Hummingbird Sanctuary in the Huachuca Mountains of Arizona by Gregory McNamee
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If you have a particular place in your heart for hummingbirds, southern Arizona harbors an ideal getaway: the Nature Conservancy’s Ramsey Canyon Preserve, a pristine sanctuary tucked in the foothills of the Huachuca Mountains of southeastern Arizona.
Hummingbird hotspot
The preserve harbors nearly all of the hummingbird species known to visit the United States. Fourteen of them in all and among them the Anna’s; magnificent, black-chinned, long billed, white-eared, and rufous varieties. No other public spot in the country offers such a wealth of hummingbirds, as well as 150 other species of birds, making it one of the country’s premier birding destinations.
Lying at 5,500 feet and graced by a slender stream that flows year-round, Ramsey Canyon was named the nation’s first Natural Landmark in 1965. The preserve itself was ceded to the Nature Conservancy in the 1970s by a medical doctor who retired to a comfortable cottage midway up the canyon in 1948. A few other buildings dot the canyon, among them a few abandoned miners’ shacks and a frame house that contains offices and the preserve’s small but well-stocked bookshop.
Conservancy Crown Jewel
The crown jewel of the Conservancy’s ongoing Upper San Pedro Ecosystem Program, the preserve maintains a policy of limited accessibility: only a fixed number of visitors, about 75 a day, or 30,000 a year, can enter. That number, Preserve Manager Paul Hardy once told me, is arbitrary.
“We want to get some science behind our decisions to hold the visitation to the numbers we use,” he says. “We know that the number of people definitely affects the animals here but we’d like to find out just how much and whether, for instance, we should change the numbers, open earlier or close at say 3:30 pm instead of 5 pm.”
The preserve’s rules are simple and straightforward: pay a small fee to get in (the fee is a suggested donation, but in the same way that a restaurant suggests what your steak dinner will cost you); do not leave the gentle trail that runs through the preserve; and, above all, don’t feed the animals that you happen upon.
Encounter Wildlife
And encounter wildlife you will. The hummingbird population resides in Ramsey Canyon for part of the year, spring and summer, except for a few slackers who have evidently decided that it’s easier to eat free nectar in sunny southern Arizona than to wing to Central America for their winter repast.
But other creatures are in residence all year-round. Among them black bears, coatimundis, and bats; including the increasingly rare Sanborn’s and Long Nose varieties. Some of the animals are quite fearless, perhaps, as Paul Hardy suggests, “Because hunters have been banned from the area for so long”.
The abundance of wildlife is not surprising. Although barely 140 miles long from its headwaters in the Sierra Mariquita of northern Mexico to its confluence with the Gila River southeast of metropolitan Phoenix, the San Pedro River, into which Ramsey Creek feeds, hosts the largest remaining area of the rarest type of forest ecosystem in the entire United States. What biologists call the ‘cottonwood-willow riparian association.’ This ecosystem is a magnet for creatures: more than 400 bird species, 82 mammal species, 16 fish species and 43 reptile and amphibian species make their home along the river.
Rare Animals
Perhaps the most interesting of them is the Ramsey Canyon leopard frog (Rana subaquavocalis); an eight-inch long amphibian that turns out to be one of the rarest animals in North America. Its rarity comes from a curious habit: it calls only underwater and then with an unusually wide repertoire of signals; including a group serenade by which the males attract the females.
Biologists have yet to figure out the meaning behind the frog’s secretive behavior, and they may not have much time to figure out why the frogs do what they do. The Ramsey Canyon leopard frog is rare for another reason: there just aren’t many of them left. Since the discovery of the species only 20-odd years ago, scientists working with the Nature Conservancy have noted a rapid decline in the frog’s population; part of a general decline in amphibian populations everywhere due to climate change and epidemic diseases.
It’s a Frogs Life
Conservation scientists are trying to improve the odds for the Ramsey Canyon leopard frog. One program involves reintroducing the once-common beaver to the San Pedro, behind whose dams the frog population once flourished, thanks to the algae-rich ponds those dams formed.
Another indirectly related program, one that local biologists don’t much like to talk about, involves killing off the huge population of bullfrogs that have been introduced to southern Arizona from Texas and points east over the last century. The bullfrogs have a habit, it seems, of eating whatever local fauna they can and they’ve become a pest.
So, while you can, go to the Ramsey Canyon Preserve and have a look at these little green creatures. Look, too, at another rarity; a 200-year-old giant sycamore tree under which ranch people, up and down the San Pedro, held community dances a century ago.
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