Author: asnsadmin

[caption id="attachment_85" align="alignleft" width="864"]Horses from Old Tombstone Tours stand on top of their designated sandbox to urinate. The horses are taken to the spot to relieve themselves twice daily. (Photo by Robert Alcaraz/ASNS)[/caption]Like tourists, horses are common on Tombstone’s streets.

And most of them – horses and tourists – are properly potty trained.

Tom Clark, an employee of Old Tombstone Tours, a stagecoach business that carries tourists and educates them about the town’s history, said his company has taught its horses how to urinate in only one place, and it wasn’t a difficult process.

“They know when to go,” said Clark, who has worked for the tour firm nearly a decade. “We take them down to the sandbox twice every day, usually around noon and 3 in the afternoon.”

 

[caption id="attachment_83" align="alignleft" width="900"]Miguel Folch, a veteran pararescue jumper, sits in front of strobe spotlights at a photo studio in the Lost Barrio in Tucson as he waits for a model to change her wardrobe. Folch has decided to pursue his passion for photography to escape the stresses associated with being a Tucson firefighter. (Photo by Josh Morgan/ASNS)[/caption]Miguel Folch, 40, is a paramedic, firefighter and fashion photographer from Tucson. He’s a veteran of the U.S. Air Force Air Combat Command operatives, also known as the “pararescue jumpers.”

And he suffers from combat post-traumatic stress disorder.

Folch is not alone. Approximately 23 percent of the nation’s more than 25 million veterans suffer and live with PTSD.

[caption id="attachment_81" align="alignleft" width="600"]Bob Newtson, executive director of Friends of Saguaro National Park, answers a visitor’s questions about the skulls displayed in his group’s booth during the BioBlitz. Newtson’s organization takes in donations and gives them to the park, local schools and nature conservation groups. (Photo by Conner Wilson/ASNS)[/caption]

 

Bob Newtson stood behind a table filled with skulls of various shapes and sizes.

“This one is of a grizzly bear,” he said, pointing to the biggest skull on the table.

Newtson, executive director of the Friends of Saguaro National Park, had lined up the skulls at his group’s booth at this year’s BioBlitz at Saguaro National Park, a Sonoran Desert ecosystem flanking Tucson on both the east and west.

Newston’s group was one of the main sponsors of the 24-hour blitz, which was conducted to count and categorize the various life forms that take refuge in the Sonoran desert.

Newtson explained that his organization attracted the attention of the National Geographic Society, which is helping conduct a BioBlitz in a different national park each year during the decade leading up to the U.S. National Park Service Centennial in 2016.

 

Ten-year-old Drake Patton sat in front of the sterile hood, listening to instructions from Dr. A. Elizabeth Arnold and her students.

Arnold, an associate professor at the University of Arizona’s School of Plant Sciences, warned Drake to make sure his gloves didn’t have any ethanol on them because it’s flammable.

“Let’s just get some more gloves,” said Drake, a Bisbee fifth-grader participating in activities during Saguaro National Park’s BioBlitz, a 24-hour species count that took place Oct. 21-22 at the park’s Rincon Mountain District east of Tucson and Tucson Mountain District in the west.