New Mexico: Provocative Park Calendars

Missouri's Department of Conservation puts out a beautiful calendar every year. Luscious photography and informative "natural events" each month, such as nesting, rutting, blooming, and migration - and even when chiggers are especially bad. It's a lovely calendar.

Credit: Missouri Department of Conservation

New Mexico has a different take on what it should put in its park calendars. May I introduce the 2013 New Mexico Noxious Weeds calendar.  The calendar is free and available at NM state parks, and it's published by a consortium comprised of the regional "cooperative weed management areas" (CWMAs), New Mexico State University, and the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

Although weeds, the photos are usually very pretty, which makes it kind of a cognitive-dissonance thing: "Oh, pretty. Kill them? OK."

Russian Knapweed. Credit: Wikipedia

This last bit is made easier because of good text info that accompanies the photos. For example:

"Russian Knapweed may be carcinogenic! Take precaution and do not touch with bare hands. Poisonous to horses ... poison accumulates over horse's lifetime."

Graphic adjectives such as "infest," "invade," "aggressive," "creates a dense barrier," "no natural predators," "toxic," and "resistant" predominate.

I like it.