The stones, plants, wildlife and archaeological remains attract natural history enthusiasts, students, and scientists to visit Cave Creek Canyon not just to study birds, but to study in fields with exotic-sounding names such as arachnology, entomology, herpetology, ornithology, mammalogy, botany, geology, anthropology and ecology.
Cave Creek Canyon offers so much, in fact, that the American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation has operated a research center for students, geologists, biologists and anthropologists in the North Fork of the canyon for half a century.
In addition to the bird species count, the numbers of mammals, reptiles, butterflies, ants and moths found in the Chiricahua Mountains is staggering. No where else in North America can one see such an array of plant and animal life. For example, 39 percent of the moth species in the continental U.S. can be found here, along with
- 21% of the reptile species https://www.cavecreekranch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Amphibians-and-Reptiles-FINAL-3.pdf
- 21% of the ant species
- 56% of the bat species
- 23% of the mammal species https://www.cavecreekranch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Mammal-list-CCR-FINAL.pdf
