Third Day at Bosque del Apache

High winds were forecast for our third day at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge Festival of the Cranes. We had signed up for the ‘Walk Out to Fly Out’ bus so we were up at 4 AM again and at the refuge shortly after 5. The bus left at 5:30. It took us to a parking area on the wildlife loop and then we walked back into a managed wetland on dikes…not normally open for hiking. Everything was quiet when we first got there and we realized that we’d be facing the sunrise rather than having it at our backs like it was at the Crane Ponds.

Something (a coyote?) startled the snow geese and many of them flew up prior to sunrise. I liked this picture of their silhouettes and the curly clouds from the winds – high aloft and at ground level.

Some cranes flew over a little later. Note how different they look from the snow geese and how the feathers at the tips of their wings splay.

Somehow the bird in the center of this picture reminds me of how primitive birds are depicted. Cranes have a long lineage…and they are big. They may have more in common with early birds like robins and chickadees.

What not to like about cranes backlit by flaming colors of sunrise!

We drove around the wildlife loop after our tour wondering how the brisk winds would impact the cranes. There were some feeding in the fields. The light was right to see a lot of feather definition in these birds (click on the image below and see a larger version).

We saw mallards in one of the canals. I chose the best picture I got of the male – with the glossy green head.

And then we went back to the hotel for naps since the wind was brutal and we knew we were going to have a later evening because we’d signed up for an Owling Expedition.

When we returned to the refuge in mid-afternoon, we discovered that the location of our lecture and dinner had been moved from the Expo Tent to a Refuge building. The tent had been closed because of the wind! It had calmed down a little by that time and we hoped it would stay calm for our evening outdoors. After an interesting lecture and a hearty dinner buffet, we headed out to 4 vans. We were looking for three types of owls: western screech, great horned, and barn. The one we saw most clearly was a Western Screech Owl. My husband got this picture! I was used to seeing the red morph of the Eastern Screech Owl (Belle, the owl at the Howard County Conservancy’s Belmont Nature Center) so I was surprised at the coloring being most grays and browns.

We saw the great horned owl in a tree top – just before it flew onward.

The Barn Owl we heard…but didn’t see.  The wind had picked up again and we declared ‘success’…headed back to the Visitors Center.

Second Morning at Bosque del Apache

We signed up for and early morning ‘Bosque del Apache Hot Spots and Elusive Birds’ tour that started at 5:30 AM on our second morning at the Festival of the Cranes. That meant me had to leave our hotel before 5…and it was cold. The tour participates and our guide climbed on the bus and were at Crane Ponds before 6 – well before dawn. The goal was to see the sandhill cranes and snow geese ‘fly out’ of their roosting area (in the water) to feeding areas in the fields in and around the refuge during the day. The action took place in less than an hour. The slide show below includes the time ordered images – once it got light enough for my camera to work reasonably well.

There was almost no wind so the reflections were good. I photographed a cottonwood tree repeatedly. The two pictures below are about 25 minutes apart…the pinks before dawn and the yellow light after.

There were other birds on the ponds too. The two pictures below are a female and male Northern Shoveler. The female is peeking out from behind pond vegetation…in the orangey reflections after sunrise. By the time I photographed the male about 30 minutes later, the magic of morning light was gone.

There were Canadian Geese on the ponds too – a familiar bird to us and not as numerous as at Bosque as where we live in Maryland.

A last picture at the ponds before we headed back to the Visitor Center for breakfast: the mountains reflected in the Crane Pond. If you look toward the top of the image, you’ll see the moon peeking out from behind a cloud.

After warming up while we ate breakfast, it was back on the bus. The Great Blue Heron we saw in one of the irrigation canals is so consistently present that the refuge staff has informally named him: Hank. The herons are not as prevalent at Bosque del Apache as we’ve seen in places like Conowingo Dam in Maryland…but another familiar bird to us.

Another familiar bird was surprise for me: an Eastern Bluebird. Evidently there are both eastern and western bluebirds on the refuge but the Eastern ones are more common in November…and this one looks more like an Eastern Bluebird to me!

And I got a picture of the legs on the Yellowlegs in one of the ponds.

There was a red-tailed hawk in one of the snags. It is a little too far away to be a ‘good’ picture but the distinctive patter on the breast make it good enough for identification.

There was a coyote watching Sandhill Cranes feeding. The predator was keeping its distance from the big birds.

I couldn’t resist some more zoomed shots of cranes. The red color on their head is such a vivid mark.

Our guided tour took us down a refuge road that is not part of the wildlife loop; the road was called ‘turkey road’ and we did see turkeys! They were come out of a path onto the road. As soon as they noticed the group of people taking pictures – they ran in the opposite direction! The turkey further back in line ran the hardest when they got out on the road and realized their ‘friends’ were so far away.

Then we turned around and saw another group of turkeys behind the bus. We must have seen about 50 birds just from that one vantage point.

It was quite a morning. We had excellent barbeque sandwiches from a food truck for lunch then headed out to our afternoon adventure...that’s the topic for tomorrow post.

First Day at Bosque del Apache

We made a leisurely tour of the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge on our first day (November 13) – not trying to get there in time for the fly out which happens at sunrise. We’d arrived at our hotel after dark the day before and took in the scene of the Magdalena Mountains to the west – and the moon -  from our hotel parking lot as we got ready to go to the refuge for the first time.

After a quick stop at the refuge’s visitor center, we drove around the wildlife loop. There were flooded fields and one of the first birds I saw was a yellowlegs – a bird I’d also seen on the west coast.

Cattails were also prevalent.

There were lots of crows that moved around together as we took a short hike.

A train came through.

I was so focused on photographing the train that I was startled by two javelinas coming toward me! After they crossed the path, I managed to get a picture of them as they continued to move away.

We saw sandhill cranes feeding in the field. The sometimes raise their necks and heads straight up and make lots of noise…and they ‘dance’ too.

I was close enough to zoom in to get a picture of vegetation through the nostrils of a sandhill crane (nostrils are on the upper part of the bill)!

There were many Northern Pintail Ducks on the ponds

And American Coots

And Northern Shovelers (male and female)

And Buffleheads which are notoriously hard to photograph because they go under the water so frequently

And turkeys

And two morphs of snow geese (white and blue, they are distinguished from the Ross’s goose by the dark mark on their bill).

The cottonwoods were still full of yellow leaves since the weather had been mild until the later part of the week we were there.

It was a lot to see in one day!

Home Again

We returned home yesterday after a week in New Mexico at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge’s Festival of the Cranes. So many photographs….they’ll come out in blog posts over the next few weeks. We had early mornings at the refuge to see the cranes and snow geese take off from wetlands where they roost as the sun came up…and a few programs that were in the dark at the end of the day to see owls and for my husband to make a side trip to the Very Large Array Radio Telescope for stars and radio disk photography. We stayed in Socorro, NM and flew in and out of Albuquerque.

We drove from Socorro to Albuquerque on Sunday because our flight on Monday was early. I was reminded again of how much I like the ‘highway art’ of the area with the mountains, buttes and arroyos….the blue and terracotta of the overpasses…a Kachina themed sculpture… and a rabbit pebble mosaic on an embankment.

The airport is New Mexico specific too with sculpture and Black Mesa coffee.

The theme continues with the tile in the bathrooms…and I appreciated that they seemed to be cleaner than most airport bathrooms and that the stall doors opened outward (easier when you have roll aboard luggage in tow)!

We got home by mid-afternoon to a cold and breezy Baltimore. Today is grocery day….to buy all the fixings for our Thanksgiving feast!

Learning Log – March 2016

March was a huge month for classes...both online and traditional classroom/field work.

The 6 modules of Coursera’s Big History were a whirl wind discussion beginning with the Big Bang to the present and then initiating the importance of our understanding Big History as we contemplate our actions into the future. This is unlike any history course I’ve taken before in that it integrates a lot of disciplines rather than the traditional view of history. In Big History - wars and memorization of dates are way down on the scale of importance. Instead thinking about increases in complexity and energy flows are the drivers of change….and human history is in the context of the universe rather than insular to our species. I still have some references from the course to read/view but I was so fascinated by the material that I did all the lectures in March!

I finished 9 of the 11 modules of Coursera’s Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences Unit 2: Belief Systems. This is a continuation of Unit 1 which I finished in February. This part of the course is delving more into neuroscience and psychology. I’ve enjoyed it.

The Howard County Conservancy provided volunteer naturalist training for the spring field trips that will beginning in April for pre-school through middle school students. There was quite a range of topics: rocks, history of the places where we hike, insects, habitats, watersheds, literacy, seasons, and Bioblitz. In each of the 7 sessions, there was a classroom segment and then a hike to demonstrate the types of things we would do with the students. We looked at macroinvertebrates in the stream, learned to use iNaturalist, explored the hiking routes in detail, and sometimes pretended we were students. The first field trip is next Monday….so we’ll see how prepared we all are very soon!

Then there were all kinds of experiential learning going on – here are my top three for March:

Observing the effect of the combination of pine bark beetles, tree age, salt mist, and big storms at Chincoteague

Noting the large number of Tundra Swans at Eastern Neck National Wildlife Refuge and Snow Geese at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge

Seeing two organisms I knew about from books and pictures but had not seen in the wild: the hemlock woolly anelgid (see previous post here) and a wood duck (more images coming in an upcoming post).

Zooming – March 2016

In February – birds dominated the zooming post. This month there is more variety. The first two collages are from Brookside Gardens – and are all plants in the conservatory.

Outside the plants were mostly dried vegetation from last falls – but the collage below contains a feather too.

And then we get to some birds: snow geese and a yellow legs. I liked the shell within a shell shape.

Shelf fungus and pine codes --- pine needles as background for heads of a Great Blue Heron and an egret.

A splintered tree trunk – a physical reminder of how power storms can be. Tundra swans with sunrise colors in water and sky as background.

Close up of two birds revealed the red in their eye. The frog looks happy to be surveying the pool with lots of eggs already laid. The daffodil is just the beginning of the spring flowers.

Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge

The last refuge on our trek was Chincoteague. I’ve posted about our two prior trips (fall 2014kingfisher, egrets, cormorants, herons, gulls, lighthouse, and sunrise/sunset; spring 2013vultures, blue grosbeak, and egrets). We always see Great Blue Herons at Chincoteague. When I photograph them now I am looking for something a bit out of the ordinary. There was one that was all fluffed up in the cold – standing very still on one leg – framed by dry grasses and brush.

Another Great Blue Heron was perched on a branch over some water – preening.

I noticed a lot more dead and splintered trees this trip and found out that the pine bark beetle had been particularly hard on the pines the past few years and

Winter storm Jonas brought such high winds that is brought trees down on the refuge.

There were tundra swans that we saw in greater numbers at Eastern Neck

And snow geese (sleeping here) that we saw in greater numbers at Blackwater.

This ring-billed gull (adult non-breeding) was not pleased that we pulled up on the road shoulder near him.

We saw a few pintail ducks (and some buffleheads which, again, were difficult to photograph – and I am refraining from posting another blurry picture!).

The birds I had to look up on allaboutbirds were this marbled godwit (I think)

And a juvenile black-crowned night heron (my husband is the one that spotted this one in the brush over the water where we often see other herons).

Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge

Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge near Cambridge MD was the second refuge we visited on the Eastern Shore. The high point of the visit was probably snow geese. They were all over the ponds closest to the visitor center.

Some were very close indeed. Most of them just calmly kept an eye on me (I was using my 30x zoom to photograph them).

But one of the younger ones seemed hyper aware of my presence – maybe this goose was smarter than average.

Of course there were Canadian geese as well – ignoring everything but their own business.

In lesser numbers but just as impressive: Great Blue Herons. Note the spring plumage on the head.

The day was very cloudy. It was only 3:30 in the afternoon but already looked like dusk as we drove around the wildlife loop.

We stopped to photograph a pair of bald eagles perched on an old osprey nesting platform. They were too far away to get a really crisp picture. But I always like to see them. Blackwater was the first place I ever saw a bald eagle in the wild – back in the spring of 1990.

As we got ready to leave – a group of Canadian geese honked their departure too.