SATW Canada Travelling Teddy Bear Blog: Bella Bella and the Prickly Bear

Wild teddy bears are loose in the U.S. state of Arizona!

Wild teddy bears, Bella Bella? Don't you mean wild black bears?

Oh yes, there are wild black bears in Arizona. In fact, there are about 2,500 to 3,000 black bears roaming the state's higher altitudes, woodlands, and river valleys.

Black bears are usually shy, and tend to avoid people. You're much more likely to encounter wild teddy bear cholla — and you have to be careful around them, too!

Teddy bear cholla is actually one of many amazing kinds of cactus in the Sonoran Desert.

My friend Butte (you pronounce his name like "cute") (but don't tell him I called him cute) is a super guide to the desert around Scottsdale, Arizona. Let's learn together about some of the plants and animals in his neck o’ the desert.

Scottsdale, nicknamed “The West’s Most Western Town,” is a city in the Salt River Valley near the metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona.

With something like 330 days of sunshine every year, Scottsdale lies within the Sonoran Desert.

I mentioned the Sonoran Desert in my recent story about Osoyoos, British Columbia. The Sonoran Desert is one of four great deserts in North America. The others are Nevada’s Great Basin, California’s Mojave, and Mexico’s Chihuahua Desert.

Gee, I wonder if there is Teddy Bear Cholla in the Little Dog Desert? Heehee!

In fact, both chihuahua dogs and the Chihuahuan Desert are named after the Mexican state of Chihuahua. I’m sure those dogs know to be careful around chollas, too.

The Sonoran Desert covers about 310,000 square kilometres of Arizona, California, and northern Mexico. Deserts like this get little rain, with very high rates of evaporation, and wild swings in temperature every day. Living things can adapt well to deserts, though: in fact, the Sonoran Desert has about 3,500 native species of plants.

Cacti (that’s more than one cactus; some people say cactuses instead, but this bear's a lazy typist) are plants that have adapted to very dry environments.

Cacti store water in their fat stems, and have spines (which protect them) instead of regular leaves (which evaporate water quickly in a desert).

The teddy bear cholla looks cuddly, but its joints and barbed spines come off easily, and really hurt to pull out. Some people call it the “Velcro of the desert.” Chollas can grow as high as three metres … a height that would make even a plush teddy bear impressive …

Another cactus that thrives in the Sonoran Desert is the giant saguaro. Saguaro cacti can live two centuries or more, and grow as high as 15 metres. Saguaro grow about one centimetre annually.

They blossom once a year, and the flowers stay open only 18 hours. The flowers close after they’ve been pollinated.

The saguaro’s blossom is the state flower of Arizona. The resulting fruit is like a ruby-red melon, with 2,000 tiny seeds that are edible too.

Speaking of edible, Butte and I enjoyed these yummy desserts — cookies with green icing, perched on top of puddings!

But back to the real saguaro. Young ones are a single big stalk. The saguaro grow “arms” when they’re 60 to 80 years old.

The saguaro stores water in its stem, and the stem expands when it rains. A saguaro can be as much as 90% water, and weigh over 100 kilograms per metre!

This is a strawberry hedgehog. It is the first cactus to bloom in springtime. Its fruit apparently tastes like strawberries (though I didn’t try any).

The barrel cactus doesn’t grow any branches or arms. It can live for 100 years, and grow up to three metres tall. Barrel cacti are also called “compass” cacti, because they grow leaning toward the south. Can you guess why?

It’s because they grow faster on their shady side, the north side, and that makes them seem to lean over.

Prickly pear cacti may be small around Osoyoos, but near Scottsdale, they can grow over four metres tall.

Their springtime blossoms are really colourful. Prickly pear cacti produce edible fruit, and juice that can be used to make drinks, jellies, or syrup.

Agave have thick, fleshy leaves with pointy tips, and spines along the edges.

Agave can be used for food, to make fences or rope, or to produce a grown-ups’ drink called tequila.

Ocotillo are a shrub, not a cactus. Their leaves come out only after it rains. Hummingbirds love the red flowers that bloom in the spring.

Another Sonoran shrub is one you might recognize from the labels on products in your bathroom: the jojoba. The jojoba’s leathery leaves are vertical to avoid too much of summer’s heat. The shrub can grow about a metre high.

Palo verde is Arizona’s state tree. Its name means “green stick” in Spanish. The trunks and branches of younger palo verde trees are green with chlorophyll.

Chlorophyll is a chemical that lets plants get energy from light. Palo verde trees do have leaves, but because this is a desert tree, those leaves are tiny – too tiny to make enough energy for the tree by themselves. So the trunks and branches help out.

The most common plant in the Sonoran Desert is a shrub called the creosote. It can grow as high as four metres, and gives shelter and shade to other plants and to animals. I liked its fluffy seed clusters.

Creosote typically live about 900 years, and some bushes may be thousands of years old. Creosote resin also gives this shrub the name greasewood. At a funky restaurant called Greasewood Flat, I met a small herd of burros, or little donkeys.

Burros are domesticated animals, though about 2,250 burros roam wild in Arizona. The Sonoran Desert is full of wildlife. While we were out walking, Butte and I saw a kind of lizard called the gila monster:

a Great Horned owl:

desert cottontail rabbits:

Gambel’s quail (these were shy little rascals, but I just loved their bobbing head décor – it looks like one of the Duchess of Cambridge’s “fascinator” hats):

and even a family of ducklings, huddling together for comfort on the green grass of a golf course:

At Scottsdale’s Pinnacle Peak Park, you can learn all about the wildlife and plants of the Sonoran Desert. Happily, I did not see any rattlesnakes, scorpions, or tarantulas …

You can also learn a lot at the wonderful Desert Botanical Garden. Opened in 1939, the Desert Botanical Garden covers nearly 60 hectares, with five thematic trails, and some 50,000 cacti and succulent plants from all over the world.

Butte and I especially enjoyed the Butterfly Garden there, a mesh building sprayed constantly by overhead “misters,” and filled with 16 varieties of butterflies.