Tiehm’s buckwheat (Eriogonum tiehmii) is an extremely rare wildflower found on only 21 acres of arid Mojave Desert habitat in western Nevada. Discovered in 1983 and described by science only in 1985, the remote and isolated Silver Peak Range of Nevada’s Esmeralda County would seem to be a safe haven for this small, clumping perennial herb with the pale yellow flower globes. One would think doubly so, because its habitat is located upon public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). One would, however, be wrong.

Tiehm’s buckwheat is adapted to a specific soil substrate with a high concentration of minerals, and is not known to grow anywhere else on earth other than at this one solitary site. But the long, heavily-clawed reach of global capitalism has found this small plant’s home and wants to displace it in order to mine the lithium and boron minerals that lie underneath the plant’s roots. A proposed mine by the Australian company Ioneer covers the entirety of the plant’s only living quarters, and if it is green-lit it would probably cause the extinction of Eriogonum tiehmii.

The approval of this mine is stalled in court while the plant is being considered for listing under the Endangered Species Act. This is precisely the type of plant that the ESA is specifically designed to protect. If a mining company weren’t interested in making a profit off of the minerals underlying the plant’s habitat, there would be no conflict otherwise. No one saw economic value in the land before a few years ago and no one lives nearby. The land is publicly owned by the American people and managed on their behalf by the BLM, there is no development pressure aside from the proposed open pit mine, no private property rights are being infringed, and the plant is otherwise not in immediate danger of extinction. It also lives nowhere else, so listing it as an imperiled species due to its vulnerably small population should be a no-brainer. But, of course, money and greed have to have their say.

Last week it was discovered that about 40% of the entire population of Tiehm’s buckwheat was dug up and disposed of, totaling an estimated 17,000 plants. This happened at some point between mid-June and early September 2020. A field survey conducted on Sept 13, 2020 discovered the damage and missing plants, and information and photos were released to the media on Sept 16, resulting in fairly widespread attention. Thousands of small craters pockmark the hillside habitat, along with evidence of human footprints and displaced stones moved to enable digging the buckwheats out of their rocky home. Most of the plants that used to occupy these holes themselves are nowhere to be seen – they were apparently hauled somewhere offsite for disposal. A few dead plant remnants are visible at some holes, but most are simply missing.

Representatives of Ioneer are trying to blame the devastating loss to the species on “an invasion of industrious small animals”, aka rodents, who according to this version of the cover story are pillaging the hillside of the rare flowers in search of food and water. This is utterly preposterous. In the past 21 years I have had more than my fair share of dealings with several species of small, herbivorous rodents here in my desert garden in western Arizona, and have by necessity become quite familiar with their patterns of activity, foraging, and reproduction. Granted, while in my case it applies to the numerous cacti and succulents I grow both in the garden and for sale in the nursery, the point remains that I’ve learned a lot about their biological and ecological behavior in a desert context not dissimilar to the site where Eriogonum tiehmii grows. I can quite reasonably say that the types of damage seen at the E. tiehmii site do not in the least comport with their normal foraging behavior.

Here are some reasons why rodents would not likely have done the damage shown in photos of the site:

1. The animals apparently attacked only the Tiehm’s buckwheats, and nothing else. Rare plant surveys done well before the mine was proposed led to a reasonably complete understanding of population location, age distribution, and size, as well as other species that cohabited on the same site. Other cohort plant species native to the same hills are evidently unaffected by the claimed rodent activity in any observable fashion. The buckwheats were selectively targeted.

2. While Eriogonum tiehmii is obscure to the general public, it was far from unknown to a dedicated group of researchers and rare plant enthusiasts. These people knew a fair amount about Tiehm’s buckwheat by the 1990s and 2000s, long before the mine proposal came into the picture. So far, none of them has mentioned past cycles of excessive rodent depredation resulting in sudden population crashes. And to my knowledge, similar problems with rodents digging and consuming much of the population of a locally endemic plant in a matter of a few months have not been known to afflict other rare species of Eriogonum elsewhere in Nevada or other western states. Or common species of Eriogonum for that matter, either.

3. It just so happens that Tiehm’s buckwheat is currently at the center of a controversial new proposed lithium and boron mine. There is an international corporate mining company that wants to profit from private use of public lands involved. I am sure that the mining company has promised “job creation” in a rural part of a thinly populated county with few employment options. This economic aspect could easily provide a motive to local residents who want to see a mine happen, and who care little about a rare plant they might consider an unimportant weed standing in the way of “progress”. What could go wrong?

4. Again, this rodent devastation issue has never happened before, at least not since the plants were formally discovered and described in the mid 1980s. Rodents have lived on this hillside in whatever population numbers for however many millennia it took for Tiehm’s buckwheat to evolve, and yet somehow they never made the population extinct long ago. Also, while rodents might indeed occasionally excavate the taproot of an herbaceous plant such as E. tiehmii in order to eat it, for them to do this so systematically on such a large number on such stony soil on a moderately steep slope in such a short time seems completely implausible.

5. To reiterate, there are almost surely at least a few local rural Nevadans in Esmeralda County who would strongly prefer to see a mine open at the site over preserving it for a plant they don’t care about. Now matter how rare or interesting the plant is, or what a miracle of evolution and adaptation to an extremely tough, arid environment it is.

6. While the region is indeed in drought as of the summer and fall of 2020, from whence did this army of “industrious small animals” suddenly descend? Were they wearing boots to leave footprints, and moving rocks many times their size and weight (small rodents weigh just a few ounces at most) in order to access the roots of approximately 17,000 buckwheats in a matter of three months at most? How many different species of rodents actually live here? What is their population density? Why was rodent digging, damage, decline, and death not noted before mid-June? This was when the site was visited and documented by people who are keeping watch over the plants while the court battles over ESA listing and mine approval play out. Shouldn’t all this destruction from rodents have started becoming evident as soon as the spring, if population levels were so high?

7. Now that it is September and the damage has been discovered and publicized, is the damage continuing? After all, the rodents will not know or care about sudden media attention and internet publicity, so their activities should definitely be continuing as we speak if they are causing the issues. If they were abundant enough to cause the death of 17,000 plants in 100 days between mid June and mid-September, an average of 170 plants eaten per day (by rodents weighing a few ounces each by the way), then there should still be many of them running around and making fresh excavations on the remaining plants. They can’t possibly have done all this damage and then suddenly disappeared. If they were there 1 or 2 months ago, they will still be very evident now. Go look for evidence of them and prove my hypothesis wrong!

8. I’d like to see the digging craters on adjacent public lands that do not host the buckwheats, which should also contain substantial populations of small industrious rodents and their excavations. Or are we to believe that they selectively targeted the 21 acres of buckwheat habitat without any spillover effects on lands immediately nearby, impacting other desert plant species as well?

9. If there are enough small industrious rodents to cause such immense loss in a few months to over 17,000 plants, then there should be plenty of evidence of them, including active burrows, droppings, and live animals skittering about, day or night. The site is thinly vegetated, so such evidence ought to be quite easy to observe. If they are doing this, it should be quite easy to document. Rodents are not an extremely difficult research subject in this regard, so if they are doing it, prove it!

10. Small rodents typically have small ranges and short lifespans of not more than 1-3 years, and most species, whatever they are, live and die within a few hundred yards of where they are born. It is quite improbable that any sizable number of small rodents exists here – but once again if by chance they do, they should be fairly easy to observe and document the existence of.

I greatly doubt that any such rodent craters exist on the nearby hills that did not host buckwheats. A thorough examination of the growing sites of Eriogonum tiehmii as well as immediately adjacent sites needs to be made in order to verify whether rodent populations are indeed dense enough to have caused this level of damage. It seems highly improbable that such evidence will be discovered.

My stance is that this supposed rodent damage cannot possibly have all happened just in the intervening summer months without some ramping up of indicators well beforehand during the spring, and continuing as I write on Sept 22, 2020. And my personal estimation, based upon decades of training as a biologist and horticulturist living in the Arizona desert and traveling widely throughout other arid lands, is that rodents probably do not exist upon this relatively steep and barren site with strongly ionic soils in any substantial numbers. To the extent that rodents do live here, they are few in number and low in diversity.

Boiled down, it is almost certain that humans did this. Whoever removed the buckwheats might well have chosen to do so without official corporate sanction or sponsorship from Ioneer, and for now we cannot assume that Ioneer had anything to directly do with it. Whoever killed roughly 40% of a globally rare and locally endemic plant species and drove it halfway towards full extinction may well have done so for a combination of economic (“job creation”) reasons and personal ideology that doesn’t particularly value the natural world in biodiversity terms. Without further investigation or suspects to look into for the time being, we can’t really say. But there is virtually no way that rodents did this. It was humans.

The BLM chapter that oversees this part of Nevada has not been adequately protecting Tiehm’s buckwheat, and has allowed preliminary mining explorations to commence without a complete review of the potential impacts of such activity. Activities detrimental to the buckwheats that have already taken place include the roughing in of roads and surface excavations for mineral tests. While Federal listing of Eriogonum tiehmii under the Endangered Species Act would provide the greatest level of legal protection, the State is considering listing the plant as rare and requiring elevated protection within Nevada, which is a significant protective tool in its own right. Both listings should be pursued while further study is done.

If necessary, remote monitoring should be installed in order to prevent human vandals from subversively destroying more of these innocent plants with no other living situation options. And at minimum some rudimentary ecological studies to verify if there truly are sufficient levels of rodent depredation to cause the widespread death of thousands of rare buckwheats should also commence. After all, if the rodent explanation turns out to be true or at minimum a significant contributing factor to what has happened here, then Ioneer should want to know about it. Whatever the cause of the sudden dramatic drop in population, we cannot sit idly by and passively allow it to happen.

This little flower doesn’t need to be made extinct, but if mining companies and unethical anti-environmental “activists” have unimpeded control over the narrative, this could easily be what happens. This is why I actively and annually support the Center For Biological Diversity, who has been intimately involved with protection plants and animals such as Tiehm’s buckwheat, as well as numerous other rare and endangered species and their habitats. Other conservation agencies are also worth supporting in the ongoing fight to stop humanity from eroding wild biodiversity in all the ways that it does so. Please consider supporting one of them today if you are able. Thank you for your attention and your action.