Posts in Category: Bosque del Apache
Interactive Cranes: Bosque del Apache
While the 30,000 spectacular Snow Geese are, without doubt, in charge of the spectacle at the Festival of the Cranes at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge each year in November…with their mass panics that fill the air with swirling geese, and their dawn and dusk fly-outs and fly-ins against the sunrise and the sunset…it is still the Festival of Cranes.
The title dates back, in part, to the 1980s abortive attempt to reintroduce Whooping Cranes by fostering them on the flock of Sandhills that make Bosque their winter home. It was a grand experiment, at time when environmentalist needed some reason to hope. It garnered more than its fair share of attention, and inspired the first Festival of the Cranes. The experiment floundered when the Whooping Crane colts grew to breeding age, and it was evident they thought they were Sandhills. Still, there were some exciting years there as the Woopers grew up among the Bosque Sandhills. The last hybrid Wooper/Sandhill failed to return to the refuge many years ago.
And yet, it remains the Festival of the Cranes. Between 7 and 14,000 Sandhill Cranes do make an impression. They are magnificent birds. Larger than you expect, always, in every situation, surprisingly graceful, and endlessly interesting to watch as they feed and interact.
Even though fall is not breeding season, there are always some young males trying out their confrontational skills in November.
At Bosque, during the Festival of the Cranes, the Refuge management has learned to put on a good show for the tourists (FofC is the largest single contribution to the local economy each year, with some $2 million in revenue for local hotels and restaurants and the Refuge itself). They hold the fields by the viewing platforms on the back side of the tour loop dry until the Friday night of the Festival, so they are fresh flooded in the morning on Saturday. The flooded fields are full of Snow Geese, ducks, and Cranes, all feeding together right below the platforms. It is that kind of view that keeps people from all over the country coming back to Bosque in November every year.
They also maintain the viewing areas along New Mexico Route 1, just inside the Refuge, by the shallow ponds where the Cranes gather in thousands for the night. The Cranes come in early, while it is still light, and leave late in the morning, well after sunrise, so they are show of their own both before and after the spectacle of the geese.
And so it remains The Festival of the Cranes.
Pelican Sunset: Happy Sunday!
I went out to the Flight Deck at Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, just at sunset, to catch the geese and cranes coming in. Though it was already crowed (as it was every night during the Festival of the Cranes), I found a likely place to park beyond the platform where there is a break in the trees that shows an expanse of the pond.
I had only been there long enough to get out of the car when I looked up and saw a skein of white birds with black wing-tips coming from the north. “Ah,” I thought, “just in time.”
I think I was on my second burst of shots before it hit me. They were not geese. When compared to Snow Geese, American White Pelicans have a superficially similar pattern of white and black…white body…black in the wings, and when the flocks are flying high you have to look twice. The shape is all wrong of course, with that heavy bill pushed out in front. But still, add the fact that the Geese are expected at the flight deck at sunset, and the Pelicans are not…and you can understand my mis-identification.
It was a flock (not a skein after all…as a “skein” is literally “ducks or geese in flight”) of about 50-75 birds. After a long slow glide in, they settled on the pond and began to feed.
The woman next to me said, “What are those? Those aren’t geese!” No, just Pelicans borrowing some of the Snow Geese Sunset at the Flight Deck. Pelican Sunset.
Canon SX50HS. Flight shots in Sports Mode. The others in Program. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought: I wonder how often we see what expect to see when it comes to matters of the spirit? Are we conditioned by the place and the time and our expectations to see what we came to see? Do we miss the spiritual Pelicans in the sunset because we are looking for Snow Geese? I think of Abraham climbing the mountain with his son for sacrifice and his faith trailing behind him the dust…only to have God change the rules, pull the faith forward, and provide his own sacrifice. I think of the Pharisees confident expectations of a messiah to free them from Rome, and how again, God changed the rules and sent them a savior sacrifice to save them from themselves…to save us from ourselves. I wonder, sometimes, how conditioned I am to see God through that story, and if I am mis-identifying the spiritual when I see it…then I remember that God is able to change the rules…is bigger than the story we tell about him and delights to prove it. I might think Snow Goose, but God will be faithful to reveal himself in the Pelicans if that is what is there!
It is, after all, the Pelicans that make a Pelican Sunset.
The Power of Flight: Sandhill Crane
There are very few places as good as Bosque del Apache to photograph birds in flight. There is rarely a time of day anywhere in the refuge were there are not Snow Geese and Sandhill Cranes in the air. If you stop anywhere on the tour loupe where the birds are on the ground, and just stand and wait you will be treated to excellent, and often intimate, views of the birds coming in and going out.
This Sandhill Crane was on its way in. I picked it up a ways out and followed it in. The camera was in Sports Mode so it locked focus on the bird and followed. I got off a burst of 10 shots just as the Crane passed close overhead. At 1200mm of equivalent reach, I could reach right out and practically touch the bird…but it was not easy keeping any portion of the big bird in the frame. I found two keepers in the sequence.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Little Brown Bat: Bosque del Apache NWR
This is not the kind of wildlife Bosque del Apache was set aside to protect…not by a long shot…but it is wildlife that has certainly found a home there. This is, literally, a Little Brown Bat…which happens to be an apt description and its common name. Two of them had found a day-roost right over the main entrance door of the Visitor’s Center at the Refuge, under the overhanging roof, where, on Festival of the Cranes weekend, six or seven thousand people walked right under them. I must have done so myself several times before someone pointed them out.
The light was dim up under the roof and the bats were just far enough to require full zoom on the camera. This is a good testimony to the quality of the image stabilization…hand held at 1200mm equivalent and1/60th of a second. That should not be possible.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/60th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
The Eye of Hawk: Cooper’s Hawk
You would be surprised at how many times I have found a hawk in this tree at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in Socorro New Mexico, especially considering that I only visit once a year for a few days. Twice it has been a Kestrel, hunting grasshoppers in the semi-flooded field below. This time it was a Cooper’s Hawk hunting somewhat larger prey. You have to love that eye!
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 250. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
A Stack of Cranes: Happy Sunday!
This is an unusual shot. The normal flight pattern of Sandhill Cranes is in a line, with each bird drafting the one ahead, riding the wave of the first birds passage a little above or a little below. They don’t do the V thing geese do, with each bird a body length to the left or right of the leader. In all my flight shots of cranes from this year’s trip to Bosque del Apache, this is the only one where they are stacked up.
Of course, if you look carefully you will see that the highest bird in the stack is actually the second bird down (notice the position of the top bird’s feet under the wing of the second bird), which throws the apparent order into total confusion. I am no longer sure where the birds were in actual relationship to each other. It might actually be two intersecting groups of two, caught as one group passed the other.
Whatever is actually going on, it is a striking image…and there is no escaping the beauty of those huge wings.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. Just under 700mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 320. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought: I thought I was going to write about the absence of drafting behavior in our kind, until I remembered trucker convoys on the highway, and racing strategy (both bicycle and auto). You would have to consider the first as pretty much the same kind of cooperative drafting as geese and cranes employ, where the lead position rotates through the group to average out and distribute the advantage to the to each individual in the group…and the second as a competitive adaptation of the technique, where individual advantage is taken a the expense of the leader…but both are undoubtedly genuine examples of the behavior in human kind. We do draft one another, when there is enough advantage to be gained. No different than geese and cranes. From my observations of cranes, I even suspect that their drafting behavior is closer to the racers’ than it is to that of the geese and truckers.
I am not certain there is a clear spiritual lesson in there anywhere…or rather, I am pretty certain there is not.
What would spiritual drafting look like? Would it be something like the veneration of the saints…or the orders of religions orders? And which form of drafting would each of those be…cooperative or competitive…geese or crane?
Can we see the spiritual drafting principle in Jesus’ words. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Can we ride the wave of his passage as the Son flies to the Father and eternity? And do we look like a flock of geese or a line of cranes as we go?
Or maybe we look like a stack of cranes…a rare site indeed…ungainly and unlikely but with the beauty of our wings fully spread?
Young Buck: Bosque del Apache
Though Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge is managed for Snow Geese and Cranes, and to a lesser extent ducks, Mule Deer are common on the refuge. And they are tame. The young deer in particular have little fear of man, as long as man stays inside man’s car.
After shooting the dawn show one morning I decided to take a loop of the tour road before reporting to the Vendor’s tent, and there was a group of five young Mule Deer feeding beside the road, right at the four way stop within sight of the entrance booth. I joined the six or seven cars that were stopped along one or the other of the roads, and pulled up within 25 feet of the deer. They were busy grazing and paid no attention to the attention they were getting.
This shot was taken out the window of the car at about 1100mm equivalent field of view. As you see, the deer was so close I had to back off on the full zoom. The light was not so great as the sun was still low and buried in clouds. f6.5 @ 1/125 @ ISO 800. However the soft light is just about right for a portrait.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Sandhills in Silhouette: Bosque del Apache
One of the reasons you get up before dawn and go stand in the cold by some patch of water at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge…or at the other end of the day, stand in the same spot on feet that are way too tired, ignoring the urgent summons to supper your tummy is broadcasting…is the silhouettes of the Cranes against the early or late day sky. Cranes in flight at any time are a primal, almost a prehistoric site, and when reduced to their most basic and cast against a sky in various shades of sunrise or sunset, they speak directly to the layer of the mind that is under the civilized and the socialized. There is something attractively wild, primeval, in a Crane in silhouette. (Do click these first two images to see them as large as your monitor or screen will allow.)
This year, with my new Canon SX50HS, I was able to catch the best Bosque silhouettes of my photographic life so far…and even some semi-silhouettes that still hold detail in the cranes like the dawn shot above.
The first image is three shots of the same Crane as I panned with it in Sports Mode at 5 frames per second. After trying a triptych, which did not quite work, I used PhotoShop Element’s PhotoMerge tool in Panorama Mode to hand place and blend the images at the edges…and then evened the exposure even more using the dodge tool. The rest are just straight Sports Mode shots processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. The next to last one is cropped at the left to eliminate a half bird.
Bosque Dawn 2: Happy Sunday!
On Saturday at the Festival of the Cranes I woke myself up early, grabbed a shower and a banana from the breakfast buffet at the hotel, and made the 25 mile drive out to Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge to be there well before dawn. When I made the dawn run on Thursday, I had been just slightly too late, and I had driven all the way in to the Flight Deck on the main pond at Bosque. I almost missed the rising of the Snow Geese who, that morning and in that place, were up and in the air a good ten minutes before the sun touched the horizon. I did not want to be late again…so I left earlier and I did not go so far into the Refuge.
I stopped at the newer ponds along NM 1, just inside the refuge. Good thing. The parking lots were already about full, and close to two hundred people lined the service road that boarders the ponds…many of them with their 600mm Canon lenses on big tripods, and at least one other camera body with a shorter lens for flight shots, but just as many with no camera at all…or with only a phone camera. I know why the big lens guys (and girls) are there, but I am always impressed that normal citizens, with no photographic imperative (or only so much as a phone camera indicates) will leave warm beds, bundle up, and drive out to shiver in the dawn to catch the rise of the geese and cranes.
I am impressed by the numbers, but I totally understand the motivation. Anyone who has ever seen the geese and cranes rise at dawn once will be indelibly marked with the desire to see it again. And anyone who has heard a friend or relative describe the experience…who has witnessed the glow in the eyes and the grin that cover the inadequate, stumbling words of the description (which often amounts to no more that “you just gotta see it!”)…will have reason for enough curiosity (if they are alive at all to nature) to want to see it for themselves. Some of these people have driven down from Albuquerque this Saturday morning, getting up at 3 am to arrive and stand beside me on this patch of dirt road beside the shallow flooded field ponds. Some of the big lens crowd have traveled (as I have) across the breath or depth of the USA to be there.
Wherever we come from, we share the anticipation, the eager excitement, as we wait for dawn. Myself, I can not resist running out to the edge of the road on the other side of the parking lot to catch a few shots of the sky as the sun rises, though I know each time I do that I might have my back turned when the geese rise.
Or I turn to watch the color come into the southern sky over the mountains and the cars in the parking lot.
The geese are late this morning. Something in the air is holding them on the ponds well past the real dawn on the opposite horizon. We are getting cold now.
And then it happens, without any warning beyond a sudden increase in the volume of the constant chorus of geese honks and cackles, and prehistoric voices of the cranes…woosh…and the air of full of gyring bodies, beating wings, and ashudder with the cries of the geese and the alram of the cranes. Only the geese come up off the water. The cranes are made of sterner stuff, and besides, lack the ability to leap direct into the air…they need a runway to get airborne…but the geese are enough.
In the half-light of the dawn my camera strains to catch more than a blur in the mass of geese. They spiral up and out…not a normal panic this, where the geese will settle back in the same pond or field after something puts them up…but a mass movement of geese to their daytime feeding grounds. They circle overhead, the flock stretching out and branching off as they form into different curving lines and head for the horizons across the delicate tints of the dawn to find some farm field full of unharvested grain…or some newly flooded crop field on the refuge.
And by now the sun is up, though still hidden behind clouds, and the last tints are fading to gold in the east. Over there the air is still full of the birds that have come up off the Flight Deck Pond, to far away for more than silhouettes and a benediction on the last of dawn.
Happy Sunday!
Hey! Move along. No turkeys here!
Happy Thanksgiving!
This is just a somewhat random shot from Willow Deck on the tour loop on a dark morning at Bosque del Apache NWR…but I like the expression on that Snow Goose. I am not certain that he was talking about turkeys at all, in fact, but, by the look of it, he was certainly saying (or thinking) something pointed about what I was doing up on that deck. Considering the proximity of the holiday (and the well known solidarity of birdkind) it is not unreasonable to think he was warning me off, just in case I mistook those big birds behind him as the centerpiece of the holiday feast (or just in case I was so untraditional as to fancy goose as the main course, or even a side dish:)
No really. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. May your table be as laden as your heart, and may your heart be big enough to embrace all the blessings of the year. May you overflow with thanksgiving.
I know I am…overflowing that is…
And if you need independent testimony…well…I offer you this goose! He will vouch for me.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. –1/3 EV Exposure Compensation. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/400th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.