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…
Michael Buckley The SaddleBrooke Nature Club began the 2018-2019 season with a “Fall Kickoff” party September 29 at the SaddleBrooke One Roadrunner Grill. Event organizer Irene Somes planned a fantastic event, highlighted by two entertaining and educational Southwest nature trivia games. Irene also had an ample supply of game and door prizes, many of them…
Ginny Berkey and Annie Maud Over a dozen Nature Club members drove far past Sells to the Tohono O’Odham Cultural Center and Museum for a tour of the new facility. We visited the museum portion before settling down to watch an interesting slide show about the center from the selection of the location to the…
Pam Boedeker Carolyn Campbell, Executive Director of the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection, was the February speaker for the SaddleBrooke Nature Club. The Coalition is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Today there are some 40 groups involved in various aspects of a mission to achieve long term conservation of biological diversity and ecological…
Annie Maud Your vocabulary word of the day: Dendrochronology n / the science of dating events by studying growth rings in trees and wood. In 1937 a University of Arizona professor formalized this new science. A. E. Douglass found he could date events in the past by counting tree rings and studying their growth patterns.…
Ginny Berkey The Nature Club began its fall activities with an evening of dinner and music at Oracle State Park. Over 60 members gathered at the large group area to enjoy the afternoon with drinks, appetizers and the company of a female Harris Hawk. Those with cameras were able to take wonderful close-ups of the…