It was time for a weekend away from the refuge, so our plan was to go to the fiesta at the Tumacácori National Historical Park south of Tubac. After that we would go to Madera Canyon and stay overnight and do some birding on Sunday. On Monday we have an appointment at the Tucson Dodge dealer to see about the power steering leak and the squeak. Finally, we would go to Tubac to go birding on Tuesday morning and get back in time to do laundry and clean up Speedy for the week ahead.
The Tumacácori National Historical Park is east of Arivaca to I-19, then south. It is a National Park Service unit that preserves one of the early Spanish missions, Mission Tumacácori. Once a year they have a fiesta. It was sort of like our grassland fair, but with more booths, more vendors, more performers and more food ... also more people. The park is right off I-19, not far from the Green Valley area to the north and from Nogales in the south.
The "Discovery Area" contained booths that were mostly government agencies, primarily the many park service sites in southern Arizona. Buenos Aries was represented by Dan, assisted by Betty and Chuck and at least one of their snakes. Even Border Patrol had a booth. They tried to enlist Ellen as a "friend" of the Border Patrol. This would entail an eight-week course and then she could shoot a gun. She told them she was from New England and not impressed by guns.
The fiesta program had a page to be stamped whenever we visited a booth with a flag. Collect ten stamps, get a prize, so we did. The booths that had flags were mostly in the discovery area and we visited each one, including Buenos Aires NWR. One of the ones that stood out was National Park Service biology project where they were surveying the habitat in all of the Arizona NPS units. They had just finished Tumacácori where they had collected data on all of the vegetation and watercourses at the site. This was the only one that they would completely survey as it is a small park. The larger parks would be sampled. This data would then be used to be the baseline for future remote sensing updates done by satellite. The goal is to track changes in the environment and habitat over time.
Another one that stood out was a group of wildlife rehabilitators who had brought birds that were under their care. They had three owls and a Harris's Hawk. The owls were a Great Horned Owl, a Barn Owl and an Elf Owl. We've seen both the Great Horned and Barn Owls here, but the Elf Owl was a first. It is really tiny, smaller than a Robin. We've seen small owls before, Morpork in our back yard on Waiheke and Sawhet Owl in our yard in Cohasset, but the Elf was truly miniature. They are only in this area in the summer so it's unlikely we'll see one in the wild.
The Border Patrol booth was also interesting, but not well visited. They were the mounted agents from the Nogales district and had brought a couple of their horses. They use tamed Mustangs that were feral horses and rounded up from BLM land. They said that they were strong horses that could go just about anywhere, much more useful in the back country than any mechanized vehicle.
After collecting our ten stamps, watching the Native American dancers and having fry-bread tacos for lunch, we selected our prizes, a canvas wide-brimmed hat for me and a cookbook for Ellen. It was time to actually visit the mission area of the park.
The park is the site of the Mission San José de Tumacácori, one of the missions Founded by the Jesuit, Father Kino, on behalf of Spain in what was called the Pimería Alta. The Pimería Alta means the "place of the upper Pimas" and encompassed what is now southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico. Pima was the name given by the Spanish for O'odham Indians. The priests came to convert the Pimas.
It is the oldest mission in Arizona. The grounds contain the ruins of the mission with the mission church partially restored. It was abandoned and was slowly melting away when the Park Service acquired it. They have restored the structure and roof of the church, but have left what existed in its ruined state.
The story we were told was that the Spanish wanted to convert the natives for economic reasons. They could only tax them if they were Spanish citizens. They could only become Spanish citizens if they were Catholic, spoke Spanish and had a gainful occupation, hence the missionaries and the missions. The Jesuits were chosen to lead the missions in Arizona because of their education and teaching. The order had also been successfully used by the French in the northeast.
Unfortunately, this didn't last. The Jesuits had one flaw, from the perspective of the Spanish Royalty, their allegiance was to Rome, not Spain, and they were expelled from their missions in the 1760s and replaced by Franciscans.
Tumacácori is also part of the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail. Anza was a colonel in the Spanish military who led an expedition of 240 men, women and children from Tumacácori to San Francisco in 1776. They founded the Presidio and Mission of San Francisco, the first european settlement in San Francisco Bay. The trail starts in Sonora, Mexico, but the expedition actually left from Tubac.
After all this history, we left from Tumacácori, made a brief stop in Tubac, just a couple of miles north, for coffee at the Tubac Deli, then continued on to Madera Canyon where we are spending the night.
Photos
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