Wiebe's Wanderings: Desert Museum

The Desert Museum is located in the Tucson Mountains and only a short drive from Rincon Country West, our RV home for the month. The museum consists of 2.2 miles of walkways so we thought we would be home in a couple of hours. We left shortly after 9:00 and didn't get home till about 3:30 and thoroughly enjoyed every minute.

TripAdvisor.com ranks the Desert Museum in the top 10 museums in the country and the #1 Tucson attraction. I can't argue. 85% of the experience is outside covering 98 acres. It includes a Zoo, botanical garden, art gallery, natural history museum and aquarium. The top attraction has to be the Raptor exhibit. This includes a number of different birds which are trained to fly from one bait station to another giving the audience a unique perspective on these birds. The reason is that they fly from one side of the audience to the other immediately over our heads. When I say immediately over our heads I am not kidding. If you can suppress the urge to duck you can feel their wings brush the top of your head. It was truly a unique experience.

A raven which didn't look too different from those at home

This guy was the crowd favourite. Such a beautiful bird. You can certainly feel their power as they brush your head with their large powerful wings

One of the smaller hawks

These hawks were of the larger variety.

We finally got a close up of the infamous Javalena. Pronounced Havalena.
Basically look like wild boars but interestingly they are very distant relations to the Hog family.

Finally a sighting of Wily the Coyote

In an earlier post I showed a picture of a Roadrunner. Here is a closeup however he wouldn't move from this position so not the greatest of shots.

Big Horn sheep are native to the area however due to hunting and natural predators they are no longer found in the wild in the Tucson area. They are currently trying to repopulate a herd in the Catalina Mountains just north of Tucson. So far this has met with limited success as the Mountain Lions seem to be eating them as fast as they can relocate them.
The big Ram was getting pretty frisky and Lori wanted to leave before she witnessed nature taking its course.

The way the Museum is set up you can get very close and personal with a number of the different critters.

The scenery here is breathtaking and often the same view can take on a whole new look as the sun moves across the sky. The different angles of the sun changes the shadows and the colours take on a different hue. Sadly my attempt with the camera does not do true justice to the majesty we see every time we step out of our trailer.

Often the different colours are subtle. Various shades of browns, sand and pale greens. But sometimes to see the more intense colour you just have to take your eyes off the horizon and look down at your boots or take a close up of some of those prickly cactus.

The red hill really stands out as the normal colour would be what you see in the foreground. This area used to be a swamp a few millennia ago and the red colour is the result of petrified mud.

A barrel cactus in bloom

Ok lets play a game. Its a version of Where's Waldo. In this case its Where's the Monarch.
I lost count but must be well over 20 flying around or perching on the branches. They are doing their job of pollinating the plants.