(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, we take to the skies with some beautiful and unusual hunters.

(Amber) I love being able to be successful and have her catch something.

(Tom) Meet the people behind one of our region's most unusual plant nurseries.

(Jane) We make a nice, pretty staged plant so that somebody can look at it and just kind of dive into that pot.

(Tom) See how a grassroots organization has been feeding hungry students in Cochise County for the last decade.

(Sarah) Poverty is a really complicated issue.

I think the why for me is making sure kids are fed.

(Tom) And discover the unique German food scene in Sierra Vista.

(Angelika) I wanna be there with people.

I wanna work with people and for people.

(electronic music) Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

Falconry is an ancient sport that's practiced all around the world.

So we'll begin this episode with four licensed falconers from Tucson who established the Sky Island Falconry Experience to share their love of hunting with birds of prey.

[Ominous music] (Nate) Any given day.

We're waking up, sunup to sundown.

Our lives are kind of consumed.

We'll fly our own birds, our own personal birds, and then we'll go out and run programs for guests.

I love the quote that “It's extreme birdwatching”.

If you love watching birds do bird things, man.

Falconry is just it's is about as extreme as you can get.

(Amber) This is my sixth season.

I also am a business partner with Sky Island Falconry.

My husband and I and our two friends run a falconry education business here in Tucson, Arizona.

(Carissa) I've been flying birds for five years and a lot of those years with was with our best friends, Nate and Amber.

And we're also known as the Super Friends.

And we have a lot of fun flying birds.

[Laughs] (Brian) With Carissa and I, We started we both flew Harris's hawks.

We were able to go out together.

And once we had Evelyn, our our child, our daughter, she tagged along everywhere we went, we got a little backpack, baby carrier.

And when we're out hunting, we're together doing it.

And so far, she loves it.

[Whistling] (Amber) C'mon girl.

(Nate) When you put a glove on somebady and they call a bird to their glove for the first time, that smile that they have on that face like I know what that's like.

That's why I do it right.

And so to be like share it with other people is awesome.

And so we pursued that permit.

February 2020, I was talking to to my wife and Brian and Carissa that I'm going to do this and they said that they'd like to be in on it.

So we're going to head.

Into the field over here.

(Nate) Fortunately, because of what we do, it's outdoors, it's small groups.

It still actually succeeded and we still were able to make it happen through the pandemic.

And so we started Sky Island Falconry Experience.

It's a U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Services licensed falconry school, and it allows us to take people out, teach them a bit about falconry.

They get to put a glove on, they get to call a bird to the glove.

They get to see a hunt with some of our programs.

And and we get to share share falconry with people.

[Ominous music] With Sarah the Cooper's Hawk, I run two bird dogs most mornings and the bird dogs will go try to locate the quail.

They walk up on point when they find one and we work our way over and try to flush it.

So you see how he's standing rigid, tail straight up.

If they stop moving at all.

For more than a handful of seconds, They have scent of quail.

It could come out any direction.

I'm going to try to push it this way Unless it's maybe down here and it's just coming up the hill.

Yeah, there's no no, just a dead, prickly pear.

There it is!

That quail is haulin'!.

Oh, my goodness!

Trust your dog!

Sarah should pursue if she feels like it.

She did it.

Most of the time this morning.

Today we were running to Hungarian Vizalas.

and they've got a really unique history with falconry.

They were originally bred for the sport of Algeria.

They were running under Falcons thousand plus years ago, working with birds of prey and humans to make it hunt successful.

[Whistling] (Brian) Not much has changed.

I mean, I got a GPS on a dog.

That's a big difference in the GPS on the bird.

Sarah, the Cooper's Hawk is this green dot.

And she's just under 1100 feet away.

But other than that, the way we handled the birds and a lot of the training of the dogs is very similar.

Right there.

There we go!

That was a lousy chase.

(Brian) She was unsuccessful in her pursuits this morning, but that's not out of the usual.

I think birds of prey miss 80% of their pursuits, so their success rate is pretty low.

It does get a little better with the help of a falconer and the dogs.

But even then, today we were skunked.

Cagey birds.

Yeah, they are.

People think I love to catch quail.

I used to chase and kill quail.

Right.

But I also love quail.

I appreciate them deeply because I've seen what they do.

I've seen how capable of an animal they are, how how they've adapted and evolved to escape predators.

And then I've got to see my hunting partner, how they've evolved to, you know, surpass those abilities.

[Pensive music] You ready?

Come on, girl.

Petra.

(Amber) I fly with a bell on Petra.

It's kind of the typical falconry.

That's like the original GPS of the falconry bird.

I feel lost without a bell on a bird.

I don't fly with GPS with her because I found myself somewhat being becoming dependent on it.

And so instead of coming out here and enjoying what I like to do and enjoying nature and just wandering and being able to enjoy what I'm seeing, I was constantly looking down at my phone and looking instead of being like, Look, I know how to do this.

I know where she is.

I know how to look for her.

I know how to find my bird.

So I love like being able to be successful and have her catch something.

But for me, like, that's, that's just to provide sustenance for her.

And that also when she catches something for me, it's an honor that she felt comfortable enough to do it in my presence and wait for me to help her.

[Running footsteps] [Subtle screeching] [Heavy breathing] [Pensive music continues] [Pensive music continues, bell rings] Watch your tail.

(Carissa) I'll do another run with her.

You ready?

Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho!

(Carissa) I had it on a lure machine.

and I was just building up fitness.

She's a baby bird that fell out of the nest.

I am flying her for a rehab right now and also building up confidence.

Her catching that just makes her believe she can.

Um, and then, you know, with her being a baby bird and not being outside her flights and, uh, flying hard after that, prey just helps build up that muscle.

[Hawk vocalizing] (Nate) You get to actually be an intimate part of that predator prey relationship.

Being able to observe wild animals in their wild habitat, doing wild animal things, it's an incredible experience.

[Pensive music] Good work.

I'm proud of you.

Good work, buddy.

[Hawk vocalizing] Well, instead of my glove she flew to my shoulder.

Goofy bird.

[Music fades] Tucson is full of hidden gems and Plants for the Southwest is no exception.

This unassuming nursery is filled with rare and spectacular desert flora from all around the world.

Now the owners met at the University of Arizona, but they've grown an international audience by cultivating unusual species from seeds.

I always tell people my husband and I own a cactus and succulent nursery.

We sell cactus and succulents from deserts around the world.

We all started from a very early prototype of life, and then we've gone our different ways and plants are just one of the ways that life has continued.

I see that when I look at plants, these are living things When it was time to go to college, I didn't really know what I wanted to do and to tell you the truth, I didn't even really realize that a degree in horticulture existed.

I came out here to go to school.

I started in engineering, got out of that reasonably quickly and got into the Agriculture College.

There were beginning horticulture classes and I took them and I love them and I thought, OK, I'm going to figure this out.

I was growing crops of plants for them to use, and I loved growing crops, I realized.

Nothing is more exciting than growing from seed because you start with this little teeny tiny seed and you end up with a plant.

This is Pachypodium brevicaule This is not a seed that you can buy readily.

These are some fruits developing on flowers.

I did maybe as long as a month ago.

I'm trying to mimic what the major pollinator in nature does, which is a moth.

This is a Javelina bristle simply cut and taped on to a piece of wood.

Microscopically, there's little hairs on it that can grab the pollen.

A lot of times people will say, Isn't that lucky that Gene found someone that could share his interest?

And I kind of go, What?

What are you talking about?

Because I actually purchased this property before we were even married.

This property that we're on today was established as a nursery flower shop in 1933.

Jane had the property with a flower shop.

I actually rented space from her at that time.

And then life happened after that.

B.C.N.

Baja California Norte Being people with degrees in horticulture.

Our focus really was on propagation.

And so we started seeking seed sources.

In 1987, there was a large grower of mesembs in Azle, Texas, and he died unexpectedly.

By chance, we were in a situation where we could buy it from his widow.

And so that was how we really got started in lithops.

Everybody has a different description for what they think they look like.

I think they look like little living stones.

They're all different and they're all beautiful in their own way.

I love the idea that their mimicry plants, the plants just disappear into the rock.

For several years, we sold lots of seed to China.

We pollinated all the lithops, and then we collected all the seed capsules, and then we sold them to China.

To the tune of three to 4 million seeds.

That was really fun.

But now they grow their own.

They don't need us anymore.

Jane was talking to you about the lithops, and that's probably the biggest collection of lithops in the Americas.

And we definitely have a national following, for sure.

And even in an international following.

There's a lot of rare and hard to find plants that we have, and we try and have pairs of those plants so that we can mass produce them.

This plant here is Welwitschia mirabilis.

It's a rare kind of slow growing plant grows out in the middle and nothing in the deserts of Namibia.

They're very primitive, coniferous plant, so they cone instead of flowering, they can grow to be 2 thousand years old.

It is a much slower group of plants to work with.

I like continuity.

I like to see things continue over longish periods of time, years, in some cases decades, lifetimes.

There's a huge emotional attachment and that's always been the hardest thing.

And Gene and I are having degrees in horticulture instead of business.

That was really the hardest thing.

Some people, you can just tell they want to put something on a windowsill and or on a coffee table, in a dark room, and they want it to look great forever, and they're never going to take care of it.

And I'm just not interested in sending my little plants to their death.

The other part of this that I like so much is to grow my plants to a point where they really look like what they're supposed to look like as old plants in nature.

That's a satisfaction, probably one that I'm winding down on being able to experience as I get older because there aren't too many more cycles of years left for me to grow some of these things up to up to their size.

I'm at a point now that's very difficult for me because I'm a retirement age, and I would love to do other things.

The goal on once a week is to keep the roots from drying out.

I'm trying to work less, but Gene wants to grow plants forever, and so I say, great, go for it.

You know that I have no problem with him growing plants forever because we love to grow plants.

But as a result, I'm trying to sell more of the lithops.

The more lithops leave Genes going, oh, but we can't have all the lithops go!

He loves to look at the lithops.

So on this table, I have been selecting plants that I think are particularly nice.

These are plants that I have been staging.

When I first bought the property, there was a flower shop on the property and I had no intention of ever running a flower shop ever in my life, but that's what paid the mortgage, so I had to.

I missed that really pretty thing you get with flower arrangements.

So now I've just transferred it over to staging plants.

Making an arrangement, I really feel attached to how the plant's going to feel among the rocks.

I take care and how I place the rocks.

I want them to look nice.

I want them to look like nature.

OK.

I have my own little piece of desert, If I can make a nice, pretty staged plant so that somebody can look at it and just kind of dive into that pot and get lost for a few minutes thinking about where they are among those rocks.

To me, that's very pleasurable.

This is Gene's new collection that I'm potting up for him.

I spend most of my a lot of my time thinking about other things I'd like to travel, I'd like to be in other places.

I'd like to study other types of plants.

But I don't want to give up what I do.

So if anything, I need more concurrent lives so that I can do it all and do more all at the same time without stopping anything.

Now the reality of life is that I'm going to have to stop some things, many things as time goes on, and I probably just haven't come to enough grips with that, as she has.

(soft music) The recent federal cuts to SNAP benefits during the government shutdown highlighted the need for food banks and other organizations dedicated to ending hunger.

Peach's Pantry in Sierra Vista is one of them.

And they've been feeding hungry students in Cochise County for over 10 years.

♪ MELANCHOLY BASS (Rebecca) Students come here every day.

They are tired, they are stressed.

They really have a hard time focusing and putting their best foot forward in school.

So having one little thing taken care of can help them relax and it can help them focus a little bit better.

(Sarah) Poverty's a complicated issue, but feeding children is not.

In 2012, the counselor at the middle school actually reached out to me, told me she had been buying food with her own money and sending it home with kids at the middle school who didn't have enough to eat on the weekends.

And so she knew they were coming to school hungry.

And she asked me, "You're already out in the community.

Think you can ask them to just donate the food and we can still keep feeding these kids?

I wanna make sure that they keep being fed."

And once we started within that one school and I started gathering food from the community and putting it in a closet at the school, and sitting at home with a few kids, then we found that there was a teacher who had been sending food home with a student in this school.

There was a principal who had been buying food for that family.

It was all over happening, but it was out of the school district employees' own pocket.

And it was, you know, just here and there where they saw the need.

And so we consolidated into one program.

We started in one school, we had 11 kids, and now we're in 20 schools, and we serve 450-ish kids every week.

♪ UPLIFTING GUITAR (Laura) Every week we put a can of fruit, a can of vegetables.

We put four packages of ramen, and every other week we'll put a box of cereal.

And then snacks, the kids love snacks.

One bag will average about $13 or $14 a bag.

And so if you look at that for a period of a month, it's saving the parents probably close to $50 a month.

My family wasn't always as fortunate when I just started here.

And so I was offered it kind of like maybe a week or after I started going to the school.

And it's helped quite a lot, me and my family, because it's a family of about five, five to six sometimes.

And so that's a lot of mouths to feed, and we don't always have the budget to feed all those mouths.

(Sarah) We had kids that were, they had been stealing food out of the cafeteria, and they were caught.

And the school said, "This," sorry, "this used to be like a difficult call home that where you're gonna get suspended, you're in trouble, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but," she said, "We have this program."

And so the call home was instead like, "Hey, do you need help?"

There was still a call home.

There was still a conversation with mom and dad.

But instead, they started that week with Peaches Pantry.

We're a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity.

We apply for grants, and we have a lot of wonderful donors.

So we are completely self-funded.

(Laura) We have no idea who the students are that gets the bag.

So it's the school personnel that determines who gets the bag.

We're in contact with our families quite a bit.

I have been in the parking lot.

When the parents are out there, I just hand them out flyers or I talk to them.

I organize them and I label them with the students initials because at the end of the day, when people are leaving, it's a little crazy.

So I can just hand them quickly.

Some of our students' parents will pull up early in the parking lot, so I can take the bags out to them.

Or if a student's not here on Thursday, I will deliver the bags to their house on Friday.

As a kid, you can't really do much about it, which is why Peach's Pantry does help because it does make me feel like I'm contributing to my household in some way.

And they're easy meals to whip up.

Like there's boxed macaroni most of the times I get, or like pasta, and those are easy to cook.

You know, poverty is a really complicated issue.

And I think the why for me is making sure kids are fed.

I have four children of my own, and we've gone through lean times in our own family.

And so I get that people struggle, and this is just a little bit to help.

The other part of it is to encourage education, because I'm a true believer that education is how we lift people out of poverty and equal access to education, but also making sure people show up.

And when kids are hungry or when they're struggling at home, this is a little incentive that if they are there on Thursday, they get to take this food home.

(Rebecca) So much of it is being able to breathe and also knowing that you're not alone.

A lot of families and kids feel like it's just them.

So knowing that there is a community backing them, it's made a huge impact.

Sierra Vista, Cochise County's largest city, has a thriving international dining scene.

In part because of the US Army base at Fort Huachuca.

In fact, Angelika's German Imports is one of three German restaurants in a town of under 50,000 people.

(Angelika Gloyd) My name is Angelika Gloyd, and I'm the owner business owner of Angelika's German Imports, formerly known as the Guten Appetit Deli.

What brought me to Sierra Vista originally is my first husband.

He was military.

That's what brought me to the States altogether.

And we lived in a suburb of Chicago for a while.

Sierra Vista just grows on you.

And I'm growing with Sierra Vista.

Actually, the German restaurants in Sierra Vista are very popular.

All the restaurants in Tucson closed.

So we have a lot of people coming from Tucson, Oro Valley, Green Valley, Sahuarita.

So, you know, I guess three restaurants can make it well here.

And then me, I'm also a market only market from Phenix to El Paso.

We have deli items like knockwrasut, bratwurst to purchase or ham baloney, German style ham, baloney, bauernschinken, Which is really popular, So it's some of the for me, not so popular items, but the customers love them.

Blood and tongue and head cheese.

So yeah, we have a lot of influx for buying all the German groceries.

Gosh, we opened in 2004 as the Guten Appetit Deli, and for medical reasons we had to close In 2009, I was gone for about a year and then re-opened out in Hereford next to a bar.

2011, We had the big fire.

So then I actually came back to my original place, which the former owners had enlarged into two units.

My customers are just always there.

We just love each other.

We become friends, we become close.

It's really tough for me when I lose customers.

I just lost another one last week and it's just devastating to me because I get so close with my customers.

Some of them move away and you lose the customers, and losing a customer to death, unfortunately, is really devastating.

It's hard.

Yeah it makes me cry.

Sorry.

It's not a job.

It's a passion.

I've always wanted my own business.

I've worked in retail for many, many years.

As a six year old.

I sat on the cashier lap in Germany and she let me punch in the numbers for the groceries.

And I think back then already something happened, you know, and it just kind of instilled in me that I want to be there with people.

I want to work with people.

And for people.

I mean, what bigger compliment can you really get than somebody to come in and say, Oh my God, this is just like my grandma used to make it, You know?

I mean, that special.

Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, we'll see you again next week.