One of the perks of being an entomologist is traveling and collecting. I put a few thousand miles on the car every summer and these are two of the best places in Arizona to collect. The top image is from the Baboquivari Mountains (Baboquivari Peak in the middle), Brown Canyon Research Station. The bottom image is of Pena Blanca Canyon, a famous collecting hotspot. This canyon is just 5 miles from Mexico and has a few safety concerns because of our current immigration policy. One morning, while sorting moths from the previous nights catch, a colleague and I had a group of roughly 30 illegals walk right through our camp. They were well dressed and clean, waved, and must have just been dropped off at the fence. Thankfully the majority of illegals are hard-working and honest people trying to earn a better life. It’s the coyotes and smugglers that are scarier – I have heard tales of Mexican police escorting drug caravans into the US with heavy artillery. And just last year a border patrol agent was stabbed to death by a coyote in this vicinity.
Thankfully, a bunch of strange guys standing around strange lights at nights grants us a wide berth.
(Are these images small enough to load quickly?)
