Autumnal equinox news briefs:

I was on the phone in the front room of our house yesterday evening, facing east, as the setting sun dropped beneath the clouds after a short burst of rain.

Rainbow. And the conversation, with the cousin of an old friend who died earlier this year, was rich.

The Rio Grande is flowing again through Albuquerque. Not a lot, but enough that a friend Sunday saw a bobcat in the woods down by the river with a wet face.

Sandhill Crane Finder has the first Middle Rio Grande Valley sightings.

Cranes are among the valley’s most charismatic megafauna, big birds with an unmistakable bugling that is one of my happiest sounds.

Their story is also cool because of the way their numbers surged back from the brink, as hunting and habitat loss caused populations to scrape the bottom of the evolutionary barrel in the 1930s. Partly it’s because we built stuff for them – wildlife refuges and such. But the cranes also pulled themselves back from the brink, adapting by hanging out on farms and eating corn.