#paramotor

There’s a Costco on the way home from the airstrip where we fly so I typically two-birds-one-stone a flight with stocking up on groceries, which means leaving my engine on the hitch rack in the Costco parking lot.

Let me tell you, there is nothing quite like the joy of pushing your cart outside to find a dad and his 6ish year old daughter examining your engine and when kiddo realizes that YOU are the owner of said car and YOU are the pilot of said aircraft, shouts at the top of her lungs DAD SHE’S A GIRL (as if her father cannot see you perfectly well himself).

And if later, after spending some time answering her questions and letting her hold the throttle, her dad says quietly, “I hope you know she’s going to be talking about you for weeks.” Well that’s fine. You don’t get emotional about that on the ride home. You’re fine. Everything’s fine.

So this is a really creative solution to a pernicious ecological problem! The short version is that arid ecosystems like deserts are quite fragile. For example, many have soil that is covered in a thin biocrust that can be damaged just by walking or driving on it. And because life needs water to grow and recover, these super-dry ecosystems may not be able to repair a footprint or tire track for over a century.

However, arid ecosystems are often some of the least understood because they can be difficult to access. And they suffer from P.R. issues because deserts are often seen as "bad" ecosystems full of death and nothingness, and because we do legitimately want to avoid the desertification of other native habitats.

In order to raise awareness and appreciation of these landscapes, biological surveys that tally the living beings found there help show how biodiverse they can be. And when we know more about how abundant or scarce a given species there is, it gives us more impetus to protect them, especially those that are at risk of extinction.

These paramotorists were able to fly across Peru's lomas (coastal fog deserts), which primarily receive scant amounts of moisture from mist. They collected plant samples to take back to scientists, carefully recording where they were found. And because they were able to fly long distances, they could minimize the amount of time their feet were on the ground and therefore minimize their impact on the local ecology.

That's a good way to spend the morning.