Desert Display

Although the Sonoran Desert has taken 8 million years to evolve into the most lush and diverse of the world's deserts, it has taken only 50 years for the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum to evolve into the premier place to see and discover it.

When the facility west of Tucson opened on Labor Day 1952, it comprised little more than a few cages at the end of a dusty road. A couple of men, William Carr and Arthur Pack, had a dream of a living museum to show how wild animals really lived.

I evolved there, too. When my parents moved from the Midwest to Tucson in 1951, I was 7 years old and the desert was a new, very foreign land. Nothing looked like home. This place had sharp mountains, sharper plants, dust devils and hopping rats that didn't drink.

The museum introduced me to wild creatures and plants with new names. And during my childhood it was the most wonderful place in the world. Between a Walt Disney movie called The Living Desert and the Desert Museum, generations of us learned to love the place in which we lived. We learned that the desert is not only friendly but fun.

Tucson TV announcer Hal Gras took the museum animals on the road to visit us in local schools. He introduced us to a collared peccary named Olivia de Javelina, a constricting bull snake named Julius Squeezer and a porcupine called Quillie Mays. The mascot was George L. Mountainlion.

Today the museum has grown enormously, but the zest remains. Kids still meet bobcats or chuckwallas eye-to-eye and exclaim, "I think it likes me!" The bond is forever welded, at least for the human youngstersand more than a few oldsters, too. A halfmillion people visit the museum each year.

Gone are the old cages. Today bighorn sheep, bears, mountain lions, coatimundis, otters, wolves and beavers live in enclosures that look like their home turfs. Coyotes and javelinas roam large territories with walls of nearly invisible stainless-steel wire netting. Called Invisinet™, it was invented by Ken Stockton at the museum, and zoos around the world are adopting it because it allows much larger exhibits to look absolutely wild. This museum strives to show animals in their habitats and how all the parts remain essential and connected. Nowhere is this easier to see than the hummingbird aviary, where seven brightly hued species whirl around visitors at arm's length. It's like being trapped inside a rainbow. Karen Krebbs has worked with this display since it opened in 1988 and knows each bird like a family member. Some of the hummingbirds have lived more than 12 years inside the aviary, a long life for birds, especially ones so small.

'I succumbed to the desert as soon as I saw it.'

A female Anna's hummingbird gleans insects from a leaf, and then captures flies and gnats to feed her fast-growing chick, which will fledge in about three weeks. She passes the bugs from her long beak into the chick's mouth and then zooms off to find more. She'll feed it every 20 minutes during the day, and keep the baby warm at night instead of letting her own body temperature drop into torpor, as some hummingbirds do.

Twenty other hummers dart around the enclosure. It's enough to make us nervous, but these fliers are incredibly aerobatic and utterly confident. Each sets up its own territory and defends it vigorously. In the wild, they will even take on birds the size of woodpeckers. In the aviary, colorful plants bloom throughout the year to give the birds food, and we're encouraged to plant hummingbird gardens back home. A wild hummingbird, looking for the good life, hovers above the netting trying to get inside. Most hummers migrate, and the Sonoran Desert serves as a crucial layover on their trips. Some, like the rufous, fly from southern Mexico to Alaska every year and then back. In spring these tiny birds move north through the Pacific Coast states, and in autumn they return south through the Rocky Mountains following corridors of flowers more than fleeing the cold. They remember areas and times where the flowers have been good. Banded hummingbirds on their annual journeys have sometimes been recaptured at the same plant on the same day year after year. Few of us can remember where we had lunch a year ago, especially after driving cross-country.

Like other exhibits at the museum, this one serves several purposes besides connecting visitors with nature. Birds hatched in the enclosure will be given to zoos around the country, which then will not need to capture wild ones. Krebbs also researches how young hummingbirds learn their songs and how mothers spend their time and energy, and is writing a book about them.

But the Desert Museum, far more than a world-class zoo, is also a botanical garden and a natural history museum. Tourists, photographers and botanists from around the world come here to witness blooming seasons and wander paths brightened by mysterious and strange plants. Nearly 1,200 plant species grow on the grounds.

In the pollination garden, some flower always sports blossoms, but the garden seems more than colorful and fragrant. It reminds us that a third of our own food and 90 percent of all wild plants require native bees, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, beetles or bats to pollinate them so the flowers can set fruit and seed. Many of these pollinators have been ignored or forgotten. Within a dozen miles of the museum live at least 600 species of bees. Unlike European or African honeybees, most of these bees remain solitary and seldom noticed.

The museum covers geology, mineralogy and paleontology, too. One popular display, called “Ancient Arizona,” shows replica fossils of a large dinosaur found about 40 miles from the museum. Named Sonorasaurus thompsoni, it was 50 to 55 feet long and 16 feet tall at the shoulders when it roamed a much wetter Arizona 100 million years ago. At the exhibit, younger visitors share the sense of discovery by chipping faux-rocks and looking for synthetic fossils molded from the real things. Who knows? One of them may become the next professional dinosaur hunter.

The museum has its share of the unusual, unique and charismatic animals to wow the Laid-back and content for the moment in its museum habitat, the secretive mountain lion is a master of camouflage in its natural environment.

crowds-colorful Gila monsters, cryptic vine snakes, adorable screech owls, tiny pupfish, haughty mountain lions. On a morning stroll, we can see more things than we're likely to see in a year of travel in the wild. Twenty species here live on the endangered and protected list, and another 150 rate special concern.

But we can't forget the common things. As many of us can recite by the time we drive home, the ordinary things serve as basic building blocks. Crusts of lichens and algae retain precious moisture and keep soil from blowing away. Bursage plants and creosote bushes provide cover for other plants. Sideblotched lizards are widespread, which means they are significant predators of insects but that they also are major prey for snakes and birds. These ordinary links make up an extraordinary web. Even though the Though the desert may look impoverished, it is ecologically complex and vulnerable.

A number of animals at the museum do not appear on the official roster. Many creatures, from foxes to canyon wrens to javelinas, ignore the museum's fence and drop in without a ticket. Professional photographers know this and snap some of their best photos in the cactus garden, along the loop trail or even in the parking lot. At times wild black vultures stop by for a few days to visit their compadres inside the bird enclosure. More than one birdkeeper has lost a sandwich or cookie to these uninvited guests. Occasionally a visitor reports an escaped coyote or tries to grab a snake on the loose, only to learn from authorities that it is wild and not an escapee.

Behind the scenes, the Desert Museum works like a university-a cactus college"A CANADA GOOSE lived by the river pool. His wings had been clipped so he couldn't fly, or so the staff thought. A summer storm came along, and the goose left on the storm winds. Some hours later, a tourist approached the curator. 'I just saw the darndest thing...' he began, and told the story of a strange bird on the road. "The curator took off in the direction indicated and found that the goose had tired quickly and was calmly walking home along the road." -Tucson Citizen, December 1976 "A DOCENT WAS SHOWING A KESTREL. One line he uses is that they are the most abundant bird of prey in the U.S. Immediately someone in the audience looked at his name tag and said, 'No, John, that is incorrect.' Everyone waited a second or two in shock at having the docent upstaged. Then the man in the audience said, 'The most abundant birds of prey in the U.S. are lawyers.' The crowd was highly amused." -Education Specialist Robin Kropp

The Desert Museum works like a university . . . it schools visitors unaware they've even enrolled in class.

Doing education, research, publication. It schools visitors unaware they've enrolled in class. And they learn the ways of the desert without cracking a book, though they could grab any one of a dozen museumpublications or find one of several hundred technical papers or books by the staff. Members of the community donate 100,000 hours a year as well-trained docents and volunteers. The docent course is so rigorous that its handbook became a 628-page encyclopedia of desert lore called A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert. Even then, much of the course information was left out. One docent survived the training course and proudly met her first group of visitors for a tour of the aviary. One of her charges was none other than Roger Tory Peterson, the famous ornithologist who wrote the field guide books. She was only momentarily flustered and later drew his praise for a job well done. Some of my buddies are also museum kids. Tom Kleespie reminds me, "Long before it was popular to do so, the Desert Museum was showing us exactly what we had in our own back yard and let us know how lucky we were to live here." Tom, who grew up in Arizona, now produces a nationally shown TV show called The Desert Speaks. You've probably seen it. Others tell similar stories of how the museum changed their lives. Steve Perchal first visited the museum when he was 5. In first grade, Hal Gras brought the Desert Ark to his school, and Steve touched his first snake. By the time he was 12, he would ride his bicycle to the museum during summer vacations. He started working at the museum as a teen, doing construction and collecting specimens. After several false nest, lay eggs and rear young in the ideal surroundings of the hummingbird aviary.

starts, such as being bitten by a Mojave rattlesnake when he tried to tie its mouth shut, he worked at the museum for 16 years. Now he runs Sonoran Arthropod Studies Institute, a center for understanding desert insects. Even the museum's current director, Rick Daley, was inspired to veer from a research career to natural history. "The museum is the reason I fell in love with the desert 30 years ago," he said. The museum also has influenced other natural history showcases around the world with innovative displays that took animals out of their cages. It pioneered "making"

rocks and trees, and designing enclosures that look absolutely real. William Conway, past general director of the Wildlife Conservation Society-which runs four zoos, an aquarium and 325 programs in 52 countries-praises the museum for blending exhibits so well, so faithfully, and of such quality that visitors feel immersed in the desert. "It was the first to represent animals in a setting consistent with their natural environment." No wonder it ranks among LOCATION: 2021 N. Kinney Road, Tucson; 120 miles south of Phoenix. GETTING THERE: From Interstate 10 in Tucson, take Speedway Boulevard 14 miles west to Gates Pass Road and Kinney Road.

HOURS: The museum is open every day of the year. Winter hours (October-February) are 8:30 A.M. to 5 P.M. and summer hours (March-September) are 7:30 A.M. to 5 P.M. June through September, stays open until 10 P.M. on Saturday nights to showcase the animals after dark.

FEES: Admission is $9.95 ($8.95 May-October) for ages 13 and older, and $1.75 for children 6 to 12. Children under 6 are admitted free. Strollers and wheelchairs are available at no cost.

EVENTS: 50th-anniversary events run throughout 2002.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: (520) 883-2702 or www.DesertMuseum.org.

"ONE OF THE RACCOONS ESCAPED. It was thought he was gone for good as a search of the grounds turned up no trace.

But early the next morning, he was found sleeping on the roof of his own holding cage."

-Arizona Daily Star, June 23, 1953 "WHILE SHOWING METEORITES to a group, I noted that one, the Allende, was 4.57 million years old.

"The little boy of one family, wide-eyed, said, 'Wow, that's as old as Grandpa!'" -Docent Charles Erickson "I WAS TALKING TO A SCHOOL GROUP at the owl enclosure. One smart little boy in front said, 'Owls can turn their heads all the way around.'"

"A smarter boy in back said, 'Only once.'" -Docent Betty Anne Wheeler The top ten zoological sites in the world. As this big kid ages a little, I spend more time looking at plants, sitting on the benches and visiting one of several snack bars. But thanks to the museum, I see deeper relationships now, how the dinosaur toe bone connects to the foot bone, how the flower is connected to the bee to the fruit to the bear. In addition to its subtle message that it's okay to love a desert, the museum has taken an active role in providing information to support expansion of Saguaro National Park, creation of Ironwood National Monument, protection of habitats in Mexico and theUnited States, and now advocates a Sonoran Desert national park. By one estimate, we've lost 60 percent of the Sonoran Desert. The museum doesn't want to be the last refuge or Noah's Ark.

What will the next 50 years bring to the museum? Already under construction and slated for opening this summer is "Life on the Rocks," which will highlight how Gila monsters, snakes, lizards and bats live in crevices in cliffs. The walls are going up, and wild animals are already moving in. One morning a female antelope ground squirrel kicked dust in the face of a bull snake and bit the tail of a Gila monster as the three of them jockeyed for space in the new exhibit before it even opened.

Also being planned is an oak woodlandwith a new jaguar enclosure. After that, visitors can expect new exhibits for mountain lions, animal tracks, seasonal wildflowers and roadrunners-the cuckoo clowns of the desert.

Those will be grand openings, and I'll be there for every one. It's the kid in me. I hope I'm young enough to see the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum's next 50 years, for when I visit it, I've gone home. AH The not-so-pleasant musky perfume of the javelina helps it distinguish between herds in the wild.

"WHILE LEADING A GROUP I heard a woman screaming. She had just passed me with her husband and small child in a stroller. I thought that she probably was afraid of the large carpenter bees that had been buzzing around and intimidating people. I called out to her to not be afraid, that the bees wouldn't hurt her. At that she screamed, 'It's not a bee; it's a snake!' "It turns out that she had run over the snake with the left front wheel of her stroller, saw the snake, started screaming and ran away, leaving her child with the stroller straddling the very surprised reptile. Luckily it turned out to be a gopher snake. So much for mother love."

Yuma Marriage Mill

HOLLYWOOD STARS CROSSED A STATE LINE TO WED THEIR BELOVEDS