About a month ago, Jeff and some of the team from Southwest Land Deals were out javelina hunting in Southern Arizona. While there, Jeff found some great examples of the local flora and decided to talk about what was around. In this video, he shares some of the wildlife and vegetation you can find in Southern Arizona.
From the video:
Hey, this is Jeff with Southwest Land Deals, down here in Southern Arizona.
Actually I was out walking around looking at some properties, sorry there was a bug there, and ran across, we just saw a jack rabbit run across the road in front of us. So I thought I’d take the chance and talk a little bit about the wildlife down here. We’re actually looking for javelina this morning, which is, we call them a pig but they’re actually in the peccary family.
And so down here in Southern Arizona, you’ve got some of javelina, of course, which is what we’re looking for. There’s deer. You have two types of deer here. You have mule deer and the whitetail Coues deer, which is a little bit smaller and very popular in this area. You get some cats, some like bobcats, a little bit of mountain lions, of course coyotes. And so that’s some of the the wildlife down here.
And then I also found this great spot right here where we’ve got some amazing saguaro cactuses right behind me, these are mammoth. They’re probably 150, 175 years old, these cactus here.
But what I also want to point out is we’ve got some other things, we’ve got some local bushes. This is a creosote bush. And this is something you find throughout the Sonoran Desert. And one thing that I like those is when it rains, it’s very distinct and that’s the smell of the desert. That comes from this creosote bush.
Behind me here, we also have the mesquite tree. It’s dormant right now. Normally it’s a very pretty tree. It grows out, nice and green, but we’re in February so it’s just coming out of the dormant season. What you’ll see a lot of times, is saguaros actually will grow out of the bottom of, not out of the bottom, but when the seeds get there, for protection, they’ll grow. A lot of times, you’ll have his creosote bush.
Or, we actually have, there’s a little palo verde. See, this little tree here. This is just a baby. The very green one. Palo verde and that means in Spanish, “green tree.” So that’s a palo verde tree, and it always stays green. So the way to tell the difference between a mesquite and a palo verde is the palo verde is going to have a green trunk and be totally green, where as the mesquite tree actually has, I see some leaves here, it has the brown, flaky-type trunk and then, there’s the leaves there, that are the very small type of leaves. So once that gets healthy, it grows out. That’s the biggest difference.
So I hope that’s helpful. Again, just some of the wildlife that’s down here in the Sonoran Desert and some of the vegetation. Of course, the king of the jungle here is the saguaro cactus, which is just amazing. Really cool to look at. You also have some prickly pears and some barrel cactus, and some choya. Which I don’t see anything around here, but those are sometimes a little bit nasty if you get into those.
Again, this is Jeff with Southwest Land Deals. You can always check out any available properties at SouthwestLandDeals.com. Thanks!