Photos by A.E. Araiza / arizona daily star

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Elissa Fazio's philosophy is simple: Don't let life interfere with living.

Yeah — it does sound like a greeting-card cliché, but for Fazio and husband Eric Rhicard, it's a principle that guides their life.

Sure, you need a job, and, sure, you must be successful enough to pay the bills and provide for your family.

At the same time, however, there's land to explore, songs to sing, and natural beauty to celebrate.

And that is the couple's life.

They own Pogonip, a company that makes and sells unique mailbox flags, and Rhicard is a licensed contractor specializing in small-home remodeling work.

His passion for the outdoors — including bow-and-arrow hunting ("We never have to buy meat," Fazio says) and rock-climbing — also contributes to the couple's income. He's the author of "Squeezing the Lemmon," a rock-climbers' guide to Mount Lemmon.

Fazio shares her husband's love of the outdoors, but the passions that take most of her time are music — she sings with the Sweet Adelines and is lead singer in an award-winning quartet — and banding hummingbirds.

Fazio, the daughter of second-generation Italian immigrants, grew up in New York City and Long Island. She went to college in Maine and, after graduation, moved to Providence, R.I. Definitely a young woman destined for life in the Northeast. But a chance trip to Tucson changed that.

"I saw a saguaro and said, 'This is where I belong,' " she says now.

So she went back to Rhode Island, packed up some things, sold others and talked a friend into driving with her back to Tucson.

In her 32 years in Tucson, Fazio has volunteered at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and worked as a tour guide at Sabino Canyon. That led to summers in Wyoming, where she was a park ranger at Devils Tower National Monument, telling stories around the campfire for visitors.

It was during those summers that she discovered hummingbirds, and her interest in the elusive, dainty little birds has grown ever since.

"Did you know," she asks, "that we (in Southern Arizona) have the most species of hummingbirds in the continental United States? Fourteen different species. East of the Mississippi, they only have one."

Through Fazio's Sweet Adelines affiliation (Tucson Desert Harmony), she met another hummingbird enthusiast, a woman who volunteered as a "bander," a person who puts tiny bands on the birds' legs so that the birds can be tracked and data can be gathered about them.

Fazio began working with the Hummingbird Monitoring Network a little over three years ago, learning how to feed, trap and release the birds. Then she learned to be a data recorder, writing down information about species, color, body fat, gender, wing length, age, etc. Finally, she decided to see if she had the skill to be a bander.

As Fazio talks about the efforts that go into banding — from the hours spent out in the open to the hours spent making the minute bands that must be fitted around the birds' legs — her enthusiasm shows.

She believes strongly in the effort to learn more about the tiny birds and to protect them and their habitat, but banding is not an easy task.

Last week in Garden Canyon on Fort Huachuca, Fazio banded 64 birds. The birds may be held captive only 30 minutes, so it's up to each bander to determine how many birds he/she can handle in that time. Once the birds are caught — lured with food into a netted cylindrical trap — they're put into individual mesh bags, which hang on a rack.

"We don't want to stress them, so they can't be held beyond 30 minutes. We feed them before releasing them to diminish the stress."

It should come as no surprise to know that Fazio and Rhicard share their home with critters — three cats, a desert tortoise and a kingsnake named Switchback. And, of course, there are birds: finch, woodpeckers and hummingbirds that hang out just beyond their living room window.

This, then, is the life they protect from the everyday stresses of living.

Possessions have never been important to them, Fazio said. "Not if it interferes with our life."