Kay Sullivan The club wishes to thank Ric Nicholson for our new SaddleBrooke Nature Club logo. After many years, it was time for a new look. After a brief business meeting to accept the nominees for the 2026 board of directors and announcements from the outgoing president, the December program, billed as “What Are These…
Kay Sullivan Members filled the West Ballroom for the November meeting, because the presentation was about “The Life of Black Bears,” by Sandy Reith, now a volunteer and recent retiree from the Pima County Conservation Lands Resources. With the recent bear activity in SaddleBrooke, this was a timely subject, and I wish we could have…
Kay Sullivan and Ann Pizzitola We had a summer field trip on Aug. 5 to the Tree Ring Lab at the University of Arizona—what the heck is that? We knew going in that you could count the rings to determine the age of a tree, but we found you could do much more than that.…
Kay Sullivan Look at what’s lined up for the Nature Club’s programs and events this fall. All our programs are held at the MountainView Ballroom West in SaddleBrooke TWO and begin at 3:30 p.m. • Oct. 13: “Birds and Birding,” by Jeff Babson, Pima Country Lands and Resources • Nov. 10: “The Life of Black…
Kay Sullivan Our outreach to the Mammoth-San Manuel PreK-12 school resulted in us helping with the cost of a field trip to the Desert Museum for the 9th grade Physical Science students in September. The assistant principal, Amber Walden, shared with us that she wanted programs to inspire the high school students toward higher education…
Kay Sullivan, President, SaddleBrooke Nature Club The SaddleBrooke Nature Club resumed its programs and meetings after a summer hiatus. Our first meeting, held on Oct. 14, featured speaker Mabel Rivera from the Pima County Natural Resources Parks and Recreation’s newest department called Conservation, Land and Resources. Mabel shared the kind of native and arid-adapted garden…
Kay Sullivan Bill Wilkening, a 15-year volunteer for the Watershed Management Group, gave a presentation called “Rainwater Harvesting: It’s More Than Just Tanks” to 50 Nature Club members on Feb. 12 in the DesertView Theater. Some of Bill’s family members can trace their Tucson roots back for six generations. He shared that his grandfather used…
Michael Buckley The February meeting of the SaddleBrooke Nature Club featured speaker Fred Stula, the executive director of Friends of Saguaro National Park (FOSNP). Fred and his wife, Tiffany, long-time Easterners from Connecticut, had previously vacationed in the Tucson area, and they both fell in love with the beauty of Arizona. When the opportunity to…
Kay Sullivan On Aug. 7, twenty travelers of the Nature Club headed to Tombstone, Bisbee, and Douglas for a summer excursion. Lunch at Big Nose Kate’s in the historic district of Tombstone was our first stop. After a sumptuous lunch, some shopped, had photos taken in old-time outfits, visited museums, toured the Good Enough silver…
Annie Maud One of the perks of living in SaddleBrooke is our proximity to Biosphere 2. The Biosphere was the brain child of Space Biosphere Ventures and was built between 1987-1991. It was intended as a grand experiment, the precursor to a space colony on the moon. The speaker at the Nature Club’s April meeting…