Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, AZ

Sunday, December 22

We watched the early church service from North Side Baptist Church.  Then we headed to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. The 98 acre Desert Museum is a fusion experience: zoo, botanical garden, art gallery, natural history museum, and aquarium.

• 21 interpreted acres with two miles of walking paths through various desert habitats
• 230 animal species
• 1,200 types of plants — 56,000 individual specimens
• One of the world's most comprehensive regional mineral collections  

 

As we were driving in this huge roadrunner was perched on the sign.  YES it is alive.

This old Studebaker Lark VIII was parked just outside the entrance.  The VIII means it had a 4.2 V8 engine and was probably about a 1960 version.

Yes this is part of the aquarium.  Now you are asking why an aquarium at a desert museum.  We learned that the Sonora Desert included the Baja and the Gulf of California.  These are little eels that come up out of the sand and feed on plankton.  Strange looking little creatures.  We never saw both ends of any of them.

Taking a picture through the water while this fish was swimming caused the blur.  This is just an example of some of the beautiful fish that live in the Gulf of California.

There were even seahorses. 

Here is a large eel.  Sorry I don't remember what kind is.

This sea urchin was in an open tank that we could reach in and touch.  It had attached itself to this rock and there was no way I could pick it up.  We did not take any more pictures in the aquarium.

These little flowers were in an area talking about bees.  It was hard to get a picture of the bees.

Now we are in a hummingbird sanctuary.  There were lots of hummingbirds flying around.  Tic was able to catch a few perched somewhere.  

There were many different hummingbirds with lots of different colors.  The pictures of the hummingbirds in flight were too blurry so these are all the hummingbird pictures.

Now we are looking at lizards.  This is from the front.  Below is from the back.

It had an interesting black band around its neck with red spots on each side of the back of the head.  All the lizards in this area were in glass exhibits so difficult to get pictures of most of them.

Now we are in an aviary.  This dove was puffed up and hiding in this bush.

Here is a male and female cardinal.

This big green parrot was in the upper part of a tree.  Its head is turned backwards and it is sleeping.

Now we are watching a presentation called "Live and (sort of) on the Loose".  First they had this large lizard.  I was taking the pictures and they all turned out too blurry.  Then they let this skunk walk out.  This skunk had been de-scented.  

This parrot walked out then, strutted his stuff.  He would fly down to the table and back up to the limb.  He also went to each of the trainers on stage.  He did have a mind of his own and chose not to go back into his cage for several minutes.  This was the last of the presentation.  We headed to the car to have our picnic lunch.  Then back in to the Raptor Free Flight presentation.

This lady was showing and talking about this barn owl.  He is so beautiful!

This was a grey hawk.  Each bird flew on its own to the area where the group was standing.  We learned that handlers put small amounts of meats on different tree limbs to encourage them to move around.

Another view of a grey hawk.  Tic took some awesome pictures!

Here is one of the handlers.  He put meat on the limb where the hawk landed.  See the hawk on the tree limb near the saguaro cactus?

Next was the barn owl.  He has a beak full of meat here.

His colors are so beautiful.

The sun was in the wrong place to get a good picture of this Harris's hawk.  

Here is one in flight.  There were about 4 of these hawks flying around.  We were told they were very social and usually hunted together.

This Harris's hawk landed on the top of this saguaro cactus.  Seems like a prickly place.

These Harris's hawks were out about 15 minutes so we got lots of good pictures.

I thought this was an awesome catch of this bird just taking off.  They were so beautiful to watch.

Here they got all four birds to land on the same tree.  Again the sun was not good for this picture.

What a magnificant bird.  He landed on this handlers hand just a few feet from us.  It was a thrilling presentation!

We took lots of pictures of the javelinas.  This picture above and the picture below.

These two were rubbing their faces against each other.  We thought they were kissing.

From the javelina viewing area, we could look up the hilll and see this neat lookout point.

This picture shows several kinds of cactus and scrub brush common in this desert.  The "wood" that looks like a cross in the middle of the picture is the inside of a dead saguaro.  The inside of a saguaro is very woody.

As we rounded the corner from the javelinas, we saw this beautiful coyote.  He was obviously well fed.

Inside this cave we learned about underground critters including snakes.  It was too dark to take pictures inside the cave.

This is a black bear sleeping in the shade.  It was warm in the sun that day.  I put this picture in because I heard on the news that this bear suddenly died on Jan 2.  

Next to the bear was this large mountain lion.  Apparently mountain lions are common here.  Look at the size of his paws.  This is a big boy!

I know this picture is a little blurry, but that big critter is a beaver that was swimming around.  We were watching him thru a glass window underground.  That beaver could swim fast.

Mountain goats are pretty common in the surrounding mountains here.  I did not get the baby in the picture.  The baby would have been in the lower right corner.  I did not realize he was there until after I took the picture.  Momma goat is on the lower left.

Isn't this buck magnificent?
We went to see the tortoises next and we could not find one.  We were disappointed.  It was about 4pm now and we were tired after being there for a little over 6 hours.  We decided to head home.  We highly recommend planning to spend a day at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.