The Bird Whisperer: Boyce Thompson Arboretum

On October 31, 2010, my mom and I met down in Payson to carpool over to Boyce Thompson Arboretum State Park for some birding. The arboretum is about an hour east of Phoenix and showcases plants from all over the world, particularly arid regions like Australia. Due to the vegetation and climate, the spot is an oasis in the desert for migrating birds. While we didn't see anything "rare" that day, we did have an amazing encounter watching a Cooper's Hawk nail a Northern Flicker. It had it pinned to a branch while it squirmed. The hawk then took the flicker down to the ground in the middle of one of the gardens and proceeded to rip it apart:

The arboretum always has some hummingbirds hanging around, even in winter because of the low elevation and warm temperatures. On this day we had a few Broad-billed Hummingbirds, which reach the northern limit of their distribution here. Here are a couple pictures of a male:

We also found a few monarch butterflies in the gardens, among other butterflies:

We noticed that the desert brooms (Baccharis sarothroides) were drawing lots of insects, including butterflies, bees, and wasps:

One of the coolest plants in the arboretum's collection is the boojum tree or cirio (Fouquieria columnaris, formerly Idria columnaris), a relative of the ocotillo that is found down in Baja California. The family Fouquieriaceae now only consists of one genus, Fouquieria, which contains less than a dozen species in the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico (the only species in the U.S. is ocotillo, F. splendens). The boojum tree is a towering plant that has adapted to an arid climate by having superior water storage capacity. Here are some photos of the arboretum's boojum trees:

Here are some photos of the naturally-growing ocotillos around the arboretum grounds, mixed among saguaro cactus and other Sonoran Desert shrubs:

We came across a flowering saguaro cactus (Carnegia gigantea) growing in one of the desert garden sections of the arboretum. I think this was the first time I had gotten to look at a blooming saguaro up close. The flowers are pollinated by bats.

Here are a couple more cacti pics, including a prickly pear cactus (Opuntia sp.) growing out of a crevice in the trunk of a large tree:

Here is what the "skeleton" of a saguaro looks like:

The arboretum has recently planted several cycads around the gardens too, which are a gymnosperm (the plant group containing cone-bearing, non-flowering plants). Their leaves look similar to palms, but the plants are low-growing. We teach about these in the biology lab I'm a TA for and so far we've only had a couple of small specimens we get from the greenhouse to show students. It was neat to actually see these growing in the ground and even producing cones: