Patagonia II: The Patagonia Sonoita Creek Preserve

The next morning we wriggled our way through town, across what was a waterless Sonoita Creek, to the Preserve, where large camera lenses congregated first at the little office itself, around which were staked hummingbird feeders just to prove that we were in the right place.

I am something of a birder myself, I suppose, confidently able to distinguish between a hummingbird and a duck, although I suppose that now-and-then I get it wrong.

The Preserve looks like a one-time farm field carved from the trees that grow back from the creek itself as it meanders west toward Nogales. The creek, which does have water by the time if reaches the Preserve, shows evidence of the times when it really shows its muscle. Rough but comfortable trails have been carved out parallel to the creek to offer the birds a place to come and watch for birders.

On the day we visited the Preserve, migrating birders from as far away as France were sighted, allowing birds to whisper to each other about what had been seen where.

It was a thistle that entranced Mari; not just one, but many. I am as knowledgeable about flowers as I am about birds, so it might not have been a thistle, at all, but it was close. It was white, and it was not a calla lily, which I associate with funerals. As you might have surmised by now, my classification of plants is about as precise as my ability to distinguish a duck from a hummingbird, mostly.

I associate hummingbirds with glass bottles, and I associate glass bottles with. . . .

The RV park where we stayed, was not elegant, but it did have shade trees, and all the usual amenities. Cooper, our mini-Doberman/Chihuahua/hummingbird/duck mix dog, saw his first cows, first deer, and more marauding trash-can-tipping javalinas.

On our way home, we drove west to where the Patagonia Creek has been dammed up to create Patagonia Lake, not usually referred to as Big Foot Lake, or even as Chihuahuillas Lake. We pretended we were scouting for another camping destination, later, but truth be told, we were thinking about a restaurant in Tubac which also had migrated up from Mexico.

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Nice to Run Into You Again

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The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

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