Plants and animals I've seen in Arizona
I've been in Arizona for several days. I'm now so sick that I have to spend all my time in my hotel room, but I have managed to see a few local plants and animals while stumbling outside to get a coffee. These are all extremely normie animals and plants, but it was fun for me to see them anyway.
- Gambel's Quail, one of those cute little quails that has the forehead feather curl going on. Adorable!
- Brittlebush, which is everywhere - I think I am here during the wettest possible part of the wettest possible season, so the desert is extremely green. Here's one of the ground cover brush plants that's making everything look so green. There's a closely related sunflower plant in LA called "California Brittlebush" which is absolutely everywhere, too.
- Saguaros, obviously. They are all over the damn place. Many of the ones I've seen by the freeway are propped up with big wooden arms, which is pretty interesting. I've had some fun reading about the various laws in Arizona meant to protect saguaros.
- Gila woodpecker, which lives inside saguaros - though I just saw this one on a palm tree in downtown Phoenix, haha.
- Great-tailed grackles, which I've seen before many times. However I've never spent as much time before listening to them sing, and the sounds they make are pretty intense. When I last saw one of these birds, in El Paso, I don't think I heard it make a single call... but I spent an hour and a half sitting under one in Phoenix this week, and I don't even think that video does it justice just how weird they sound to someone who isn't used to them. They have a sound quality that I associate with "tropical" birds - I have no idea where I'm getting that impression from, but that's what it sounded like, to me. Really strange! Common Grackles used to migrate through my yard when I was a kid - we'd get one or two huge flocks of them per year, with thousands of birds covering the entire property for a day - but they sound nothing like this.
- Palo Verde, a very striking green tree which I've seen written about in books before but somehow never bothered actually looking up a picture of. The whole tree is green - like, the bark. It's a landscaping tree according to wikipedia, which tracks with some of the places I've seen it around here. Again, these plants and animals are very normie - I just haven't been to Arizona since I was about five years old, so a lot of this stuff is new to me.
- Desert Cottontails. I saw a cute little rabbit :)