Thursday 5th March: The Desert Museum

The Desert Museum sets out to create areas of different desert landscapes with authentic plants and animals. It’s a delightful setting in the foothills of the Tucson Mountains, on the edge of the Saguaro National Park. We stopped on the drive there to admire the scenery and were tempted follow this inviting path and visit the Museum on another day.

In the museum the trails lead you through what you could expect to find in various parts of the Sonoran Desert, for example these types of cactus. The column one in the front would be about 8 ft. tall and the one with many arms in the background about 20 ft. It’s difficult to get the scale if there’s no person in the photo, and Jane refused to climb the column cactus and sit on top although I said the spikes were probably quite soft and spongy.

Many of the birds and animals were not in any sort of cages as they were in their natural habitat. At our coffee break in the outdoor café this colourful bird appeared on the wall in front of us looking for crumbs from our muffins. Our bird book told us it was a pyrrhuloxia, aka the muffin bird.

Plenty of lizards, too, roaming around. This one’s a desert spiny lizard, about 15 inches long including tail.

Not all reptiles were appropriate be mixing with the visitors. For instance there are many desert snakes, including 13 different species of rattlesnake. We viewed these from the safety of their glass vivariums. Similarly, the mountain lion, of which a small number still exist in the wild, was in an enclosure. This one ended up here after being found as a cub in a suburb of Los Angeles, its mother presumably having been killed- or maybe some kooky celeb just mislaid it.

Another enclosure was the free flight aviary of the hummingbirds. They were happily building nests, all of 2 inches in diameter, as shown in the photo. The eggs take only 2½ weeks to hatch, and about 3 weeks for the brood to fly the nest. Two chicks maximum. Average lifespan is about 6 years in the aviary, and 4 in the wild.

Not everything was on a grand scale, these small cacti could almost have been knitted (by Jane, of course).

There were extensive mineral exhibits. Mineral discoveries in the latter part of the 19^th century resulted in the establishment of many mines and mining towns and encouraged numbers immigrants into Arizona. In the process of prospecting and from random discoveries in general, numbers of dinosaur bones have been discovered. This is an example of where these bones would have come to light.

I’ve got to sign off with a view of the cowboy film cactus, the saguaro. There are 1.5 million of them in the adjacent National Park and some have obviously sneaked into the Museum grounds.

The catering facilities were also good. We had a splendid day out, which was the general opinion as the Museum displays a 5* Tripadvisor rating and top attraction out of 291 in the area.