In collaboration with the Bureau of Land Management, Sky Island Alliance staff recently helped install five new water troughs for wildlife along often-dry sections of the San Pedro River without other surface water. We opted to use closed troughs that passively collect rain (up to 210 gallons) and which offer wildlife a space to drink from the corner. The hope is that these wildlife drinkers will only need to be filled manually during long periods without rain and that they’ll naturally fill during the wet seasons. These troughs sit on the ground without causing a disturbance, they’re easy to retrofit with an external access ramp to help small animals reach the water, and they’re low maintenance. In the coming months, we will monitor how wildlife use these new water sources and how they function in this arid landscape.
Immediately after installation, wildlife including mountain lion, white-tailed deer, coyote, bobcat, cottontail, and hooded skunk came to inspect the new watering holes.
The San Pedro River is a very important riparian area that provides habitat for numerous wildlife species that live in and migrate through southeastern Arizona and northern Sonora. The San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area is home to 84 species of mammals, 14 species of fish, and 41 species of reptiles and amphibians. There are also 100 kinds of birds that breed here, and the area offers migratory winter habitat for another 250 bird species. It was the nation’s first Globally Important Bird Area designated by the American Bird Conservancy in 1995.
While the San Pedro River historically provided year-round surface water to wildlife along its entire reach, there are now many sections of the river that are intermittently dry, as you can see in the map below. Thanks to The Nature Conservancy’s wet-dry mapping campaign that collects annual data on the San Pedro River’s surface flow during the hot and driest part of summer, we have a very clear picture of where wildlife are most likely to struggle to find water along the corridor.
These new water troughs were placed approximately half a mile from the river itself on terraces above the floodplain near Palominas, along the San Pedro Trail, and near Fairbank and Contention. If they are in fact easy to maintain and prove to help wildlife, we may install more of these troughs in the future.
Thank you to the Water for Wildlife Foundation for providing financial support to purchase the supplies for these first five troughs and for helping us sustain wildlife along the vital San Pedro River corridor.
Stay tuned for updates on this effort and a chance to help us map spring sites along the San Pedro again next summer. You can also explore our FotoFauna dashboard to learn more about wildlife in this area.