On Kirsten Dutcher’s recent hikes in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, she’s witnessed a troubling sight: Ocotillos have keeled over onto the desert floor, and cholla cactuses are browning up from their base, fighting for their last days in a habitat that’s unusually dry.
“The plants themselves are looking pretty crispy,” said Dutcher, the reserve manager of the Steele-Burnand Anza-Borrego Desert Research Center, on Tuesday. “There’s not a lot of flowering, and the perennials are in a leafless, sticklike state.”
The rains from this month’s storm — 0.71 inches in the 13 days through Thursday — will likely provide some reprieve to the desert. But it’s still not enough.
Since last April, the desert has gotten only a total of 1.09 inches of rainfall, all of it since the beginning of February. The park typically sees an annual rainfall average of 5 to 7 inches.
Dutcher says she’s feeling more optimistic that the plants and animals that have made it this far will be able to replenish themselves after months of making do without.
But the lack of rain over the past year has raised some alarm for her and other scientists, and not just about the spring bloom. They point to consequences for the desert’s overall health, such as disturbances in the food chain, the heightened risk of a hotter summer and a higher wildfire threat — especially if the current warming trend continues.
“Everything that lives out here has adapted to living in some of the harshest, driest and hottest conditions,” Dutcher said.
“But adaptation is generally a slower process,” she added. “If things change too rapidly, then we will just see die-off.”
The drought also means the desert likely won’t experience a strong wildflower bloom this spring.
Four out of the past seven years have seen above average rainfall, which has led to blooms covering areas in the park such as Henderson Canyon and June Wash.
Last summer though, the desert didn’t experience its seasonal monsoons. And this winter, it recorded no precipitation from November until March, when it typically sees the most.
“Wildflowers are going to be at a minimum,” said Dan McCamish, the senior environmental scientist for the California State Parks’ Colorado Desert District. “We won’t see the blanketing carpet of blooms that we’ve seen the last few years.”
There can be impacts for the area’s economy, too.
A good wildflower year can triple the number of tourists coming to Borrego Springs, said Françoise Rhodes, executive director of the Borrego Springs Chamber of Commerce. But the community doesn’t count on the wildflowers each year for tourism and an economic boost, because the bloom happens so sporadically.
There are some benefits of drier years such as this one, McCamish says.
During especially rainy years, he says, invasive species like Sahara mustard can thrive, outcompeting wildflowers for water resources, soil space and sun. These invasive species aren’t adapted for harsh, dry conditions, though — so years like this can kill off their seeds and weaken their hold on the desert.
But this year’s dry spell, which aligns with the desert’s general drying trend over roughly the last decade, also impacts the entire landscape.
Wildflowers, for example, are important for more than their visitor appeal. The flowers — which include desert sand verbena, desert lilies and desert dandelions — attract the sphinx moth caterpillar, which is in turn eaten by birds such as the Swainson’s hawk on its northward migration from South America.
And without the wildflowers and growth of other vegetation, there could be less food for jackrabbits, which themselves are prey for larger animals like coyotes, said Jim Dice, the former reserve manager of the Steele-Burnand center.
“It’s got to have an impact on just about everything,” Dice said.
Animals desperate for water will seek out hydration from human-made water sources, such as at the pond for pupfish recovery at Palm Canyon or the water feature at the research center. The state park also manages 11 water “guzzlers” that collect rainwater to feed wildlife across the state wilderness area.
But sometimes it’s not enough. In past dry years, Dice says, rabbits have chewed up irrigation lines at the research center in an effort to get some water.
Peninsular bighorn sheep have also been seen grazing at local golf courses.
“The drier the year, and the hotter and the harder it is for those animals, the more likely they are to change their movement patterns on the landscape,” Dutcher said.
The endangered sheep, protected under state law, are a specific concern for researchers. As of 2023, there were an estimated 790 roaming the desert, and initiatives over the years — including the installation of the guzzlers in the 1970s — have aimed to help preserve the species.
The winter and spring are an especially important time for the sheep because it’s their peak birthing season, says Mark Jorgensen, a retired superintendent for the state park and an expert on the species.
“The timing of their birthing has all evolved around the spring ‘green-up’ in our area,” he said, referring to the period when the desert bursts with vegetation due to winter rains — typically from late January to late March.
The lush vegetation provides food for the lambs and their mothers, who also need to maintain enough energy to produce milk for their babies and feed themselves. But without that vegetation, the struggle to survive becomes even tougher.
“In a good year, mortality is relatively high,” Jorgensen said. “And in a bad year, maybe nine out of 10 lambs die.”
Researchers have already seen that the desert vegetation is declining due to impacts from climate change. A 2022 UC Irvine study found that the desert’s vegetation growth dropped about 40% between 1984 and 2017, with the plants struggling to keep up with the “new temperature extremes.”
Scientists look at multiple factors when trying to understand and predict the desert’s rainfall patterns — from considering the impacts of climate change to whether it’s a La Niña or El Niño year.
But the weather patterns can be extreme and fluctuate heavily from year to year, said Alex Tardy, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service.
This is a La Niña year, for example, which typically brings drier conditions. But Tardy says some of the wettest years of the last decade have been La Niñas, such as the winter of 2016-2017, throwing the reliability of the pattern out the window.
Tardy says meteorologists also look at atmospheric trends to think about why some years are drier than others. Typically the atmosphere will “reset” each season — from spring to summer, fall to winter — but that hasn’t been happening.
“What we have been seeing is an overall trend where the atmosphere (doesn’t reset),” he said, and instead warmer summers and drier winters are becoming the norm.
This continued drought condition can lead to a hotter than normal summer, he added, which can lead to an earlier fire season.
For residents, there’s also a question of how long-term drought will impact Borrego Springs’ water supply, which fuels the community’s farms, golf courses and residential homes. Borrego Springs runs exclusively on water drilled from the depths of the Borrego Valley groundwater basin.
The supply is not immediately impacted by precipitation, says Geoff Poole, the general manager of the Borrego Water District. But runoff from the watershed does flood into the basin, and climate change and rising soil temperatures will affect groundwater elevations over time.
Borrego Springs has already been grappling with a critical overdraft of its basin, though it’s taken steps in recent years to curb its usage. In 2020, a court mandate required it to reduce groundwater usage by more than half by 2040.
Five years in, Poole says Borrego Springs is well ahead of that goal. He points to some of the historic pumpers, including family farms, that opted to sell their land and water rights to the water district, boosting the available supply of future water for district customers.
“We really don’t need the water right now,” he said. “We need it about 20 years from now.”
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