(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, learn how demand for a psychedelic drug could threaten one of our favorite monsoon visitors.

(Robert) They have habitats, they have neighborhoods, if you will.

And if they're removed from them, then they have a very low survival rate.

(Tom) How the art of keeping trees small and tidy is growing in Tucson.

(Cynthia) You also have to think, because every clip has a purpose, and there's the rules of the traditional bonsai artistry.

(Tom) A fossil collection of some prehistoric creatures gets a much needed restoration on Tumamoc Hill.

(Jessica) The sites where there is evidence of paleo humans hunting giant animals like mammoths, many of those sites are from the Southwest.

(Tom) And poet Raquel Gutierrez reads On the Crisis of Abandonment.

(Raquel) Where to mine a mild mercy as the hum of the parkway wanes in your folded ear, dear javelina.

Hello, and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

No doubt over the years, you've become familiar with the Sonoran Desert Toad, which of course can only be found here in the Sonoran Desert.

Now the Toad was once plentiful in our region, but now the experts worry that it's being exploited because of that psychedelic substance it produces and the growing popularity of that drug.

[Soft upbeat music] My name is Robert Villa.

I'm 36 years old, native Tucsonan.

Im president of Tucson Herpetological Society.

[Music continues] Im gonna give her a little bath here.

[Water running] I live with a Gila Monster, a desert tortoise and a rosy boa.

I grew up flipping rocks and and logs and looking for lizards and bugs.

There's pictures of me in the crib with little sock snakes that my grandmother put in the in the crib with me.

So I think my destiny as a naturalist and a herpetologist was sort of sealed.

Yeah.

This a Sonoran Desert toad Incilius, l. alvarius.

And we are just near a parking lot along the Santa Cruz River.

The Sonoran Desert toad is the amphibian version of the Saguaro, and that it's found nowhere else except in the Sonoran Desert region.

Sorry, little guy, was probably traumatic for you.

They're big toads and they can live up to 20 years.

Probably more.

They spend their lives mostly asleep until monsoon season.

They are actually awakened by the sound of running water or water hitting the ground.

Thunder.

[Thunder crashes] That's what actually brings them to the surface.

And it's a race to eat, mate, lay eggs, eat some more and go back under when the before the water dries up.

Oh, here we go.

And, uh, people confuse this with bullfrogs because bullfrogs are also big and green.

But again, toads have these big glands behind each eye, and bullfrogs don't.

The toad has produced this chemical, 5 MeO DMT as a defensive mechanism.

It takes a lot of harrasment and a lot of stress for it to willingly exude the substance.

5 MeO DMT purely smoked and inhale this instant, uh, trip out of consensus reality.

It's a it's can be likened to a near-death experience.

I haven't smoked it.

I don't intend to.

[Psychedelic music] People describe pixelated vision, extreme senses of euphoria.

Well-being, love, clarity, a general awakening of reality and consciousness.

On the other hand, people who react negatively experience extreme trauma and years of therapy.

Then about 2017, I was approached by Vice Media to consult on an episode for a program that dealt in psychedelic substances.

We were able to interview Yaqui Community Elders and talk about the actual role the toad has in Yaqui culture.

To this day, there's no conclusive evidence that suggests that toads were used as psychedelics by any pre-Hispanic cultures.

When the episode aired, this really shot the toad into popularity, even though there was factual information and we stated that it wasn't indigenous cultural practice.

People want it to experience it.

To have this and use to use it is a federal offense.

It's breaking federal law.

That doesn't stop people from doing it, of course.

In 1980, a guy named Ken Nelson landed on an obscure paper which outlines the fact that this one toad species produces 5 MeO DMT.

And Ken had a light bulb go off.

He found a Sonoran Desert toad, and he squeezed the gland onto his windshield.

And when it dried, he scraped it off and he smoked it.

And he had a transcendental experience.

And he became so excited by this that he wrote a pamphlet.

He would just leave this this pamphlet in places wherever he went.

It has its, its risks.

Someone said this can either cure PTSD or it can cause it.

So when people collect toads and they usually grab great buckets full or bags full and they take them to a central location where they squeeze the glands and collect the substance, and they don't return the toads.

They have habitats.

They have neighborhoods, if you will.

And if they're removed from them, then they have a very low survival rate.

[Soft music] I'm looking for the ,etymology of this toad name.

The Tucson Herprlogical Society.

We give small grants for research just to understand toad populations.

Amphibians have experienced severe declines all over the world from chytrid fungus, pollution, climate change, um, habitat modification, roads which which they get smashed on on top of collecting, which we can't really measure very well.

At least five sites which were known to have toads did not have toads.

I can't tell you if that's from pollution.

I can't tell you if they've gone somewhere else.

But from a couple of years to the next, at five localities, toads have disappeared completely.

It's really a race against time to understand what are healthy toad populations.

And then what are the threats to toads.

[Motorcycle sound] Psychedelics are popular and everyone is curious about them.

I think a nightclub is a great place to talk about drugs.

The toad is essentially a laboratory that produces pure 5 Me0 DMT.

So there's almost no difference whatsoever between what a toad produces and what a laboratory produces.

The toads live at the venue there.

They're known to be there.

It will be perfect to talk about this is This toad is at risk.

If you're doing psychedelics to be a better person or to be a more conscientious person, there's there's a dissonance there that that has to be addressed.

Our goal is to say, Look, there's all these other threats and we're trying to quantify all of those measurable threats and say the toad is not doing well and collecting them cannot, cannot help at all.

I have an obligation to the Sonoran Desert toad to get people to leave it alone.

Let let the toad be a toad.

And if you're going to do 5 MeO DMT, you can source it from other places besides a living creature.

[Upbeat music ends] The Sonoran Desert is home to thousands of plant species that amaze and captivate, but many others can be grown in captivity right here in southern Arizona.

Next, we introduce you to the Tucson Bonsai Society.

They were established in 1972 and continue to grow strong.

[Automotive sounds] My name is Stephen Ross.

I'm an automotive technician her at Klipper Automotive.

I've been in the automotive industry for over 29 years.

That's all I've ever done.

From electrical diagnosis and AC to putting the engine back together on this side for a timing chain.

But we do.

We do it all.

[Mellow music] I bought one bonsai.

And then over the course of a couple of years, it took on a life of its own I think there might be 60, 70 trees back here.

Here we have is my favorite tree in the garden.

And It is about a 45 year old bald cypress rom a swamp in Louisiana that our founder, David Meyer, he started styling and working with it in the nineties at a workshop and it's survived dieback and te and it's survived dieback and termites and it looks like, you know, a 100 year old massive tree [Water sounds] He likes a lot of water.

So in that sense, a couple times he gets a big drink, but he's happy to be here.

Does he have a name?

No, I don't name the trees.

But he's definitely the king of my yard for sure.

I discovered the Tucson Bonsai Society during the pandemic.

Something came over me and I bought a bonsai tree.

And then I started researching how to take care of it and found the group, and they weren't meeting because of the pandemic.

But I was able to follow them and get help from some members.

And when they started re-meeting a little over a year ago, I was able to join at that time.

They tend to be low maintenance, although I know you'll really maintain your plants so that's more that comment more aimed toward landscape use.

Also benefits for wildlife and pollinators.

And then you know another thing [Mellow music] Cynthia martin, vice president of the Tucson Bonsai Society.

The special connection with the is a wonderful question because it's the time that you're with yourself and we talk about this a lot.

Some people play music, some people drink wine.

Some people drink coffee.

Everybody has their own little place, that they like to do their trimming, and it's my time with myself, and I usually play music.

You also have to think because every clip has a purpose and there's the rules of the traditional bonsai artistry of style, balance, and also where you cut and also where you cut promotes a limb to grow in a certain way.

You can't just go clip, clip, clip.

You've got to go Now there is where's the next bud?

There's two leaves below it.

I'm going to cut it halfway here.

They all have a reason for a snip.

We have the Sonoran Desert coming in from the south and the Chihuahua desert coming in from the east, the Rocky Mountains from the north and this real cool tropical influence from the south as well.

It's all mixing up here.

And so we have more species than most places could ever dream of having.

The first time I went to my meet I brought one of my cuttings and they taught me how to plant and how to wire it and how to cut it and how to keep it alive.

Not only is it a community, it is a learning experience.

Female trees normally are blossoming trees.

They'll have flowers.

Some of them are very large flowers, and some are little tiny flowers But the way that we present them is in a round pot an oval pot, that doesn't have any hard lines and it accentuates a female tree And in the male you can see that this is not glazed.

These pots are perfect for an old, older tree, male tree, 15 year old olive, because he has a personality.

And you don't want to take away from the beauty of what he's offering with a pot that's too showy.

[Water sounds] There is a term that us bonsai artists use amongst ourselves is we are bonsai nuts and we say it proudly.

Well, when people usually hear I do bonsai after knowing me in the automotive industry.

It gets a couple of chuckles, because it's just so very different.

But yeah, it's truly my passion Beyond here.

It's my little piece of heaven.

Now that I've been at it.

I couldn't give it up.

[Mellow music] [Mellow music] The Desert Laboratory's vertebrae paleontology collection houses over 20,000 fossils, many of them from right here in the Sonoran Desert.

Now the collection focuses on a period when man coexisted with now extinct megafauna like mammoths and mastodons.

Today, the collection's in great shape, but that wasn't always the case.

What are the critters?

Pack rats.

Pack rats.

A lot of pack rats.

Little bitty turds.

And-- Actually, good stuff.

And a lot of urine.

A lot of urine.

And this was on top of the specimens that were in the little boxes.

So, who are you going to call?

It was when the university did not replace him.

So the entire ver-- The Vertebrate Paleontology Program just simply came to a screaming halt.

Jeff had moved here from Illinois and was already starting on the incredible undertaking of cleaning and reorganizing the Vertebrate Paleontology Collection, which had been neglected.

What Jeff started, then I came on board a year after.

You were still breathing pack rat poops, (laughing) were fossils curating fossils.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

(soft music) I'm Lynne Shepartz, and I'm the newly appointed collections manager for this, which is the paleontological collection of the University of Arizona, which is now part of the desert laboratory.

We're the repository of, I would say, about 20,000 fossils.

And these range from some very early materials that are dinosaurs, examples of dinosaur skin, the impressions left.

We have a lot of particularly mammoths in our collection.

This is the pelvis of a young male mammoth.

Most of our collection, and the biggest emphasis in terms of research, has been on some of the later time periods.

And this is sort of the times of the megafauna, where you have large elephant-like creatures, the mastodons and the mammoths.

And you have large camels that were living right here in the Southwest.

So this is part of the skull of a camel.

There's a rich history of camel forms that originated in the Americas.

We also have something that some people might shy away from studying, and that is, to put it bluntly, fossil turds or coprolites.

And people are quite fascinated with these.

We can learn a lot from their contents about what the animal was eating.

The sites where there is evidence of paleo humans hunting giant animals like mammoths, many of those sites are from the Southwest.

This lab has this great collection of faunal material from the Pleistocene, which is really useful if you're studying a site and you want to make identifications and figure out what animals are present at your site.

Some of them, you know, look like from extinct animals, and I need to make identifications to figure out what animal they're from.

So I've spent a lot of time just comparing what I have with what's here.

I've identified camel teeth.

There's a mammoth tooth recovered from the site as well.

And there's plenty of mammoth material here to compare it with.

I've learned a lot from Jeff and Jessica about what it is to manage collections and I've realized there's a lot more to it than just looking at bones and so forth.

This isn't a very fancy room, you can tell, but it was so lively when Jeff and I were graduate students.

I am confident, not just hoping, get confident that we're gonna get a new crop of graduate students up here to study all this all this wonderful material that was left to molder for 20 odd years and now it's having its own Renaissance.

(piano music) Next, we bring you something a little bit different for our show.

Arizona Illustrated collaborated with the Poetry Center to bring you a series of poems written by local poets and then visualized by our team of producers.

Here, writer Raquel Gutierrez reads On the Crisis of Abandonment.

(Raquel) Well, it's the middle of my life now.

And just about every day I mistake Aviation Parkway for the ocean and the buzz of bustling vehicles eschewing speed limits unbothered with the fact of death in the foreground of this infrastructural monster.

Every day in the middle of my life now, I expect the javelina to becoming halo of mushroom fuzz, and greet its decomposition hastened by the summer heat of an unfathomable season.

I yield to my own promise of decomposition as alluring to forge a new life someday, somehow, and for someone else in the elsewhere.

Your life wasn't for nothing.

That it made a difference to the funny thing we call kin.

A large husk that once hurled into a void it wasn't concerned with anyway, for some, make a pretty good life in the rubble of other people's trash.

A peccary in the muck of concrete an oil slick of monsoon garbage or slippage where the 18 wheeler impressed upon with the force to twist its barrel chested ness to the shoulder of the frontage road.

No one dreams of dying alone, but these are the dreams to seize upon and feast in defeat.

If you did it right, you are remembered for the reputation you lost defending against the new grain of patrimony, the sublimated rages, the busted neon sign throbs in diminished power differentials.

You are remembered for being stingy with your time, demanding promissory notes for the granular pains.

In the factory you thought improved upon the last factory.

Where to mine a mild mercy as the hum of the parkway wanes in your folded ear, dear javelina.

You don't see what's coming but feel the fear flooding.

Chronos is a cortisol of phlegm to a punctured lung.

Consider my decomposing body on the side of the parkway and lay a bouquet of pink flowers at the snout of my cathedral.

I forget the wild boar inside myself.

The smell of sweetness in the afterlife is it another Zoom meeting.

Will I die by some less impressive machine of the blue halo, the screen screaming for another mode of lymphatic reaction desperately fathomed.

When I mistake Aviation Parkway for the ocean, it's a temporary sensory deprivation of forgetting.

I live next to a freeway wall.

Goat head burrs and births the need for virality that ensured a livelihood.

We go through each other's trash in this neighborhood and wonder about the last thing left unsaid.

What if I said the name of a color three times?

Would the image of forgiveness forgo the olive branch?

These images don't sustain me anymore, and for that I worry and wait for the sun to come and guide me back to the marked grave to see what other creatures have come along to feed on the fungus of your body.

Stay tuned to Arizona Illustrated to see more of these poems in the coming weeks.

We will also be showing a new collection of visual poems in collaboration with the Poetry Center on the big screen at the Loft on Wednesday, August 27th at 5 p.m.

The event is free and open to the public and we'd love to see you there.

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Before we go, here's a sneak peek at a story we're working on.

(Willie) You might see it different than I see it.

You got to find your voice in the work.

You can't go by the voice of the artist.

What do it make you feel?

So the colors kind of help pull you into that.

Then you start deciphering what you see, what you feel.

I'm communicating to you spiritually.

My parents would take all of my siblings to church.

I was engaged into the artwork in the Bible, and I wanted to tell a story about my existence in the world.

My parents encouraged me to be me.

My father played the blues.

My mother sang gospel in the church.

It was difficult for me to walk around with a guitar and be outside and play.

It was a lot easier to have pen and paper in my back pocket where I could just draw.

Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you again next week.