Arizona Sonora Desert Museum

We attended the museum today and truly enjoyed ourselves. We arrived just in time to get a tour by a docent who used to live in Atwater. She was really great. We learned quite a lot about the different plants that grow in the desert. For instance, most of the tall saguro cactus started growing when Thomas Jefferson was president. The cactus's that look dead in the middle portion are still alive, but suffered from a frost. They have a wonderful humming bird area that you can walk in and the humming birds litteraly fly right by your head. I have posted a picture I took of one of the humming birds sitting in a nest. They also have a bird avairy that you can walk through. Besides being a museum, it is also a zoo of animals one can find in the desert. Those pictures are on the webshots page. They offer a Raptor Free Flight Program in which birds of prey, we saw the Harris hawks, hunt for their food. These birds came swooping down over the audience in search of their food. If I lived in this area, I would have a membership so I could return every month to see how things have changed.