This will be a short post because I just finished sorting through about a thousand photos of hummingbirds (!), and now it’s late.

Today we hung out at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson. Lori came across it online yesterday, and it seemed to be highly regarded—so we extended our stay here an extra day to visit it. Turned out to be a good call!

The place is billed as a “museum”, but it’s really a zoo, aquarium, botanical garden, and art gallery rolled into one. The animal exhibits are extremely well done, and in most cases there are no barriers between you and the creatures on display. In particular, the hummingbird aviary is worth the price of admission alone—it was very cool to see so many different (and basically tame) species of the colorful little birds.

I need to get to bed, so I’ll let my pics tell the rest of the story, but the Desert Museum was definitely one of the highlights of our trip thus far. Click for larger versions:

Anna’s hummingbird. I have so many photos of hummingbirds from today that it’s a little sick.

A Costa’s hummingbird. One landed on Lori’s shoulder!

A gray hawk during a (very well executed) free-fly raptor show.

A barn owl having a gory meal.

Gray fox.

The fattest prairie dog I have ever seen.

Tomorrow we head east, to El Paso!