The Dream of Docenting

Next month will mark the 10th anniversary of my first trip to Tucson. Restless after 11 years in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which I strongly suspected was just a way point on my journey, a casual suggestion from a good friend led to four hours on the Internet, resulting in my "deciding" I was moving to Tucson.   Shortly after this momentous decision I brought my daughter here on a post-college graduation trip.  I suspected I might be crazy to give up my well paid, if terminally boring job, my passive solar home on an acre of forested land, and leave all my good friends to make this huge leap of faith move.  I trusted my daughter to help me figure out if I was having a mid-life crisis, or if my gut instinct to shake my life up with a whole new exciting landscape was worth the risk.  She told me she had never seen me so excited and alive and insisted I make the move.

One of our first adventures in Tucson was a visit to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, a well known, internationally respected, and much loved zoo and botanic gardens that features animals and plants found in the Sonoran desert in which it  is located.  It was late May and the saguaros were in bloom.  Strings of Gambel's quail chicks scurried after their parents.  It was warm verging on hot under the intense late spring sun.  We hadn't gotten off the entrance patio before I noticed people in white shirts and beige pants with official looking patches indicating they were docents.  I wasn't quite sure what a docent was, but I was sure that I wanted to be one.

Interpreting a magnificent raptor, the barn owl

It took me over nine years to fulfill the Desert Museum docent dream, mainly because I was working most of that time.  When I retired late in 2008, thanks to my wonderful husband (who just happened to have been my first Tucson neighbor -- another "meant to be" sign), I was dismayed to discover that the Desert Museum wouldn't hold their next docent class until the fall of 2010.  Rather than wait to become involved with docenting at the museum, I volunteered there, working as a keeper's assistant with the Interpretive Animal Collection, the animals that are used on and off the grounds (often by the docents) for education.  I spent a happy year and a half handling many of the animals in the collection -- snakes and salamanders, falcons and owls, parrots, porcupines, and pelicans -- cleaning pens and perches, preparing diets, hand feeding, and helping with the Running Wild shows.  My husband, who is still working full time, volunteers with the botany department one day a week.  There are so many fascinating volunteer opportunities at the Desert Museum.

A botanic garden

Docent classes started late in August of last year and ran to near Christmas.  We were in class two days a week, all morning and sometimes into the afternoon, being instructed by curators and other Sonoran Desert experts on staff.  Our presence was required at other times each week, researching information available on the grounds and observing the docents at work interpreting the Sonoran Desert for visitors.  There were take home quizzes that took many hours, writing our own interpretations, thousands of pages of material to absorb, a midterm and a final exam.  It was demanding and an incredible gift to learn from such experts.  Forty new docents graduated early in January, joining the ranks of nearly 200 experienced docents, many of whom had inspired me on that first visit to the Desert Museum almost a decade earlier.

A zoo

I knew that becoming a docent at one of my favorite places on Earth would be wonderful, but I didn't expect it to be as extraordinary as it is.  The docents are a fascinating group of people from all walks of life, but we have the common thread of having an almost insatiable interest in our desert environment and a desire to share what we have learned and experienced with others, hoping to influence them to value and protect this and other natural places.

The mission of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is to inspire people to live in harmony with the natural world by fostering love, appreciation, and understanding of the Sonoran Desert.


For docents, the learning never stops.  Advanced Docent Classes are held one morning each month, nine months of the year, and all docents are expected to attend.  Docents are updated on relevant Desert Museum business and on animal and plant collections and exhibits, followed by expert presentations on everything from wild flowers to the Mexican Grey Wolf program.  There are birding (and whatever else crops up) trips once a month, and special organized docent trips to such places as The Living Desert in Palm Desert, California (more about that in a separate post) and the Galapagos Islands.  Lunch time is lively as docents consult with one another and pull down reference books to identify the wild birds, reptiles, and insects seen on the grounds.  And docents with special experiences or expertise often hold trainings for other docents.

Docent training docents

Docent sharing a passion for moths

Birding trip to southeastern Arizona to see the Sandhill Cranes at Whitewater Draw

Sometimes the socializing is taken off the grounds.  Most docents volunteer one day a week, and those groups get to know each other quite well.  Last weekend one of the Friday docents invited all the other Friday docents (and their spouses) to a barbecue and wagon ride at his ranch south of Tucson.  A huge group showed up at his place, potluck sides in hand, and had a great afternoon visiting and eating and riding in the mule pulled wagon.

Wagon ride after the BBQ

Some of these volunteers have been docents at the Desert Museum for 30 years, racking up over 20,000 hours of donated time.  It is clear that many important relationships have bridged those years, and the support system for docents, especially by docents, is enormously significant to those with many years invested.  The existing docents have been so welcoming to the new docents, mentoring us formally or informally since we first became docents in training.  Docenting is an act of generosity is so many ways, to the Desert Museum itself, to its visitors, its staff, and to other docents, but the biggest gift is undoubtedly to yourself.

Snow Day

The rare beauty of a cloaking of snow on the Tucson Mountains

With predictions of wind and rain and snow (really?) last night, we went to bed wondering what the morning would bring.  The howling wind and lashing precipitation in the middle of the night coupled with the pacing of our nervous dog made for less than sound sleep until the wind abated before dawn.  Finally things quieted down and I awoke well after dawn to find our nearby Tucson Mountains heavily powdered with snow, a serious rarity around here.

Before noon most of the snow was gone, but the frenzied activity of the birds gave credence to the freeze predicted for tonight.

A male Gila woodpecker topping off at the suet block

A male Costa's hummingbird busy defending this feeder

After the catastrophic freeze a few weeks ago, three nights with temps in the high teens and low 20's, we figure what was going to suffer from serious cold will have already done it and will likely not bother to cover much tonight.  What doesn't survive we'll do without (simplify, simplify, simplify), or replace with plants that can survive temperatures in the mid-teens.

At least we had good weather for a wonderful and long-overdue visit with my daughter and son-in-law recently.  Tucson is like a third home to them, the San Francisco area being their first, so they were not interested in playing tourist every day, though we still got some of that in.  The Desert Museum is always a must, especially when your hosts volunteer there -- one as a docent and the other volunteer with the botany department.  Then we also managed The Cup Cafe at Hotel Congress for breakfast, Tohono Chul Botanic Gardens and lunch at the Tea Room there, and lot and lots of walking the hills of the Tucson Mountains, be they snow covered or not.

Trailside in Sweetwater Preserve, Tucson Mountain foothills

Mother and child reunion hike

In the shade of a saguaro older that
his great-great-grandparents

The early afternoon sleeting has just stopped and once we get past tonight it looks to be highs in the 70s and 80s.  Bring it!

Banded Gneiss, Hoodoos, & Stoner Mummies

The landscape surrounding Tucson, those brackets of rugged mountains rearing out of this valley of stone and sand, is key to the essence of this part of the Sonoran Desert. We orient ourselves by them, learning early on their shapes and proximities -- the Catalinas to the north, the Tucsons to the west, the Santa Ritas to the south, and the Rincons to the east. We bid them a fond adios when we leave town, and they are the first to welcome us upon our return. We watch the light play over them, changing with the time of day and day of the year. We drive up into and over them, and test our legs and lungs by hiking them.

In the triple digit heat of the summer we retreat to the loftiest ones where the temperatures are guaranteed to be 20 degrees cooler, maybe more. Mt. Lemmon, soaring to over 9,000 feet in the Catalina Mountains, 6,500 feet above the Tucson Valley floor, is known as a "sky island", an ecosystem isolated by surrounding terrain, in this case a searing desert. You start your journey in classic Sonoran desert vegetation -- the iconic saguaro cactus, ocotillos, and palo verde trees -- and in less than thirty miles you you arrive in an Alpine landscape similar to that found in southern Canada. About half way up the mountain the windows in the car go down and the A/C gets switched off, and the car fills with cool air bearing the scent of pine.

Yesterday we joined a Pima County Natural Resources, Parks and Recreation outing, a trip up Mt. Lemmon with geologist Bob Scarborough. I've loved physical geography and earth science since junior high, and evenually earned a degree in geography and almost (all but paper) a masters in earth science. I was lucky enough to have taken classes with Bob Scarborough before during my two attendances at the Audubon Society's excellent Institute for Desert Ecology held annually at Catalina State Park. I knew we were in for a treat.

Fifteen of us caravanned up the mountain, making five stops along the way. Bob started out orienting us to geologic time with his "time stick", a fancifully painted representation of a big chunk of Planet Earth's existence. A consummate story teller, Bob spun the tale of the creation of our mountains in a way that had us making connections across topics ranging from geology to archeology to spirituality, with heavy doses of mystery and wonder.

Some favorite factoids:

The Tucson Mountains are the remnants of a huge volcano, one which spewed out about 800 times as much debris as the Mount Saint Helen's eruption.

Mt. Lemmon is capped with sedimentary shale that is a million years older than the granite it now sits on, and was formed when the continents nested together and a shallow sea covered the area that is now Tucson.

The U-shape of Ski Valley on Mt. Lemmon (yes, you can drive from Tucson to a ski area in less than an hour) is evidence that there was probably a glacier on Mt. Lemmon at one point.

Our trip included a picnic stop at the San Pedro Vista














and a hike on the Oracle Ridge Trail.



















And it was about more than rocks. The discussions ranged, quite logically mind you, from types of rocks, such as the banded gneiss so representative of the start up Mt. Lemmon, to the eroded granite hoodoos, to the Clovis people and the stomach contents (refined cocaine) of 8,000 year old mummies on two continents. It made sense. Trust me. And do yourself a favor -- if you get a chance to attend a class or participate in a field trip with Bob Scarborough (he leads trips for the Desert Museum among many others), take it.