Posts in Category: New Mexico
The Backlit Goose Shot: Bosque del Apache NWR
This kind of backlit goose shot is highly prized by the hundreds of wildlife photographers who gather at Bosque del Apache NWR during any given November. You see them lined up along the tour loop, a dozen at at time, with their huge white Canon 500mm, 600mm, and even 800mm lenses on tripods looking like the massed guns of a battleship (there are always a few black Nikon’s mixed in the way a few Ross’ Geese mix with a flock of Snowys). The sound of mirror’s slapping in a dozen DSLR bodies as a flock of photographers all let off on the same in-coming goose is one of the enduring aural impressions of Bosque in November. If you are standing on the edge of the road, you can actually hear it over the geese. 🙂
The thing about the backlit goose shot is, of course, the way the sun shines through the wings.
It is a shot that requires the sun at just the right angle, and the goose coming in just about straight overhead. The primary skill involved is timing (after being in the right place at the right time), and today’s cameras with fast sensors and rapid capture ability…not to mention auto focus…make it a lot easier than it was a few years ago.
It can even be done with a Point & Shoot, as is evidenced by this shot with the Canon SX50HS. Sports Mode on the SX50HS is the best of any Point & Shoot I have yet owned. Focus is fast and accurate, and in Sports Mode seems tuned to pick up moving targets. Once you are locked on, the camera will shoot at 5 frames per second for 10 shots, and it focuses between frames. That is totally amazing performance for a Point & Shoot. The full fledged pro DSLRs do better of course, but the proof is in the results, and I have a strong feeling that a shot like this one would be prized no matter what camera it was captured with.
I have cropped this slightly from the full frame, and edited out another bird’s wing that protruded into the frame from the lower left, but I selected it from a sequence of shots of the same bird because it had the best wing position.
1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Flight of Cranes: Bosque del Apache
I have been working with my Bosque del Apache images extensively over the last week, putting together my Bosque del Apache: November Days ebook, but there are still images in there that surprise me. I came across this one yesterday while my wife and I were looking for an image for the wall, and it struck me immediately with its wild energy. It is not in the book, not because it did not make the cut, but because I missed it in going through the images all together! (The book is free, and can be downloaded at this link: Bosque del Apache: November Days.)
This is a pre-landing pass. Cranes do not land in such a mass. A few drop out at a time. These birds were still headed for a pond further along New Mexico Route 1, flying strongly and with intent.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 1200mm equivalent field of view f6.5 @ 1/640th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4 in the Afternoon Glow: Happy Sunday!
Late in the day, in that brief interval between afternoon and evening, the low sun turns the fields and fall cottonwoods at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge to gold. The mountains to the west, as the shadows lengthen, are molded and contoured, sculpted. The Sandhill Cranes are restless. They know it will soon be time to move to night quarters…to find shallow water to stand in while they sleep…and they are moving, in small groups, field by field, closer. The angle of the sun is such that the wings, those great wings, are often lit, as they land, as much from below as above. This is the Bosque at its most subtle, and, in many ways, most beautiful.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. Zoomed back from full to about 700mm to catch the group. f5.6 @ 1/640th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. The image looks even better a bit larger. Click it to open the lightbox, auto-sized for your monitor, on WideEyedInWonder.
And for the Sunday Thought: It is the between times that are often most beautiful to us as human beings…dawn and dusk…early sun and late. We pause. We ponder. We are just a bit more open to the wonder. Those are the times when unsuspected beauty is revealed in quite ordinary circumstances. 4 birds, 4 cranes, coming in for a landing. The world is thinner, with the light edge on to every solid thing, and the spirit shows through. 🙂
Close Formation: Snow Geese
Geese in flight, near the ground, can be pretty chaotic. The ordered “V” formation of their long distance flights breaks up on approach, or never forms if the flight is only from one field to the next. It takes time for Snow Geese to sort themselves out behind a leader into their classic V with one long and one short arm. Still, every once in a while, more often than you might thing, you find a single pair, like this one, in perfect draft formation.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 250. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
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?