Aptly named Alligator Juniper

A considerable portion of the Arizona highlands are covered with various species of juniper trees, locally referred to as cedar trees. Not tall enough, usually, to give any shade except right in their vicinity, they have been considered as weeds and are looked down upon by pine tree lovers. Juniper trees grow throughout the entire northern hemisphere. There are 28 species of Juniperus. Those found in Arizona include the alligator juniper shown above, the California juniper, redberry juniper, common juniper, oneseed juniper, Utah juniper, and the Rocky Mountain juniper.

Juniper trees have been ubiquitous during my life. We used to have juniper berry fights, we used them for fence posts, clothesline posts, and firewood. The wood is extremely tough but the trunks and branches are so crooked and twisted, there is almost no good building wood in the trees.

At one time in Arizona, the ranchers began a huge campaign to eradicate the juniper trees to "improve" the range land for cattle. They took two huge Caterpillar tractors and attached a huge chain and dragged the chain across the landscape essentially pulling over all of the juniper trees. Huge areas of the Colorado Plateau were subject to this "range improvement." The destruction of the juniper habitat is still a common practice in other states, like Texas, for example. Ranchers are still looking for the juniper solution. Here is a description of the practice:

Numerous and sundry mechanical means are employed to physically destroy plant enemies. Prominent among these is "chaining," in which a heavy chain (or a heavy cable) is dragged between 2 crawler-type tractors to rip out all woody plants. The heavy equipment and huge anchor chain kill wild animals, destroy nests and burrows, kill many non-woody plants, damage the soil, drag and dislocate large rocks, and generally trash the land. In This Land Is Your Land, Bernard Shanks reports that chaining has likewise effaced hundreds of federally "protected" Native American ruins and archaeological sites (Shanks 1984). After chaining, the woody debris is burned or left to rot.

In an average year hundreds of square miles of Western public land are chained, hundreds or even thousands of acres at a time. Utah State University research scientist Ronald Lanner a decade ago found that more than 3 million acres (the size of Connecticut) of public pinyon/juniper land had been chained for cow pasture (Shanks 1984). Lanner recently stated that the weight of published research does not support any of the reasons used to condone chaining. Yet, common to the remote West is the chained landscape -- thousands of broken juniper, pinyon, greasewood, or sage skeletons scattered about the ravaged land, a few cows seeking forage among them.

 Some of the juniper removal is done under the guise of increasing rangeland hydrology, even though studies are very inconclusive as to the benefits of chaining all of the junipers. There appear to be few studies that focus on the peripheral damage done to the land by wholesale chaining.  See "How an increase or reduction in Juniper cover alters rangeland hydrology."

One thing I do know, overgrazing by cattle greatly alters the natural habitat and variety of species that can survive the extreme temperatures and lack of water on the Colorado Plateau.