So right now we are in Tucson Arizona. It’s a quite beautiful college town/city in an amazing desert setting –surrounded by mountains- with very lovely streets featuring handsome old houses, lined with palm trees and cactuses*.

The Tucson Sonora Desert Museum

Today we went to the Desert Museum and saw this raptor display. The museum is right in the middle of the desert. They had some captive “harris hawks” which they let out and showed them off by having them fly around and then grab food out of their hands. It was pretty great to see but also that kind of stuff is only so great because you know the birds are captive and in my opinion no bird should be captive, no animal should be captive, unless it’s experience of life in captivity genuinely resembles it’s life “in the wild”. Because there were also wolves and coyotes and deer and mountain lions and bobcats in this “museum” and to me their cages were all waaay too small and I felt sorry for them and they looked depressed and unhappy with everyone staring at them in their small enclosures.

Anyway the coolest thing about the raptor display was that they were describing the raptors behaviour with the males and females, and it so happens that in the family group of these hawks the dominant one is the ALPHA FEMALE and she mates with the alpha male AND the beta male – if she wants. Basically she can mate with whoever she wants and can have more than one mate. Not too many animal structures where the female gets multiple partners. Respect to the Harris Hawk for thinking outside the box.

The White Sands

“The White Sands National Monument, New Mexico.” This is the place where the jumpsuit photos were taken, we went there on Monday and it’s a breath-taking phenomenon of vast white sand dunes in the middle of the New Mexico desert. It is STRIKINGLY beautiful, and we wandered around on those surreal dunes for a heavenly while… it was so other-worldly and astonishing, never seen anything like it before. We LOVED it. There are some more photos up that are not of me in the jumpsuit.


*I refuse to say “cacti”.