A Visit to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum

It was a beautiful warm sunny day to drive out to the museum.  It was located out near Saguaro National Park West.  The museum, with all the things relative to the desert, was created right in the lush desert landscape with distant views of the mountain ranges in the distance.  You could even see the range that is across the border in Mexico.  The place is so large that it took us almost 5 hours of walking around to see it and we still didn’t see all of it.  There were winding paths that took you to all of the exhibits. It was all nicely laid out as if you were just hiking through the desert.  The museum is a very popular attraction so the place was VERY busy!

 

The museum consists of all types of animals, large and small, that are typical of desert wildlife.  Snakes, tarantulas, river otter, coati mundi,  Javelina, bobcats, bear, deer, mountain lions, Big Horn sheep, quail, etc.  My favorite animal exhibit was the prairie dog town.  I LOVE prairie dogs!  The one below posed at my special request!  There are a few pictures of some of the other animals we saw.  There are too many to show and some were just sleeping in the shade so were hard to capture.  The mountain lion is behind glass so it was hard to get a clear picture.  The mountain lion is such a beautiful animal, that I hate to see them in captivity.

   

  

A fun exhibit was the Hummingbird cage that you could walk around in.  They were buzzing around everywhere, like giant bees.  Some of them are very colorful and we were fortunate enough to see one nesting.  They are so tiny!! We have a Hummingbird feeder outside our RV window so we get to enjoy them often.  But this was still fun to get closer to them.

 

A fun demonstration to watch was the Raptor Birds of Prey demonstration.  These different beautiful awesome birds of prey have been trained to fly in a certain area as we stood beneath their flight path.  Trainers had treats at different places in the desert and the birds fly in the various directions over us to get the treats.  They flew so close to us that it looked that they were headed right for us and you could fell the air from their wings they were so close!  Just wonderful birds to watch! It was a fun day to be out there in the sunshine and the desert and get a close up look at lots of desert wildlife.