Field Notes
What Our Sky Island Fellow Learned about Springs in Sonora
June 21, 2021¿Hablas Español? Lee el blog en Español. Earlier this year, our 2021 Sky Island Fellow Ángel Garcia — who also spent the summer and fall of 2020 with us as part of our binational internship program — graduated from the Universidad de la Sierra in Sonora, Mexico with a degree in biology! (You can read…
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Notes from the Field: The Great Porcupine Search
June 10, 2021Photo Caption: A North American porcupine detected on one of our Border Wildlife Study cameras. Thank you to our wonderful volunteer, Alicia Stout, for this engaging blog post she wrote on her recent wildlife adventures with SIA staff in the field! If you have similar stories of volunteering with us, please send a write-up to…
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What are Sky Islands?
June 9, 2021The Sky Islands. You probably hear these islands mentioned a lot in southern Arizona and northern Sonora, or see us refer to them in our social messages and on our website. In fact, it’s even there in our name, Sky Island Alliance—a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and restoring the diversity of life and lands in the Sky Island region. Sky Islands, Sky Island region, las…
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Border Wildlife Study: People on Our Trail Cameras
May 24, 2021Photo caption: A white-tailed deer rests near an oak tree (left) while an orange construction vehicle drives quickly along a the border road during active wall construction in the Huachuca Mountains in January 2021. Border Wildlife Study cameras document so much more than just wild animals on the move at the border. They document weather,…
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Border Wildlife Study: Vegetation and Drought in the Borderlands
May 21, 2021For the last year, the Border Wildlife Study cameras have documented an amazing array of wildlife species across the San Rafael Valley and the Patagonia and Huachuca Mountains that flank it on the west and east. One of the interesting questions of our study is: How does the wildlife community vary across the different habitats…
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Notes from the Field: Wildlife in San Antonio Canyon
May 18, 2021Recently, Sky Island Alliance staff had the opportunity to take a group of reporters down to our Border Wildlife Study area so that they could see what’s at stake with the threat of more border infrastructure looming over the region. While we were visiting, we got the chance to visit one of our wildlife cameras that predates the study, as well…
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Celebrating 30 Years of Conservation: The Founding of Sky Island Alliance
May 13, 2021In 1991, activists from a variety of groups met to discuss the gap they saw in the environmental grassroots movements of the time. National conservation organizations had their priorities, but none of them were focused on protecting the biodiversity of the Sky Island region—a place that needed to be seen as a landscape without state, federal, or international borders. That’s…
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Estudio de la vida silvestre fronteriza: un año de conteo de especies
May 12, 2021La región de las Islas del Cielo alberga una impresionante diversidad de especies de vida silvestre en este paisaje accidentado donde se entremezclan especies templadas y tropicales. Para documentar la verdadera diversidad de un lugar, se debe emplear una amplia gama de métodos, de los cuales cada uno está diseñado para detectar una especie o…
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Configuring New FotoFauna Cameras in Mexico / Configuración de Cámaras FotoFauna en México
May 11, 2021Miguel Francisco Enriquez Galaz joined Sky Island Alliance as an intern in 2019. After a two-year internship, we’re delighted that he’s staying on through 2021 as a Sky Island Fellow to help coordinate Sky Island FotoFauna submissions across the region. Here are some of his insights from setting up trail cameras in Sonora, Mexico: “My…
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Border Wildlife Study: Measuring Nighttime Habitats
May 6, 2021In April 2021, Sky Island Alliance and Round River Conservation Studies followed the Globe at Night methodology to measure the nighttime sky quality across the Border Wildlife Study site and along the flanking border regions. Along 84 miles, our staff and volunteers took stellar magnitude readings of the sky at night at points between the…
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