Tucson Weekly: Bird's-Eye Viewpoint (March 5

In The Words Of Buckaroo Banzai, "No Matter Where You Go, There You Are."
By Kevin Franklin
IT'S AN UNAVOIDABLE hazard of all hikes and backroad drives that you have to arrive somewhere at the end. I suppose the only greater hazard is to expend all your resources and not arrive at your destination.
Yet there's a tendency to focus on the act of getting from one place to another, with the experience of the journey itself getting left by the wayside. Many's the time I've watched groups of my fellow hikers making tracks in the hiker-pool lane, speeding past all the rest stops in their commute up a mountain.
Review Guilty of this myself at times, I decide today to be an idle observer; to forget about deadlines and odometer readings and head out over Redington Pass to see what captures my interest. I think of it as sort of a Sonoran Desert safari: a tourist's exploration of terra incognita. When tourists go on safaris in Africa, they're not traveling halfway across the world in order to drive a few miles in a Land Rover. They're going to look at the wildlife. What road they take and the distance they cover is irrelevant. The key to enjoying this kind of outing is recognizing what you're looking at and how it fits into the overall ecosystem. Without understanding the role of the various organisms, it's like looking at wallpaper; or watching two people talk without hearing any of the words.
The best natural historians I know spend a lot of time outside simply observing. They don't necessarily cover lots of ground, but they take a close look at the ground they're on.
My friend Yar Petryszyn, curator of mammals at the UA, conducts a great deal of rodent and bat research. Most of his field research is done at night, so during the days he peruses field guides and studies the other wildlife living around his camp and wandering through it. Over the years, this has made him into the best general naturalist I've ever met. The Smithsonian Institute, which employs him as a naturalist for many of their member excursions in the Sonoran Desert and around the world, seems to think so, too.
One of his basic tenets is that the point of a field guide is to have it in the field--not at home on a bookshelf. The best way to learn and remember your natural surroundings is to identify them while you're there and can put them in context. Once home, you begin to forget key details--or maybe you didn't note them in the first place. This leaves you flipping back and forth between different candidates, less and less certain of what you actually saw.
Another of his tenets is that all field guides are not created equal. The best way to choose one is first to decide what you hope to learn from it. A comprehensive guide, like The Audubon Society Nature Guides: Deserts is a good book for a beginning naturalist interested in learning the marquee plants and animals. If you want a single book that describes things like saguaros, gray foxes and rattlesnakes, this is a good one. However, generalist books leave out a lot of the lesser-known species. If you're interested in finer detail, then you need a book that focuses on a narrower field.
Plants are a great place to cut your teeth as naturalist. They don't run away, aren't very good at hiding and generally submit to study without too much of a struggle. I like the Audubon Society books because they use photographs, which for me identify things more conclusively than illustrations. One of the best resources for plant identification locally are the Southwest Parks and Monuments Association field guides, like Shrubs and Trees of the Southwest Uplands.
Flip through various guides at a local bookstore and see which works best for you. Pick out a few guides in your area of interest; flip to a plant or animal you already know; and look at the various depictions and descriptions. From this you can gauge which guidebook jibes best with your understanding. Remember: The best field guides are the ones that work best for you.
With the recent rains, Redington Pass Road is a rough ride. I bounce along until I reach the mouth of Beuhman Canyon on the east side of the pass. I set up camp here. Right off the bat, I spot a few unfamiliar plants and birds, along with a few unnamed ones I've seen many times before. I kick back in a folding deck chair, crack open a beer and flip through my various field guides. It's safari time.
Next week: Out There Guy searches for the ghost of Ed Abbey at Atacosta Peak!

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