to procreate with your nasal mucosa), and one news reporter who shall remain nameless, threatened me in the office yesterday with doing a negative "expose" on me if I didn't do some seriously unethical things and wished loudly for an enormous forest fire to destroy them all. Really. "I am the center of the universe" thinking. Desperate measures, I suppose. Then I was thinking, what was here first, us or the trees? What would life here be like after such an enormous forest fire? I think the smoke would aggravate airways as well (and there would be all kinds of other problems from the fire). And it wouldn't destroy the mulberry trees, which, guess what, were introduced and planted by many homeowners, are not native to this area, and produce pollen counts in the 10,000 range (three times what junipers produce).

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My favorite shot, caught with the pollen just bursting forth like a nuclear weapon.

I have pretty horrible allergies too. But since I have chosen to live here, I have chosen also to love the beautiful junipers that make me miserable for a few weeks in the early spring. And all that pollen means that there will be little blue berries in the fall for me to nibble on during my hikes.