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Wanderung 8

Swinging Sweetly through the Sunny South.

January-February 2005

January 30, 2005 - Sonoran Desert Museum - Tucson, Arizona

Debbie cooked us all a nice scrambled egg (with lots of stuff) breakfast, and while we wolfed that down we discussed options for the day, finally deciding on the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum. The museum had been recommended by a Ranger in the Guadeloupe Mountains and was just past the western edge of Tucson, so it was fairly convenient. As it was Sunday, the city traffic was light and we were in a desert area with huge Saguaro cacti in very short order.

I had always imagined these deserts as having a single cactus here or there, or at most isolated clumps of Saguaros. Instead, the Saguaros were so thick and numerous that they formed a kind of stumpy forest of plants on the slopes of the mountains. Rob mentioned that the Saguaros only grew in a certain range of elevations, and only took root where the land was at least a little sloped or uneven, never on a flat plain. He also mentioned that transplanting them was quite tricky because apparently they were sensitive to the orientation to the sun where they had grown, and would only survive if they were transplanted in about the same orientation. Surprisingly finicky behavior for a cactus, in my opinion, but they seemed to be surviving and populating the Sonoran desert quite nicely.

We stopped at the top of the pass to climb up to a little observation hut made from rocks—it turned out to be an improvement made by the CCC in the 1930s. The trail up to the hut had not been maintained however (if it had ever in fact existed), and so I picked my way up carefully trying to find a passable route. Not so Karl; he bounded up the slopes like a young mountain goat with an absolutely astonishing fearlessness and sure footedness. I could vaguely recall running across piles of bricks from demolished buildings like that when I was 10 years old, but that was a long time ago so I let him run on ahead and picked my way along. Rob decided to give his son a run for his money and bounded up the slope after him, and it was an interesting race. Rob was ahead for a while due to greater sheer strength, but in the end the youngster, who after all was regularly playing soccer and the like, pulled ahead due to having greater endurance as well as a better power-to-weight ratio.

I took a panoramic shot of the pass while we were up on top and we were in general having a grand old time when disaster struck. Monika slid on a patch of gravel-covered rock. She went down slowly, but her left foot twisted underneath her as she slid down. That didn't look good, so I hurried down hoping nothing was broken. She got up limping, and although we were pretty sure nothing was actually broken, her left ankle was certainly badly sprained. Despite winces with each limping step, she maintained it didn't hurt that badly and insisted that we all continue on to the museum for our planned visit.

The Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum turned out to be as nice as everyone had described it. In some sense, it was an odd combination of a zoo for local animals plus extra exhibits such as a cave with mineral exhibits, climbing corridors, and so forth. But the museum also had trailside information centers on different topics that resembled vending carts in a mall, and had scheduled live presentations at different points during the day for birds, snakes, and stuff somewhat like the special events at an amusement park. Thus, I couldn't quite pigeon hole it because the museum seemed to blend together things you would ordinarily not think of. In any case, the blend worked in creating an exciting visit for us for the day.

We started off chatting with 2 women showing birds out in the ticket purchasing area. One lady held a cute little American Kestrel on her (gauntleted) arm and discussed the diet and habits of this tiniest member of the hawk family. Apparently the Kestrel female owns the territory and just mates with a selected male each year in order to raise a brood of chicks. A second lady held an even larger Barn Owl with its unique heart-shaped feathered face. It was a very beautiful bird but seemed distressed by the sounds of a passing aircraft. She explained that the aircraft was being perceived in a higher position than the owl in such as way that the bird probably interpreted it as a possible predator. She discussed its asymmetrically placed ears and how they were used to locate prey by sounds when hunting at night.


 

After purchasing the tickets, we started walking on the basic paved loop leading around to the animals and exhibits. The very first exhibit was snakes, scorpions and lizards, where I learned that Arizona boasts 8 species of rattlesnake. They looked quite different, so the take home message for me was that the western diamondback pattern was only one of many variations in rattlesnake that I had to watch out for. Many of the other snakes were non-poisonous and some were even quite pretty, in my opinion, but then again I'm probably more pro-snake than most people. I had a pet garter snake for a while when I was a kid and liked it a lot. It seemed to like me, too, but it's rather hard to be sure with any reptile whether they like you personally or just enjoy your body heat and having regular meals.

After the snake exhibit we wandered into a cave that was partly natural and partly enhanced to make room for various kinds of exhibits. One room had a really thorough geological and biological history of the earth, and adjacent to that was a room full of beautifully displayed minerals like geodes, crystals, and so forth. Other parts of the cave had be reconstructed to resemble a real archeological site complete with Native American artifacts, and they had even made a tight, twisting little side passage to give kids the real experience of climbing around in a cave. What a hoot!

Once out of the cave, our path continued around through many animal exhibits of native flora and fauna. Exhibits were usually built along the "natural habitat" lines pioneered in the late 1800s by Hagenbeck's Tierpark in Hamburg, Germany, (see Wanderung 5). We watched otters, a black bear, a Mexican wolf, and several kinds of big cats including a mountain lion and a bobcat or lynx, I think. I didn't think of Arizona as having a lot of aquatic animals, but apparently some rivers were large and consistent enough to support populations of otters and other aquatic life.

Monika had just been hanging in there and limping slowly along with us for the morning, so after lunch at the zoo grill she wandered around nearby exhibits while the rest of us walked back over to a bird show. The bird show was located on a gravel path branching off the main path, and given that uncertain footing Monika chose to not risk further injury to her ankle. We arrived at an overlook in time for the "free flight" show that featured a family of hawks. In that area of the desert these hawks had evolved a family hunting scheme where some of the hawks would swoop down and spook the prey into the path of the other hawks. The docent said that there was only one other species of raptor that had evolved cooperative hunting, and that was in yet another odd ecological niche, the Galapagos Islands. It sounded to me a bit like in these two cases "necessity was the mother of cooperation", to coin a phrase.

We visited some other exhibits on the way back to rejoin Monika in time for a poisonous reptile show, which I really wanted to see. It is not that I like poisonous reptiles, for I surely don't, but I do sincerely believe in knowing about environmental threats, and for anyone who likes to wander around in the wilderness poisonous reptiles poise such a threat. As it turned out, the reptiles are not as much of a threat as I imagined. In Arizona, for example, there were indeed 300+ reported snakebites each year, but it was extremely rare for a person to die from them-only 1 person every 3-4 years. They showed 2 good examples of Arizona rattlesnakes; one was a black-tailed version that had, true to its name, a jet-black tail for about 3-4 inches below the rattles. The two handlers were, by the way, some of the funniest guys I have ever seen. They had a droll sense of humor as well as a great line of patter plus the ability to ad lib jokes based on audience comments or questions. So you might not have thought of a venomous reptile display as being funny, but it really was and by all means catch the show if you're ever in the area.

The show was also, of course, educational. During the program I also learned that the rattle is just a sign of being emotionally disturbed; often a rattler will strike without giving any such warning. I further learned that a rattlesnake can strike ½ to 2/3 of its body length even if it is fully extended, and that surprised me a lot since I had always thought that they could make a big lunge only if they were in a coiled position. The rattlesnakes, by the way, seemed just as fascinated by me as I was at being within arm's length of them, and one of them just hung his head over the edge of the table and stared directly at me. Now I didn't mind being liked by my old garter snake, but being eyed by a 3 or 4 foot rattler made me distinctly uneasy, especially after I learned that they do not have to be coiled to strike at distances up to 5 or 6 feet.

The Gila monster they displayed was also something that could populate a person's nightmares. I had also thought of a Gila monster as being really poisonous, but that turned out to also not be true. Apparently only 2 people had been conclusively proved to die from Gila monster bites in the past 100 years or so, which was a reassuring statistic, especially as the critter itself looked really threatening. Still, one of my students had her hand badly mangled by her pet iguana, which was not poisonous at all, so I still would not like to play around with a Gila monster. Come to think of it, the Gila monster also kept trying to crawl in my direction, for whatever that's worth. I rather hoped this attraction was merely due to some temporary aromas from my lunch entrées rather than being due to some reptile-attracting pheromones deriving from my idiosyncratic biochemistry. The latter case would make wandering in the desert at night, for example, a much more exciting recreation than I would want it to be.

We ended up the day working our way past the last exhibits on the paved path. I particularly enjoyed a hummingbird cage that had at least 5 distinct species (probably many more) zinging around in it. Some were eating, others were resting, and a couple were even sitting in nests, feeding their (very tiny) young, and so forth. Cheerful birds, the hummingbirds, although in reality they are extremely territorial and pretty feisty combatants for their size.

As we headed for the exit we had one bonus, a little gray owl was just snoozing away on the branch of a bush right beside the trail. He was real, and I was amazed that he was undisturbed by the 100-odd people that must have walked right by his perch during the day. Still, there he was and although not really an "exhibit", he turned out to be the last animal of the day. We drove back through Gate's pass and the Saguaro "forest" to a nice dinner back at the house.

That evening we put ice on Monika's ankle while we watched "Goodbye Lenin", a German film about the end of East Germany in 1989. It had English subtitles, so we could all enjoy both the humorous and poignant bits, which it had in full measure. One point made by this film that I don't think most Americans appreciate, was that some East Germans were very proud of their achievements as a separate country. The fall of The Wall meant that the East Germans were essentially invaded and taken over by western culture and economic might, and some of them at least longed for the good aspects of the old days. I realized that fact when I toured a maritime museum in Rostock during Wanderung 2 and found a 4th floor filled with proud exhibits about the maritime achievements of East Germany. The movie, to me anyway, brought out those feelings of loss of the old, familiar, comfortable, and in some ways more idealistic even if more authoritarian, East German culture.

A curious side effect of watching the film was that I enjoyed simply listening to spoken German again. Why? I think this is because I have had such uniformly good experiences while visiting Germany occasionally over 30 years, primarily due to a wonderful set of in-laws. I think those experiences have given me a wellspring of positive associations with hearing the language spoken. A perhaps similar phenomenon is the positive emotions I experience when I hear the music played that I first heard when I was in my teens and twenties. It's not that the music is inherently any better or worse than other periods; rather I think it is the association of that music with the positive states of being young, healthy, energetic and optimistic that gives the music evocative power. For music, at least, I generally observe that most folks prefer the music of their youth and maybe the association with their generally pleasant youthful memories is at least part of the reason. In any case, when the film ended, I helped Monika limp off to bed for the night.

Copyright 2005 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

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