I've been a fan of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum since I first moved to Arizona way back in 1988. The destination is still a lot of things: a zoo, a botanical garden, an art gallery, and a nature preserve, conveniently collected in a breathtaking corner of Tucson parkland. In these multiple ways, the park teaches the visitor about the natural history of the Sonoran Desert.
The ecosystem spans much of the southern half of the Grand Canyon State, a big part of Mexico's state of Sonora, southeastern California, and most of Baja California. In fact the desert even surrounds most of the Sea of Cortez.
On a recent visit, several first-time encounters reminded me how every visit to the ASDM - as the museum is known - expands my knowledge of the region in surprising ways. I hadn't been through the entrance gate for thirty seconds when I stumbled upon an iguana near the footpath. At first I thought the lizard was a chuckwalla, a common reptile in the desert preserves throughout Phoenix. However a nearby attendant soon corrected my mistake.
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| Iguana at the ASDM in Tucson. |
I associate iguanas with Mexico; the large lizards frequently greet visitors disembarking cruise ships in Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlán. But I was surprised that a species might actually live in the Arizona desert. In fact the species is fittingly called the desert iguana. However the spiny-tailed variety living at the ASDM was apparently introduced sometime in the 1970's - either in a study or inadvertently - and thrived in its new habitat. Clearly the cold-blooded creatures have found plenty of warm crevices to shelter in during the winter's frigid nights.
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| Spiny-tailed iguana at the ASDM. |
These specific iguanas are native elsewhere in the Sonoran Desert like in Baja California. Meanwhile desert iguanas live in lower deserts to the west. So an encounter with one of the lizards at the museum added to my appreciation of the variety of life in the vast and arid environment.
Another improbable resident at the museum was a white-fronted amazon. A handler exhibited the parrot along a shaded path near the hummingbird aviary. Perched calmly on a roost, the bird is native to the state of Sonora, closer to the southern end of our Sonoran Desert. Its cousins the thick-billed parrots were extirpated from the sky island mountains of Arizona last century and are, as of recently, no longer showcased at the museum. So happy for me, the white-fronted amazon was a sort of understudy the day I visited.
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| White-fronted amazon at the ASDM. |
My favorite exhibit at the ASDM is the hummingbird aviary. Within its small space usually live several species of the tiny bird: the Anna's, Costa's, and broad-billed. Each of them dwell in the surrounding Sonoran Desert all the year-round where they are joined by close to ten other species during at least part of the year. A migrant bird surprised me by actually joining the locals in the aviary on the day I visited. It was a male rufous hummingbird known for visiting the area during the summer after breeding in the Pacific Northwest. This individual must have qualified to winter over in the cozy habitat in Tucson due to some unknown hardship or misfortune.
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| Male rufous hummingbird in the Hummingbird Aviary at the ASDM. |
A second aviary easily ranks as my next favorite exhibit. Much larger than the hummingbird home, it houses dozens of native bird species, both year-round locals and seasonal migrants. Masked bobwhite quails were in residence, notable because they used to call the immediate area home, but like the thick-billed parrots, are now extinct in the wild on this side of the US-Mexican border. Nonetheless the northern cardinals, Inca doves, pyrrhuloxias, white-winged doves, white-crowned sparrows, and yellow warblers, to name just a few of the other residents, represented the numerous native birds that still thrive in the wild outside of the enclosure.
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| Masked bobwhite quail in the Bird Aviary at the ASDM. |
Like in the hummingbird aviary, a single bird drew most of my attention. It was a male hooded oriole high in a tree in the farthest corner away from the human entrance to the verdant coop. He seemed to fixate on the open space beyond the chicken wire. I wanted to believe that he and the other birds lived in the aviary because they couldn't survive outside; they were lame, unsocialized, or otherwise incapable of fending for themselves in the wild. The oriole makes long flights into Mexico for the winter, breeding in Arizona and California during the summer months. Instincts must have been still telling the caged bird that.
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| Male hooded oriole in the Bird Aviary at the ASDM. |
Later, several hundred feet beyond the aviary, past the stingrays, otters, beavers, and bighorn sheep, was Cat Canyon, where a sleeping bobcat and an equally fatigued gray fox were taking noontime siestas out of the hot sun. High above the complex in a tree was another male hooded oriole, this individual unencumbered by cages, ailments, or ennui, literally free as a bird in the rich habitat of the museum's desert landscape.
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| Male hooded oriole above the grounds of the ASDM. |
The oriole stood in stark contrast to his kin in the aviary. Still both birds, as do we all, owe some gratitude to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum's unique contribution to protecting our desert home.
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