(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, meet some of Tucson's most beautiful and photogenic residents.

(Cheryl) Bobcats, personality, they're a very buzzy kind of fierce little personality, and yet they live with humans almost seamlessly.

It's remarkable.

(Tom) Drawing, printmaking, and community with artist Andrew Rush.

(Eric) It's a community space where printmakers, artists, can come together, learn, and share their time together.

(Tom) And our Tiny Home Series continues with the group Wholistic Transformation.

(Bryan) Unless the things that we're doing need to change the heart and the mind of the people we're trying to help.

It's not going to lead to transformation.

It's not lasting change.

(Tom) Hi, and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

You know, Arizona is known for its scenic National Parks and other destinations that allow you to explore and discover to your heart's content.

And here in the Tucson area, we are lucky to have so much beautiful open space and a community that appreciates all of our wonderful plant and animal life.

Here's one example from this area.

[Music] (Narrator) In sprawling cities around the world, many people never get to truly know their neighbors.

But residents west of I-10 in Tucson are making a concerted effort to do that.

And they'll take as much information and details as possible.

(Karen) I catch the videos of them on the two cameras I have outside and those cameras log what time.

So I put the times into my spreadsheet.

(Jennifer) So I had seen him coming to the house at night on camera.

He seemed very tentative.

(Narrator) The inquisitive homeowners are focusing on photogenic felines, not human beings.

[Upbeat Music] The bobcat is a relatively common and charismatic North American native that inhabits this area.

(Jennifer) They're just so special.

Look, a spotted cat in your yard.

It's amazing.

(Karen) The bobcats have always been part of my life living here.

I really enjoy the bobcats.

I think they are my favorite wildlife for sure.

(Vet 1) Point four eight?

(Vet 2) Yes.

(Narrator) Dozens of people are volunteering as citizen scientists with the Bobcats in Tucson Research Project.

The group was founded in 2020 by retired wildlife professionals who want to give back for the greater good.

Their collective experience spans about 200 years.

[Bobcat growling] The many decades of working with animals are pivotal since the project entails various important aspects.

Setting up humane traps and concealing them, catching the cats and sedating them.

[Bobcat growling] (Vet 2) Got it?

(Vet 1) Yep.

(Vet 2) Time is 9:04.

(Narrator) Dr. Ericka Johnson is the on-call veterinarian who also volunteers.

(Ericka) A few years ago, the biologist had reached out to us to see if we'd be interested in helping with this project and we were very interested and are glad to help.

What happens when we pull a bobcat out of a trap?

First, we are checking reflexes to make sure that it is sedated and not going to be a harm to us or to itself.

Once the bobcat is out, we will get a weight on it and immediately get vitals to make sure that it's handling the sedation well.

Once we do that, we do a complete exam on the cat and we draw blood.

We get some samples to send a lab, usually some blood and some oral swabs to do some viral testing.

(Narrator) One essential technological breakthrough are modern satellite collars that drop off when the battery is dead or can be released remotely by the scientists.

(Kerry) The real basic elements of the project are fairly simple and straightforward at this point because we don't have a lot of information.

So we wanted to know where are these bobcats living?

How are they making a living?

How does a female raise a kitten in an urban environment like this suburban urban fringe here on Tucson?

What's happening with our bobcat population?

(Cheryl) I had a friend who was a biologist here in Tucson who's also a cat person and she had done some preliminary work on this population and told me about it and it just stuck in my head.

I was so amazed that bobcats, the personality, they're very buzzy kind of fierce little personality and yet they live with humans almost seamlessly.

It's remarkable.

(Cheryl with bobcat) Okay off you go.

(Narrator) So far the project has identified dozens of individuals.

Each one is unique.

(Kerry) Well Avery is one of the bobcats who we caught early on.

She's a big female and she's become kind of a star of the project if you will.

Avery has her kittens right in the urban development.

So she's in the middle of housing developments and raising her kittens and because she doesn't have rock piles and places to stash them she's been using roofs.

So she lives on top of a roof and stashes her kittens there right after they're born for six, eight weeks something like that and then moves out every morning and every evening to hunt then comes back to the housing development to take care of the kittens.

(Cheryl) I believe that they structurally look at our environment, what we think of as a house.

It's just a rock pile that humans happen to live in.

One of the things that's fascinated all of us is they go back to the same houses over and over again.

So once they find, we call them cat houses, but once they find a friendly house, they go back over and over again.

And people are very proud of that in most cases.

And, you know, if you're not friendly, then you're likely not going to see them again.

But we do have, you know, bobcats that have had their kittens and raised their kittens several years in a row at a particular house.

One of them said they wanted to have us all out for a barbecue.

And they said we have to wait till the bobcats leave because we got a new grill, but it's out in the backyard and we can't put it together because [Laughter] because we don't want to bother the bobcats.

(Narrator) For homeowners and volunteers such as Jennifer Turner, a biologist herself who now works at a different field, a gesture from the Bobcats in Tucson Research Project recognizes a very special person.

(Jennifer) They gave me the opportunity to name the bobcat.

We named it after my mom, Cynthia, who passed away 33 years ago.

So she loved wildlife.

She's the one that got me involved.

And so it was good to honor her memory.

(Narrator) Karen Dotson lives a few miles away from Jennifer.

Dotson retired from Tucson Electric Power.

And while she's not a scientist like many others, she enjoys topics such as data and analysis.

The team was thrilled.

(Karen) I like organization and I like predictability.

And with the bobcats, I was really interested in the predictability.

When did they come?

Did they come on a full moon?

Did they come on a rainy night?

And the best way to keep track of that was on a spreadsheet.

I've really enjoyed doing that.

And, you know, I have spreadsheets for other things in my life, too.

But the bobcats are probably the most enjoyable spreadsheets.

(Kerry) Because of the satellite collars that we were able to put on them, we were able to really kind of open the door to see how far they were moving, where they were moving, how are they allocating the environment into home ranges.

What we found is that the bobcats here in this urban project are going about their business just like a bobcat would in the wild.

(Narrator) But the cats do face major threats in urban environments.

[car drives by] The first one is getting hit by vehicles as the animals try to navigate the city's countless streets.

(Kerry) And that was a surprise to us is the number of times that they crossed roads.

(Narrator) Another setback is people who kill them.

(Kerry) Conflicts with bobcats around urban domestic livestock, especially chickens, has led to the death of a number of our bobcats.

Bobcats are protected under Arizona state law.

And so there are very few exceptions that allow the taking of a bobcat in circumstances that are significant and a problem.

If they take the bobcats outside of that context, it's an illegal act.

The other strange things is, is these people are in the county or in the city limits, and they're shooting these bobcats in people's backyards.

And so it's very dangerous as well.

(Narrator) Scientists say constructing better chicken coops and outside shelters for pets can help.

And if you have predators in your neighborhood, don't leave your animals outside alone unprotected.

(Cheryl) This is their home, just like it's our home.

And the difference is they don't have the flexibility to move, they're gonna be in this home range for their entire life.

People will say, "Well, just move them someplace else."

Well, if you visualize what we found with our females, they're like puzzle pieces.

So there is a bobcat next door always.

And so she can't just move over.

There's someone who already lives there.

(Vet 2) Good heart rate.

(Cheryl) Awesome.

(Jennifer) When we were young, my mother used to tell us that the animals are more afraid of you than you are of them.

And I do have people that say, "Aren't you afraid that there's a bobcat in your yard?"

And I really am not.

It's an honor and a responsibility.

I feel like it's their yard and I just live here.

So I hope that the message gets out, that it's a wonderful thing to have these animals in your life and be a part of what you can see on a daily basis.

(Cheryl) I always tell people, "I'm glad I advocate for bobcats and not javelina."

[Laughter] Because if you compared it to javelina cause way more problems, way more property damage, you know, injuries, you name it.

And bobcats, it's really remarkable.

(Al) I treat my profession very personal.

I don't do it for myself or anybody else.

I do it for the wildlife.

Anything that I can find that will benefit them, I feel like I'm doing my job.

(Cheryl) My goal is if someone says Tucson, someone goes, "Oh, that's where all those bobcats live."

I really think that it's that unique of a situation and it's something that Tucson should be proud of.

It's a point of pride as far as I'm concerned.

(Tom) And here to tell us more now about the Bobcats and Tucson project is co-founder, Kerry Baldwin.

Kerry, your labor of love makes for a wonderful story as we've seen, and just this morning now, you were out on a mission.

(Kerry) - Yeah.

We have our tracking callers are falling off some of the Bobcats.

We actually can release them by a signal to the satellite.

We were trying to find one and it's down in the Santa Cruz River bottom in the mud and the wet.

(Tom) Will you ever find it or you gave up for today?

(Kerry) We know exactly where it is with the signal, but just how to get there from here.

(Tom) This, as I mentioned, a labor of love.

It was gonna be three years now you've extended into 2024 because there's lots more to find out about these wonderful animals.

(Kerry) Absolutely, and that's really what it was.

And then the other part of it is that we were very lucky that the public has provided us extra funding so we can buy more equipment, more collars, and continue the research on.

(Tom) What's been your biggest thrill, your biggest surprise in all of this?

(Kerry) I think the biggest surprise is how well these Bobcats move through this suburban environment.

They're very, very good at finding a way to make a living and coexisting with people.

And the problem is it's more people being unwilling to coexist with them.

(Tom) But you think that might be changing now?

(Kerry) Tucson's really good about that and it is a very positive environment, but it's a slow one and it's a small portion of people that have a problem with Bobcats.

(Tom) How unusual is it to have so many Bobcats in a city like Tucson, an urban setting like this?

(Kerry) This is pretty unique.

Based on what we hear from other researchers on Bobcats in other places, we may have the highest density of Bobcats anywhere.

(Tom) In the world?

(Kerry) Yeah, yeah, in an urban environment like this.

It's extremely dense.

Basically in Tucson, there are Bobcats everywhere.

(Tom) Yeah, in the city and-- (Kerry) All the way from the city.

So you take the Tucson basin and it's pretty much completely filled with Bobcats.

(Tom) Kerry, looking at the broader picture of what you've discovered about Bobcats in the last several years, so many species are under siege and dwindling and suffering even.

What have you learned about Bobcats in that respect?

Are they thriving?

Are they holding steady?

(Kerry) Yeah, our Bobcat population here in Tucson is doing very, very well.

And Bobcats in general are the most common of the spotted cats, worldwide.

So they're doing fine, they're not endangered.

And it really is one of the rewards we get here in Tucson is that we have a spotted cat where most of the spotted cats in the world are endangered or threatened.

Ours aren't.

Ours are doing fine.

And as long as we provide them a habitat and a place to make a living, we're gonna have Bobcats from here on out.

(Tom) Kerry, thank you and thank you for what you do.

(Kerry) My pleasure.

(Tom) To learn so much more, you can go to the website bobcatsintucson.net Andy Rush is a former associate professor of art at the University of Arizona.

He is also a printmaker, sculptor and drawer.

In fact, he considers the study and practice of drawing from observation to be the foundation of visual intelligence.

In 1992, he founded the Drawing Studio with a core group of Tucson artists.

[ Pensive piano music ] (Andrew) First of all, drawing is a language.

It's more than what you see with your eyes because to draw goes through your kinesthesia, so there's a whole language that is developing as I actually draw you with my body.

And so for me, drawing brings us into in a much deeper and more personal way.

Stieglitz used to say, the great photographer, a portrait is as much a self-portrait as it is one of you.

So I draw because it's a way of getting to know the world that you never know by just looking at it.

It's an enterprise that is not just about picture making.

It's about a whole zone of being that you set up and then live in it for as long as it holds my interest.

[ Pensive piano music ] (Andrew) In the beginning, it was because I had the first charismatic teacher of my life at the University of Illinois named Lee Chesney.

And he was a printmaker himself.

And I walked into the graduate studio one day after he had first arrived and watched him engraving on a large copper plate and I was hooked.

[ Pensive piano music ] I was in the Marine Corps.

When I was in Korea, I was on the demilitarized zone.

And that meant by day, there was nothing to do.

So I would be with my watercolors out wandering the hills looking at one of the most beautiful countries I've ever seen in my life.

I also was in Japan every week and visit Japanese museums and learned so much about composition from Japanese woodcuts.

When I finished my time in the Marine Corps, I went up to Iowa and I asked where I could meet Lasansky and I went into the print room and there he was and I introduced myself and said that I had come to work with him.

He said, "Well, the semester, you have to wait till next semester starts to enroll."

He said, "Do you have any work with you?"

And I said, "Yes, I have a trunk full in my car."

And he looked at my work for maybe 15 or 20 minutes.

He arranged to enroll me that very day.

And I became not only his student for four years, but ultimately I became his assistant.

[ Soft staccato music ] I am in Tucson because I had come back from a Fulbright grant in Italy in 1959 without a job with a new baby and a recent wife.

And I was prepared to go into design work in Chicago when somebody called me from Arizona and said they had too many students and were looking for a drawing teacher.

And could I please consider it?

I said, "Would I consider it?

I'll take the job site unseen."

And started work in two days at the University of Arizona.

(Eric) Andrew Rush was my printmaking teacher in 1969 and 70 at the University of Arizona.

Andy's work is humanistic.

It reflects the problems of the world that we're living in.

That is part of the history of printmaking.

(Curt) When I first came out here, the art community was a fairly small, tight group, and the name Andy Rush always came up.

He was just so well known that I guess I was expecting to feel very small in his presence, and he's such a welcoming person that it was very easy just to sit and chat with him.

(Eric) Lasansky studied with a man named Hader, and what Hader brought into the United States was the print shop as a community space where printmakers come together to help each other make their prints.

(Eric) And now Andy has made The Drawing Studio in Tucson as a community space where printmakers, artists can come together, learn, and share their time together.

[ Soft piano notes ] (Andrew) My fascination and experience with community is how come The Drawing Studio happened.

I consider The Drawing Studio as a direct evolution from my experience both with Lasansky and with modern printmaking community studios.

[ Soft piano notes ] (Jennifer) I've known Andy since 2008.

He is really a very, very masterful printmaker.

[ Soft piano notes ] (Tom) I came to the drawing studio specifically to be mentored by Andy.

We have since developed, I think, a very close relationship, not of competition by any means, but learning from each other, and that's the beautiful part of printmaking.

(Andrew) I keep hundreds of sketchbooks, and as I do this, very often something starts occurring to me.

I use four separate figures and then combine them with different colors and in different ways so they speak a little differently in different contexts.

[ Soft piano music ] (Andrew) What's the future gonna be about?

It's gonna be about anybody who can think of things from more than one point of view, and the only place I know that teaches that is the arts, especially the visual arts, and that the drawing studio is an effort to design an organization that addresses the learning of art in a way that can reach anybody who wants to start.

(Curt) I was teaching drawing classes in my studio, and there were very limited places to learn drawing, and whenever a student showed up that came from Andy's school, it was apparent, they had skills and knowledge and an ability to work with the materials.

[ Pensive music ] (Andrew) The professor artist Charles Littler, every Sunday morning we sat to talk about community and what it would take to find a way for artists to live together in a more compatible way with our children and our lives and continue to make art.

Charles' wife, Cora, found an ad in the paper advertising an old dude ranch up for sale 80 acres and 23 houses for $68,000.

Can you believe it?

[Laughs] (Fox) We got a group together from the U of A to buy this property in 1968.

And the following year, Andy moved out here and we've been here ever since.

We've done many projects together, mostly murals and tile murals.

We've had shows together here in the gallery.

He switched to clay for a while.

He worked on clay for probably 15 years or so.

(Andrew) In the middle of the 80s someplace, I noticed that the market for what I make, black and white etchings, was fading.

Suddenly I had four kids in school at the time.

I needed to find something.

And at the time, my friend Fox McGrew here on my ranch, who was a ceramic sculptor, was teaching me how to make tile, how to make art tile.

So I began to work in terracotta sculpture.

[ Soft music ] (Andrew) Art is a language, and you learn it like you learn any language.

You know, it has a grammar, it has a vocabulary, it has a context, it has a history.

So it every bit of it needs to be learned like you learn to speak or you learn to write.

[Soft music fades up slowly and slowly out ] (Tom) The next story in our Tiny Homes Series introduces us to a nonprofit called Wholistic Transformation.

Director Bryan Benz is turning old shipping containers from former Governor Doug Ducey's border wall into cozy little homes for foster youth.

Now the idea isn't just about building homes, but about a caring community and a brighter hope for the future.

(Bryan) Affordable housing.

It's not more affordable today than it was three years ago.

It was a problem three years ago now.

I would say it's a crisis.

Homelessness is not getting better in our community.

And so our plan is to to build a community of seven homes on two lots that we have in the central part of of Tucson at 15th and Plummer.

The vision of Wholistic Transformation is to build one bedroom houses for young adults aging out of the foster care system.

These are young adults who experience a tremendous amount of trauma through no fault of their own.

So we're planning to use some of the shipping containers that were used as a wall between Arizona and Mexico.

I think there's a symbolism in the idea that walls are to keep people out and this container is to be used to create a home.

The name of the organization is Wholistic Transformation.

We spell it with a W. If we're going to speak into the lives and work with others, we need to be aware of the whole person.

Unless the things that we're doing change the heart and the mind of the people we're trying to help.

It's not going to lead to transformation.

It's not lasting change.

[door latch opening] One of the things that makes us, I think, a little unique is idea that one of those homes will be inhabited by what we're calling a resident navigator.

That's a person who's going to live on site, work with the other individuals that are living there, and then navigate the resources that are available in our community.

Rent will be collected, but we're going to incentivize people participating in these different areas by reducing rent.

So, for example, if you're going to school, your rent is going to be reduced by $100.

If you're working, you're going to reduce by $100.

If you're involved in the maintenance of the facility, the community garden, another $100.

It's a complete 320 square foot house.

It'll be move-in ready.

There will be a a queen-sized bed.

There will be a couch, TV, there will be like a nine-foot galley kitchen with a full bathroom.

It's going to be very attractive Southwest style courtyard that fits in our community.

But the inside will be an industrial look.

The walls will be metal.

We'll use exposed conduit.

We think one, it's attractive and plus it gives us more space on the inside.

And so it'll be something you'd be happy to live in.

(Bryan) He was supposed to go and bring two.

The house is a starting place.

People need a place to live, They need a safe environment.

You know, what is the responsibility to step up in this area where possible and to be a part of making a difference in affordable housing?

Do we have a responsibility?

I feel we do.

(Tom) Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you next week with another all-new episode.