Sonora Desert Museum

Just outside of Tucson in a beautiful valley sits the Sonora Desert Museum. If you decide to visit plan to spend a day, its well worth the price of admission. Bernie and I truly enjoyed it, the reptile display, the desert walks, the prairie dogs, the aviary, and especially the Hummingbird walk. Where else can you walk through an aviary and have dozens of Hummingbirds buzzing past your ears.

This is a disaplay they have that shows the extent of the Sonoran Dessert.  You can see from this that it covers a huge area including the Baja Peninsula, a large part of Mexico, Arizona, New Mexico and more.  The size really is quite amazing.

We started the day in the reptile display. Since snakes of any kind drive me crazy, we decided to get it out of the way first. The display was great; I can handle it when they’re on the other side of a piece of glass. Here are a few pictures, Jan (sister) you may want to skip this part. These two bad boys and a bunch of others, some extremely venomous, can all be found in this part of the USA.  They also had tarantulas and scorpions in case the snakes didn't make your skin crawl.

From here we apply a bunch of sun screen and headed out to walk around. This is a picture I took early in the day trying to show the views from up there. Of course my favourite subject is featured here.  In case you didn't know I like taking her picture.

Now it was a “walk about” to see all they had to show us. There wasn’t enough time to do the longest part but these pictures will show you a bit of what we saw.

This little fellow was checking us out, fortunately it was from the other side of a thick glass.

The prairie dogs have it too good.  There was a whole bunch of them and they were having a great time.  Interesting note here.  They had a display of one of their dens that shows how they share it with scorpions, snakes, etc and they live together in peace down there. Beats me, but that's what they said.  Maybe we could learn something from them?

Then we had a nice walk around a part of the museum they call the Agave garden.  There were lots of special pl;ants and things to see there but we really enjoyed the flowering plants.  The pictures will show the giant shoots these plants end up as they flower.  These flowers can reach to 8 or 10 feet and are very impressive.  The problem is that poor plant which could be 50, 60 or more years old only gets to flower once.  Over a course of two to three weeks they grow these giant flowers, the flowers open and then the plant dies. 

Bernie was standing at least 10 feet in front of this one but it gives you an idea of how tall they grow.

Then we went to the aviary to walk among a whole bunch of exotic and non exotic birds.  We finally ended the day in the aviary dedicated to Hummingbirds.  That was a once in a lifetime kind of thing.  There were dozens of then flying around in there and they were quite accustomed to people.  I was with about 6 inched of one but no amount of quiet chatter could convince him/her to land on my hand.  There were a few nests with babies and we were watching the moms feed them.  The babies were no more than the size of a thimble with no feathers, fuzz, or anything else.  They go from that state to flying in three weeks.

This fellow greeted us with a friendly "hello."

Hummingbirds are hard to get pictures of but I did get this one having a drink.

I caught these two watching us watching them.

So the day ended with us wishing as usual we had "more time."  This is an all day place and we had only budgeted for an afternoon.

Tomorrow move on to the Phoenix area where I hope to have some really nice things to get on here.

Thanks for stopping by and please do leave a comment when you.

Neal and Bernie