When you think of Arizona, you probably don’t think of islands. There aren’t a whole lot of large bodies of water throughout the state, and there’s certainly no ocean. But believe it or not there are quite a few islands riddled around the desert landscape, they’re just a different type of island.
Sky islands, as they’ve been called, are isolated mountain ranges found in both southeastern Arizona and northern Mexico. They rise thousands of feet above the surrounding desert floor, making for dramatically different ecosystems between the two regions.
The plant and animal life of these sky islands is incredibly unique, with some species found nowhere else in the world in addition to animals that move back and forth between the high ground and lower ground found in the mountains. More than 7,000 different species of plants and animals live in these regions, including over half of the birds in North America.
