In 1983, or thereabouts, I read an article in Sports Illustrated on the best zoos in the United States. I believe they were, in no particular order, the Bronx Zoo, The National Zoo in Washington, and the San Diego Zoo. What I remembered for sure was that they said the best zoo was the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. I had just discovered the San Diego Zoo and thought it was the best zoo in the world, without, almost, any evidence and I wanted to see any zoo that was supposed to be even better. I did see it soon after and I was unimpressed (and a little dumbfounded). I’ve been wanting to see it again but, during the interim, I began to wonder if I had misremembered the whole thing. I tried looking it up on the internet a couple of times but couldn’t find anything.
The strange thing about the internet, however, is that, as time goes by, more old stuff rather than less old stuff ends up there. I couldn’t find the Sports Illustrated article but Google did lead me to an article in the January-February 1977 issue of American Education that discussed the Sports Illustrated article. Whenever I get a chance, I complain about local museums wanting to have a second or third class Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg rather than first-class local artists. Ironically, I didn’t appreciate that this nature museum is doing exactly that. It’s sort of embarrassing and it makes me wonder how many other times I’ve missed the point. The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum has no elephants or howler monkeys, it only has animals and plants that live near Tucson.
The site of the Museum is spectacular, even the drive to it is spectacular – once you leave the extended suburbs of Tucson – with the road winding over a low pass through a saguaro forest. Once we are at the Museum, the landscape seems to be in a natural environment and one of my first thoughts was that this area has a much richer – richer as in more plants and animals- environment than at home. But that is an illusion, this is really a distilled version of the local environment that is made breathtaking by the backdrop of the Avra Valley basin.
One of the downsides to civilization and its accouterments is that it covers up the natural environment. Travel to a city as small as Memphis or an even smaller city, like Chatanooga, and you don’t see the landscape. Even if you go to a local park, it is hard to get an idea of what the land was like before it was covered with our “improvements”. Tucson is different and every place should have a similar Natural Museum. In addition to the great site and lots of local plants and animals, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum has a terrific Birds of Prey show. The day we were there, they had three different kinds of raptors demonstrating three different hunting styles; Peregrine Falcons which cruise the area at ultra-high speeds, Barn Owls which quietly hunt alone, and Harris’s Hawks which hunt as a group. All of them were untethered – except for the golden handcuff of free meals – and they were captivating.
If the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum were all that Tucson had to offer, that would be enough but it also has the stunning Mission San Xavier del Bac and a vibrant art scene. The Mission was founded in 1692 but, the current building – in a sort of primitive, baroque style – wasn’t built until 1740. The only art gallery we had time to see, before hotting the road, was the Etherton Gallery, a suburb photography gallery but we plan on coming back (soon, I hope).
