Phoenix Visit

Phoenix Visit

My wife and I visited Phoenix, Arizona last week, which I hadn't seen since 1965 or so.   I was a kid then, didn't pay attention, and had 50 years to forget what little I'd seen.  Now that I'm a good mature retiree, I gave the place another look.  I decided to bypass pictures of thousands of RVs and the ever-present human snow birds - pretty repetitious really.  Instead, I toured the Desert Botanical Gardens with a birding group and recorded the winged desert wildlife.

The collection of desert plants was astonishing and awfully alien to a long-time Minnesota resident.   Phoenix was going through record heat, 86 degree or so, while Minnesota had a cold snap, having troubles getting the temperature above zero.   Phoenix's far more uniform and hotter climate breeds entirely different plants - I saw no white pines or rhubarb there.  Many of the birds were new to me - cool..

Long ago I stopped growing cactus plants in my Minnesota garden - yes it's possible to grow a few cactus in Minnesota - because I kept impaling myself on the spines.  Weeding cactus plants is tough. The weeds didn't look as lusty in the botanical garden as home but what surprised me was the birds casual, even intimate, relationship with prickles.  This Gila woodpecker is working on the fruit of a cactus.

Earlier in the day was the time to see birds like this blue-gray gnatcatcher.   This fellow was tiny and moved quickly.

Talking of moving quickly, hummingbirds in flight were tough to capture - I wasn't sure I caught any of them until I got home.

We have gold finches in Minnesota and I'll bet they feast on tree buds like this too but no in February.  These birds were in the tree tops - there are at least three in this photo - but they're hard to see.

I had heard of saguaro cactuses but never realized how omnipresent they were in Phoenix or how many bird holes were drilled in them.  I don't know what kind of exotic bird this is - I hope it's not an English sparrow.   I have a really boring picture of the head of a sleeping owl sticking out of a saguarohole  that I won't inflict on you.

Butterflies are great fun to photograph but they can be buggers to catch.   This queen butterfly flitted about, never stopping.   We don't have these in Minnesota so I was hot for a capture and with patience stopped him/her in mid air.

A greater roadrunner came sneaking by in the afternoon and stopped for a drink.   It was a bigger bird than I expected.

We visited a little park that had ponds with waterfowl.  This American coot - a bird I've seen in Minnesota and California - was diving and surfacing regularly.  The fellow her looks a little like the pictures of dodo bird but he's all fluffed up - most of my coot pictures are of a far slimmer bird.   They may be known as mud hens but I still like them, especially their blue feet.

I don't know my ducks so I can't identify this one.   He was shedding water much like a dog would.  He'd just been feeding on the bottom like the coot.

We visited Phoenix's hole in the rock and actually climbed up to look through the hole at the sights.  This is what the non-cultured desert looked like with the rock in the background.

The rock close up was awfully barren.  There wasn't soil as Midwesterners know it, thus the lack of weeds.

We drove up into the South Mountains to the Dobbin's Lookout for the panorama of Phoenix in the flats below.  I can see the lure of Arizona - it's warm in the winter - but by the time we left, I was ready to return to our wildly varied climate - I remain loyal to home.