Nine hours.
That’s how much time I spent at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, AZ over the course of 2 visits within 3 days of each other. I cannot recommend this museum highly enough. It’s a must-visit if you find yourself in Arizona. It’s part botanical garden, part zoo, part natural history museum, part art gallery and totally fun!
One of the best parts of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is that it’s in the desert. Ummm, obviously Shae it’s a “desert museum”… No what I mean is that by being positioned in the desert it has a natural landscape that allows for wild desert animals to roam across paths, between enclosures and over your shoes if you’re not careful.
If you’re very quiet as you walk around you can hear lizards scamper, snakes slither, rabbits nibble and ground squirrels skitter. It adds so much to the experience. Some, are even more bold, like the ground squirrel that had her babies in the desert tortoise enclosure and the large lizard (that looked like an iguana but I can’t be 100% sure) that’s taken up residence in the bear enclosure alongside his furry roommate.
One thing I recommend is getting to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum as early as possible. It opens at 7:30am and I arrived close to that time. Not only was it more comfortable for me as a visitor, the animals were awake and moving around in the cooler temperatures. By the time I left on both visits between 11:30am-12:30pm, the animals were mostly hunkered down for naps in the warm desert sun.
The museum takes being in the desert very seriously with water bottle refill stations all over the site and even sunblock dispensers in the bathrooms! I was incredibly impressed by this.
85% of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is outside. This includes the desert loop, the hummingbird enclosure, other animal enclosures and gardens. There is a small aquarium area, the reptiles and amphibians, an art gallery, a cavern replica and other nocturnal animal enclosures inside. Everything you’ll see below is only a tiny taste of all the museum has to offer.
On the desert loop you can see coyote and javelina (pronounced hav-uh-leena). I loved the javelina fact below and that they identified javvy hotspots so you can look in certain locations for the javelina “jerd.”
The cactus garden was a really interesting place to see so many cacti you’ve never seen before. Like the Wooly Jacket Prickly Pear and the Golden Hedgehog Cactus.
You can expect to see traditional desert animals that you’d expect like rattlesnakes and lizards.
You can also find a few really unexpected desert animals, such as stingrays.
It might seem weird that you’d be able to find stingrays in the desert, but there’s a reason for that. The Sonoran Desert is one of the few deserts in the world that borders water (Gulf of California) and as a result has monsoon-like rains and bio-diversity that’s not in your average desert.
A few extra things that make this museum stand out over most others is how many interesting things there are for the young and young at heart. There’s a cavern replica, a geology display, a “mine” where you can find a mineral, identify it and keep it, and a space for budding paleontologists to uncover fossils in the sand pit and learn about the Sonorosaurus.
The landscape is beautiful and it’s a treat just to walk around. The desert was starting to bloom while we were there too. I went for my virtual field trip students and immediately texted my mom to say that when she arrived a few days later we needed to prioritize her and my stepdad visiting there too since it was so amazing. We tagged their visit on to a visit to the Saguaro National Park (both sites), so it’s easy to make a full day out of a visit to Tucson if you’re staying further afield like in Phoenix.
The price is worth it. It feels expensive on the face of it at $25 (at the time of writing) but honestly, with all that you can see, it’s so worth it. If I lived closer I’d get an annual membership, I enjoyed it that much. It’s a can’t-miss if you’re making an itinerary to be in the Tucson area or even farther afield in Arizona.
Here are a few pictures I took as I wandered in the peace and quiet with my camera.
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