Starting 2024 Well…

We started the New Year well… by getting up early and heading back to Sweetwater Wetlands. It was beautiful watching the sun come up, and we did see plenty of nice birds. A bit dark for photos, however. But I shot a lot anyway!

Here is a Vermillion Flycatcher. I include him just because he’s beautiful, and my Hawaiian birding buddy Wendy might be reading this! This one’s for you, Wendy!

A Snowy Egret looks purple in the interesting lighting: (He’s really white)

Cute little Spotted Sandpiper

A gorgeous Northern Pintail, and a Mallard for comparison.

This bird is now called and Abert’s Towhee, but some say this year they are going to rename all birds that have people’s names attached. Like having the discoverer’s name attached is unfair to some birds or some other early birders. I think it’s unfair to rename the birds!

This guy was new for us: a Black-thoated Gray Warbler. Very elusive, but we and several others in the early morning were delighted to find him. (Maybe his name is offensive to all birds without black throats??)

And here is the other exciting find… a Northern Parula. He also was very active and hard to photograph. But such beautiful coloration!

As we left the park, this majestic Cooper’s Hawk watched us from not very high overhead. (Perhaps we will now have to call him “Person who makes barrels Hawk.”

Old Tucson

We’ve heard of this place for a while, and finally checked it out. In around 1930, a movie was to be made about “Old Tucson,” that is, what Tucson looked like in 1910. Well, the city had grown too much and was too “Modern,” so they found a spot in the desert a ways west of town, and built a movie set there. And movies and TV shows and commercials have been filmed there ever since! I was going to make a list of some of the more famous movies created here… but Wikipedia mentions over 220, and about 30 TV shows!

Our tour guide told about plenty of scenes and where they were shot.

A lot of the buildings just get repainted or renamed, and appear in dozens of films.

This church has been in many movies… one movie (I can’t remember which) featured this church as a backdrop in 3 different cities. All in the same movie! Once a director said he didn’t like the angle he needed to shoot it, so they moved the whole building – ten feet! While we were there some “Cowboys” were rehearsing for something in front of the church.

They have some of the sets used as an amusement park, but that wasn’t open this early in the year. There is a pretty Merry-go-round, and they have shows in some of the buildings and shops open… later in the year.

I believe this is one of the few real buildings, meaning it was really used as a train station before being moved on site.

Here is a stagecoach, made to look like it’s armored. But really making it out of metal would be far too expensive, and way too heavy for those delicate wheels. So it’s plywood.

So that last unusual vehicle is my segue into this week’s Car of the Week…

As many of you know, I’m volunteering at the Tucson Auto Museum. This is a car I had never heard of till visiting this museum. And no wonder… It’s the only one ever built! It’s a 1948 Kurtis-Omohundro Comet.

Paul Omohundro had a drop-forge hammer company, and made parts of car bodies, and some fiberglass hoods, fenders and such for Frank Kurtis’ sports cars. The two men decided to make an aluminum bodied sports car, and came up with the 1947 Comet. They spent a year on the first car.

They followed that up with a second car, the 1948 Comet, which also took a year to create. The ’48 Comet had a bigger cockpit, a fancier grille, and was slightly longer. It was said to have a convertible top, but I can see no evidence of one at all. It also, rather oddly, has no windshield wipers. If you have no top, you’re not going to drive a car like this in the rain!

The ’48 Comet was built on a Mercury chassis, with a Cadillac V-8 and automatic transmission. This car was featured in the February 1949 issue of Road & Track magazine, and later in the British magazine, Autocar.

The picture below shows a plaque in the license area, topped with a medallion that says “V10.” I asked the owner about that… because the car is powered by a Cadillac V-8. He said he showed the car at Pebble Beach, and he was in row V, slot 10.

The Comet is sleek and smooth almost beyond belief. I sure wouldn’t want wipers cluttering up the lines!

I’ve been gazing at this awesome car for quite a while now, and just noticed… it has no trunk! It feels like a mile from the back of the cockpit to the back bumper… with no opening anywhere. The fuel filler is on the left fender, but there is no opening of that long rear end. I suppose that would have required horrible things like gaps around a trunk lid and handles to ruin the lines.