Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

 

We arrived at Organ Pipe at 9 am and snagged the first spot available for 1 week.  Only later we found out it was President's Day long weekend so we were lucky to get in.  Also Family Day in BC, a holiday I will never cease to bitter about.  All my working life I used to say we need a holiday in February to help us get through the long winter.  It finally got declared after my retirement and now I never remember that it even exists because it's just like any other day! 

We're so glad to finally stop driving we just got set up and put our lawn chairs out and relaxed for the rest of the day.  We were assigned an accessible site so we've got a liitle extra space for a tent pad and we're not so close to our neighbors.  And it comes with our own little resident cactus wren nest.

Later in the afternoon we walked down to the visitor centre to get a bird checklist and use the wifi (very slow) to update this blog.  It's a twenty minute walk each way through the desert so we got a little exercise.

We're happy to reconnect with all the usual desert birds: canyon wren, gila woodpecker, raven, curve-billed thrasher, ...  Now that we have the Merlin bird app, maybe we'll be able to distinguish it  by call from the other thrashers we have so much trouble identifying.  The checklist says they also have Crissal's and Bendire's thrashers.

But the bird of the day is the crested caracara, the national bird of Mexico, which can only be seen just north of the border.  We saw two feeding on a roadkill on the drive into the park.

In the evening we were delighted to attend a ranger's talk at the outdoor amphitheater.   These were a staple of my childhood and parks all over North America still have them, left empty and unused by fiscal restraints.  Only the national parks still keep it up. The last time we attended an evening talk was in Grand Canyon in 2015. 

Anyway the talk was about how the the ecosystem of the park has changed over the millennia.  I learnt a few things.  Like, they carbon date fossilized packrat nests to determine what the vegetation was during specific eras.  There's no fossils in deserts because no water but the packrats' urine does the job!