Desert Museum

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Today we got up early and headed to the Sonoran Desert Museum. It actually opens at 7:30, so people can avoid the heat. The "museum" is a combination of museum and zoo - mostly zoo. We wandered around looking at the desert animals and plants - thoroughly enjoying them all. Rich liked the bighorn sheep the best, of course. Nancy liked the hummingbird aviary. There was a fluffy little baby sitting on a branch. The adults were whirring all over. Every person in there had a smile on their face! We also liked the other aviary where you could see different local birds up close. I had no idea that cardinals lived here! I thought their range ended much further east!
There was a cross-section exhibit about the woodpeckers and the cactus boot. Also, a volunteer had a peregrine falcon sitting on his glove. Nancy showed him the photo and he agreed that it was a male falcon. He seemed impressed that we had seen one in the "wild".
We also learned about the trees here. The palo verde tree was the most interesting. It's bark is green. In times of drought, the tree drops all of its leaves and the green bark continues photosynthesis so the tree will survive. The ocotillo has the same system. The palo verde has one other way to survive a severe drought. It has the ability to cut off water to a few branches at a time, killing the branch. Within a few days, the branches dry up and fall off, conserving moisture for the remaining tree! Amazing! It's like a plant with a brain!
The saguaro were all plump and fat from winter rains. I touched one and the skin was hard as a rock. The barrel cactus was hard, too. A ranger explained how to tell a small saguaro from a barrel cactus. The barrel cacti tend to lean a little toward the southwest and have different spine patterns. Did I mention that a saguaro has to be about 60 years old before it grows its first arm? We saw one with lots of arms. nancy said, "That one must have had plenty of water." Rich said, "Yeah, enough for an 'arm'y."
We enjoyed our day and went back to our trailer to get ready to leave in the morning.

May 11th
We left for Kingman, rather glad to be out of the Sonoran Desert. It was beautiful, but very prickly! We were glad we hadn't brought Daisy because she couldn't have gone for a walk anywhere without getting cactus spines in her somewhere. Rich said that no one could have robbed banks or committed crimes because they coudn't have escped on horseback or on foot very fast through all those cacti!
The highlight of the day was when we passed Rooster Cogburn's Ostrich Farm. There were over 200 ostriches out in corrals. ALL of them had their heads on the ground because there was quite a stiff wind blowing. A strange sight!

May 12th
We spent the night in Barstow, California so we could leave the trailer and drive down to
San Bernardino to go to the courthouse to look for some family records on Rich's side. it was fun looking through the huge, musty old record books. We didn't find what we were looking for, but we found a marriage license for his great-grandparents.
Then we had lunch with Cindy and Rich Wilde and got caught up on all their news.

May 13th
We headed up Highway 295 toward home, comfortable to be back in our kind of desert - Great Basin.
We stopped in Lone Pine at the Western Film Museum that celebrated the hundreds of movies and TV shows made there in the Alabama Hills. Think Roy Rogers on horseback in the rocks, or the Lone Ranger, or Gene Autry, and you're in the Alabama Hills. We stopped in Independence at the courthouse to look at other records and , again, didn't find what we were looking for, but found other information instead.
We drove the rest of the way home.
It was an interesting trip!

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