In the car at 8:00 am, we negotiated the motorways of Tucson to get to Tucson Mountain Park and were birding on the Golden Gate trail by 8:30. Great views of the hills overlooking the sprawl of Tucson and of prickly pear, saguaro, opuntia, ocotillo and white-winged doves.
We birded and walked for a little over an hour and saw Gambel’s Quail, White-winged Dove, Mourning Dove, Gila Woodpecker, Verdin, Cactus Wren, Black-tailed Gnatcatcher, Wilson’s Warbler, Black-throated Sparrow, Pyrrhuloxia, and Black-headed Grosbeak.
The weather was pleasant for our bird stroll but was warming up at mid-morning when we arrived at the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum. The Museum has a zoo with Sonoran Desert animals in natural settings including a hummingbird aviary and underground exhibits of nocturnal animals sleeping in their burrows behind one-way glass. Those were difficult to photograph.
Outside of the netted and glassed exhibits the lizards ran across the paths. The Cactus Wrens, Gila Woodpeckers, and the House Sparrows were the most numerous birds on the grounds and very unafraid of people.
The grounds also had some interesting sculptures and artwork here and there.
The plant collection was extensive and included many blooming cacti and other desert plants.
After lunch we visited the Ironwood Gallery which had a traveling exhibition from the Leigh Yawkes Woodson Art Museum called Birds in Art. They were some of the oils, watercolors, prints and sculptures from a juried show that the Woodson Art Museum does every year.
We left the museum at 1:00 and went back to the hotel to rest and to shower. At about 3:00 we went out to visit the Native Seed Search store, then drove for about an hour to a house in the Rincon Mountains where we had been invited to dinner.
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