A bobcat with its roadrunner prey inside the Vistoso Trails Nature Preserve in Oro Valley on June 25. Jake Smith, a neighbor of the preserve who is documenting species he sees there, took the photo and said watching the bobcat stalk the roadrunner was his favorite observation there so far.

 Jake Smith photos

By the time Oro Valley officially opened its new nature preserve on Friday, Jake Smith had already gotten to know more than 250 of the residents there.

Smith lives about a block from Vistoso Trails Nature Preserve, and he rides his bicycle there almost every day. Since February, he has identified more than 1,000 plants and animals from 255 different species within the preserve, recording each of them using the biodiversity social networking website iNaturalist.org.

Now he has turned his observations — and some of the photographs he took to go with them — into a digital field guide for visitors to the new preserve, which snakes through the Rancho Vistoso community north of Tangerine Road.

“The goal is to reflect what’s most common and most notable out there,” Smith said.

Residents gathered for a ribbon cutting ceremony for the Vistoso Trails Nature Preserve in Oro Valley on Friday. The former golf course, which is 202 acres, is now a nature preserve and can never be developed.

The 202-acre desert green space surrounded by homes used to be an 18-hole golf course that operated for more than 20 years before going out of business in 2018.

When the owners of the property floated plans to cover it with homes or an assisted-living facility, a group of neighborhood activists teamed up with national nonprofit The Conservation Fund to buy the land and save it from development.

The neighborhood group known as Preserve Vistoso raised $1.8 million in just five weeks late last year to acquire the abandoned Golf Club at Vistoso.

The land was donated to the town of Oro Valley earlier this month, but not before a conservation easement was placed on the property to ensure it is only ever used as a park.

Miles of trails

On Friday morning, more than 100 people gathered under shade tents on what used to be the ninth hole, as town officials, members of Preserve Vistoso and others involved in the conservation effort held a celebratory ribbon cutting for the preserve.

Later this year, with input from Oro Valley residents, the town will begin drafting a master plan to guide improvements to its newest outdoor amenity, which already features 6 miles of paved pathways perfect for walking, bicycling and bird watching.

A red-spotted toad sits at the Vistoso Trails Nature Preserve.

Smith and his wife moved into Rancho Vistoso with their son, Kip, 8, and daughter, Bell, 5, less than two years ago. They started using the trails through the abandoned golf course in January.

“It’s been a real resource for our family to be outdoors with our kids out there,” he said.

Smith didn’t set out to make a field guide for the preserve. He was just trying to log as many iNaturalist entries as he could from the area.

The website, now operated jointly by the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, is designed to make it easy for citizen scientists to observe, map and share information on biodiversity around the world. It is free and open to anyone who wants to report a plant or animal sighting.

Smith said he started posting his nature encounters on the site about a year ago. As of now, he is responsible for about two-thirds of all the observations that appear on iNaturalist for the Vistoso Trails area, though he said there are also sightings on there that date back to when the golf course was still open.

Those older observations include “stuff that’s not there anymore” such as water fowl that used to hang out in the ponds on the golf course before they went dry, Smith said.

His quest to document stuff living in the preserve intensified about two months ago, when he set out to compile all the iNaturalist sightings for the area into a field guide for the new park.

“Hours turned into probably hundreds of hours spent out there making observations and taking pictures,” he said.

The Vistoso Trails Nature Preserve was home to a golf course that closed in 2018. The land was initially bought by a national nonprofit, The Conservation Fund, which partnered with a local group called Preserve Vistoso. The preserve now falls under the town of Oro Valley’s parks and recreation.

Wildlife aplenty

The resulting guide is 167 pages long, with sections devoted to mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, insects, plants and even fungi. There are roughly 180 photos, all but about a dozen of which he took himself.

Smith said his favorite observation came on June 25, when he got to watch a bobcat stalk and catch a roadrunner. “I got some good pictures of it, too,” he said.

The guide is now undergoing final edits and rewrites with the help of some experts who are more well-versed in desert flora and fauna than he is.

Once that’s done, Smith plans to hand the whole thing over to Preserve Vistoso so it can be made available for free on the group’s website, perhaps in as little as a few weeks.

 A ribbon cutting ceremony was held at the former 18-hole Oro Valley golf course Friday to celebrate the Vistoso Trails Nature Preserve, which will be used as a recreational area for the neighboring communities.

There are no immediate plans for a printed version of the guide, though he said Preserve Vistoso might decide to sell it that way someday as a fundraiser for the preserve.

Smith was still adding entries to the guide as recently as Tuesday night.

That’s when he went for a ride through Vistoso Trails after a monsoon storm and encountered what he described as “a biblical quantity of toads” hopping along the old golf cart paths in search of, um, playing partners.

He cataloged four different types of amorous amphibians during his bike ride that evening, including two species that were new to him.

Until this week, Smith hadn’t seen a Couch’s spadefoot or a Great Plains toad out at the preserve. Now he’s bumped into them both, and he has the pictures to prove it.

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Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean@tucson.com or 573-4283. On Twitter: @RefriedBrean