This week on Arizona illustrated wings over Wilcox, then cranes while they're here on winter vacation, when the sun comes over the mountain, they're ready to go out and find a place to forage plants for the southwest.

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

Agua Caliente Park, hang out here.

Even people who got married here, we saw a couple of the other day or family that had a memorial service, and so this is really a sacred spot for our community.

Welcome to Arizona illustrated, I'm Tom McNamara for millennia.

Flocks of Sandhill cranes have migrated to winter in southeastern Arizona's wetlands.

In fact, this year, Arizona game and fish counted more than 47,000 of them in the sulfur springs and HeLa river valleys.

Well, recently we traveled to the wings over Wilcox Festival to take in the sights and sounds of this great annual migration.

[music] [crane calls] (Homer) When you're looking at the head of the crane and the bill and you're looking at just the crown area there and the color and when you're looking in the eye, I don't know.

That's just maybe that fascinating is not the right word, but that's the moment when it feels the most special.

It looks like they're looking at you, and maybe they are their visual acuity is pretty darn good.

There's a certain wonder, just like, what are you thinking?

[laughter] You know, if I could actually if we could actually talk to each other.

I'm sure it would think it's like, you're interesting, don't come closer, I'm sure something like that, right?

But it's it's just a really interesting view.

I can picture it in my mind right now.

It's just stunning.

[crane calls] I always enjoyed the cranes.

I enjoyed the sound flying overhead.

I do feel fortunate to be a native of southeast Arizona and a multigenerational native.

It gave me the opportunity as an adult to really appreciate it.

And with the Wings Over Willcox Birding and Nature Festival, I am, you could say the chair person as well as one of the field trip leaders and and and all the various other things that might help it along.

[music] You can be out there and all of a sudden you realize I'm not here by myself, there's actually 40 or 50 other people sitting about on benches or some people sitting on the ground, or some people are standing over here, the viewing deck, 100 feet down and you're all kind of in that moment together.

But even if it's just yourself, it's still, you know, you're just feeling part of something bigger than yourself.

[crane calls] Then cranes, while they're here on winter vacation when the Sun comes over to the mountain is a little bit before a little bit after, they're ready to go out and find places to forage.

And nowadays, you know, modern foraging habitat is generally agricultural fields.

Any sort of grain fields, there's corn out here.

Alfalfa fields can sometimes be used for foraging.

They go to where the food resources are and they eat.

Sometimes they'll stay in the area, find an area to loaf.

They say just loafing, hanging out, relaxing, preening taking care of your feathers.

I mean, that's that's an important task.

You know, your feathers help you to fly, but they also protect you from weather.

And as they they hang out and they might interact with each other, sometimes they'll do a little bit of dancing or or a little bit of a agitated display with a neighbor they're not so happy with.

Then, when it gets close to dark, if they're not at the spot, they're going to roost.

They might move just, you know, quarter mile or a few hundred feet even to an area in the water, and then they spend the rest of the night there.

[crane calls] They're very vocal, and we talk about the vocalizations trumpeting and bugling are one of the terms that are used to describe it because it's French horn, they've been compared to French horn.

Sometimes, you know, you'll see these family units, generally three birds, it'll be the father, the mother and the offspring for that year.

But they are definitely part of a larger society, in a sense a larger social system.

New Caption Here in southeast Arizona, with the clouds and the skies we have, you know, it is I mean, I I just love the camp because you see the cranes, but then you get all these different colors of the sky.

And as the Sun is setting, you know, the colors are changing in the clouds and the clouds themselves, you know, depending how thick they are and they're are fluffy.

they are.

You know what?

What kind of cloud they are?

And then the mountains themselves and how they change.

That can still give me goose bumps, and I've seen that, you know, over a fair portion of my life and I can't beat it.

You cant beat it.

There's an unexpected treasure hiding in plain sight in Tucson, plans for the Southwest.

This is an unassuming nursery with a distinctive offering.

The owner's Jane Evans and Jean Joseph bonded over their love of plants at the University of Arizona, and they eventually married, and together they've established an international reputation for cultivating unusual desert flora from seed.

They're proud of what they've built, but what happens when one person wants to retire and the other doesn't?

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.

Outside places with year round water are considered a treat by most desert dwellers.

And there's one location east of the Tucson city limits, that's an accessible example.

Agriculture into a park which in Spanish means hot water has a hot spring that's been drawing visitors there for thousands of years.

And after operating as a resort and a cattle ranch for decades, Pima County acquired the land and opened the park in 1985.

[Reflective Music] (Bart) This place is an oasis in the desert.

It is one of our absolute favorite spots to sign.

[Reflective Music] My name is Bart Smith, serve as pastor of St Mark's Presbyterian in Midtown.

[Music] Love the palm trees, the view of the mountains, and it's it's a park for the people you run into all kind of folks who have an opportunity to.

Enjoy the outdoors here.

[Music] My name is Elizabeth Smith, and I'm a Presbyterian minister currently serving as interim pastor at Saint John on the desert, just kind of around the corner from here.

We do a variety of things so we always bring visitors and we have out of town, family or friends.

This is a favorite spot.

We try to do picnics.

Suday we brought our camping chairs and read a book.

We've walked around today.

We thought we'd come with coffee and walk around.

I know plenty of people who hang out here, even people who've gotten married here.

We saw a couple of the other day, our family that had a memorial service.

And so this is really a sacred spot for our community.

Reflective Music] My name is Sandy Cohen, and I'm retired teacher.

I first became acquainted with it many, many years ago when a friend got married here.

I hadn't been out here before, but most recently it's been a gathering place since COVID for my Monday morning coffee klatch, since we can't meet at the loca establishment down the way.

We've been meeting here.

I like the option of walking around the grounds and the serenity of it and the option to meet in a beautiful place and socialize during a challenging time.

[Music] My name is Pam Emerson, and I'm a volunteer here at the Ranch House at Agua Caliente Park.

This room here, which was the which is now the dining room.

When people come in, we usually start with the dining room because that was the original footprint of the of the ranch house.

The first owner of the Ranch House, built it in 1873.

It would have had a dirt floor or it would have been very basic and.

And that was all they had, basically one of the things in the ranch house that people enjoy seeing is is the kitchen.

There are three little areas in the kitchen.

one of them is, we think was the first little kitchen that was built, which is.

Fairly modest, but then when the last family came, we always told the story.

The wife said, You know, if you're going to Arizona to play Cowboy, I want a decent kitchen.

Very upmarket and.

It's still a beautiful kitchen these days.

You'd probably get a longer flowering period from the bird of Paradise.

I like to spend time here because.

It's just a beautiful, peaceful.

Interesting.

Place to be with lots of history, lots of wildlife.

Just a gem that everybody ought to come and visit.

[Bird chirping] (Sandy) I've come here many time to walk the trail and and so on and so forth.

So and just enjoy the serenity.

I mean, it's so quiet.

It's so far away from the main hub that it's it' kind of a nice place to be.

I grew up in Kansas, as my shirt says, and I didn't grow up with palm trees and these types of bodies of water and the mountains, of course.

And so for me, it's just a really sacred gem, and I hope more people can enjoy it And the Ducks are a nice touch.

I actually would like to add our niece.

Her nickname for me is Duck, and she got that when we took her here as a toddler and she was running after the ducks and somehow associates me with ducks.

So this place is special for our family.

And his uncle Duck.

[Reflective Music] In this encore story, we'll revisit filmmaker Deidre Peaches.

Now her work has taken her to Alaska, the Sundance Film Festival and the Navajo Nation during the COVID 19 crisis.

She uses the medium to illuminate injustice.

Tell stories about space travel and to better understand her own community.

Now she takes us on a journey in her own words, illustrated by her own films.

(airy music) - [Diedra] (speaks foreign) I'm introducing myself using my clans in Navajo.

And also saying that I live here in Flagstaff.

I've been filmmaking for the past 15 years.

During my, I think it was sophomore year in college.

One of the things I wanted to do was document my grandmother.

- (speaks foreign) - She didn't wanna be on camera.

My cinematographer, Jake Lingua.

He would document different objects around her house that depicted who she was.

(airy music) Rocket boy is a film about a young boy named Calvin who develops a rocket ship in order to see his father in space.

At the time we had no money, there was no ego behind it.

We had submitted it to different native film festivals.

They denied the film.

And we're like, "Oh man, like they don't like our film."

And then we submitted it to Sundance.

They're like, we've got it.

And we were like, "Oh my God.

Like Whoa."

So we were like the youngest native American filmmakers to be accepted into Sundance.

And I was blown away.

I still am blown away.

(laughs) After Sundance, kinda just like, went into more documentary filmmaking.

I wanted to do more about learning about my community.

"Water is life" (speaks in foreign) is a documentary about the scarcity of water on the Navajo nation.

As well as the connection between resource extraction.

Filmmaking was a way for me to have a glimpse in seeing a system that was put in place to disenfranchise indigenous people.

- [Ruby] I don't like to say reservation 'cause this is home to me.

(laughs) So I don't like to say that.

I just say "I'm from home."

And home is here where I live in Popovich on third Mesa - [Diedra] Ruby Chimerica She is based out of Hopi.

She's an herbalist.

She allowed us to go to her property.

She loved what she was doing.

And you could see that in the way that she was talking to her granddaughter.

That hope for the future and that hope in her culture.

And so that, was really empowering to see.

And to see that wow, you can survive off the land, like living in a city.

We forget those same connections.

I wanted to use filmmaking more to like, learn about my culture and learn about like, things that like I wasn't taught in school or I wasn't taught by my parents.

Other aspects of my identity that I hadn't yet learned.

There's something that we call like poverty porn.

And it's like, (laughs) basically like, you'll have someone come in and they'll just show all the negative impacts.

So, we don't want to see our community being talked down upon.

We want encouragement.

We want uplifting stories.

(calm music) I was contacted by the Navajo Hopi COVID relief fund.

And they had asked if I would be interested in filming a water delivery.

My mother, she has a background in like epidemiology.

And she's been training for pandemics.

(laughs) And so she was just talking about how infectious it could be.

And I told them, "Yeah, like I'd be down to film.

I just need to get like my PPEs in order."

And so I started looking online seeing, okay, this is what people in Wu Hong are wearing.

And so it was basically the Tyvek suit, a face shield goggles, booty things that you put on your shoes.

Like I was sweating.

Like trying to like focus.

It was a lot of work and it was scary.

'Cause I didn't know if I had COVID.

And so I just like stayed in my room.

(foreign chanting) (foreign chanting louder) When I went to Alaska, it was like, me meeting with extended family members.

And it was cool too.

(laughs) 'Cause like there was some Navajos that were married into the Tlingit tribe up there.

And so like they knew about sheep.

They knew about mutton.

And like the customs were very similar.

'Cause like in Navajo we have something called (speaks foreign).

And it's like, you live in harmony with like, not just yourself, but with everything around you.

Those same sort of teachings and principles I found were super similar with the Tlingit tribe.

I was out there for like 10 days.

Just roughing it.

(calming music) If you're an outsider coming into a community, there's a lot of take, take, take, take, take.

I think like as an indigenous filmmaker you always think about the people .

(calming music) By thinking in those terms like that definitely helps to uplift an entire community rather than pushing them down.

(calming music brightens) Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you next week.