Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

On my sixth day in Arizona, I woke up in Tucson, but had to get myself to Phoenix by the end of the day to turn in my rented car at the airport. Luckily, Phoenix is only a couple hours’ drive away on good highway, and that meant I had almost all day with David once more. He took us to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

On the way there I was so enamoured with the landscape that I made him stop a couple of times and pull over so I could get photos.

David had been talking about the museum for days, which I thought was pretty sweet: my cousin loved a bunch of art so much that he insisted we go. Ha! I should have guessed that the kind of museum he would fall in love with was an OUTDOOR museum with BIRDS.

With the views here, it seems like the museum is 1000 square miles, but it is 98-acre (40 ha) combination garden, aviary, and zoo founded in 1952. There are animals from vultures and hummingbirds to big cats and wolves to fish and otters. I enjoyed the multiple demonstrations of plant life:

I spent a lot of time in an agave garden, simply marveling at the huge variety of that plant. I had no idea there were so many. Click the slideshow below to see just eight of them:

We arrived in time for a raptor show! I didn’t realize we would catch it and was delighted by the amount of time the bird handlers spent with us to explain to us how to appreciate these gorgeous birds.

I wandered the museum for a couple of hours, mostly trying to reconnect with David because we had become separated. But the place is so enormous with a maze of trails, we were separated the entire time. Both of us had fun despite only catching glimpses of each other from a distance.

I enjoyed the variety of outdoor displays tucked in between animal enclosures, like this little garden:

I walked through an aviary and then a second, hummingbird-specific aviary!

The most delightful thing I saw at the museum was a hummingbird sitting in her nest. My photos are all awful and you would hardly know what you were looking at if I didn’t tell you. She was intelligently buried deep in a particularly brushy area, far back from tourist eyes. I only spotted her because I watched her fly in. The nest was maybe as big as a golf ball, no bigger. As always, I am in awe of the perfection of hummingbirds on such a tiny scale.

David messaged me on my phone (since we had not managed to find each other in person), and said it was time to go to the next stop, to Old Tucson. I had very little idea of what it was, and was enjoying myself so much at the museum, it was with distinct reluctance that I left and aimed for the parking lot. I was learning to trust his recommendations, though.

Bird count: I’ll end it here, since I have no more bird photos in this trip. I identified eight more at the museum, for a total of 47 unique bird species photographed in Arizona. That was such a fun game!