Archive of entries posted by jfleck
The snow goose problem
There’s no denying the spectacle of thousands of snow geese. The Jan. 17 Bosque del Apache bird count put the number at the central New Mexico refuge at 55,000. Lissa and I watched entranced this afternoon as some subset of that, many thousands strong, flew and landed and flew again in the north farm fields …
Portal to the past?
Found this behind an old bookshelf. Not sure what it is.
“idle imaginings of the newspaper man”
The tension between scientists and journalists goes back a long time: The vaporings and idle imaginings of the newspaper man, I am compelled to believe, are more acceptable both to landlords and tourists, than any presentation of actual facts. That’s University of California Professor C.B. Bradley, writing in Overland Monthly & Out West Magazine in …
Water policy is no one thing
At a water conference here in Albuquerque last week, one of my water mentors Bill Hume (former editorial page editor at the newspaper, later water advisor to New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson) made this observation (this is from Bill’s written text, which he kindly shared after the talk and gave permission to me to use): …
A desert river in winter
Here’s the entire Rio Grande right now, which easily fits through the slot on the east edge of the Angostura diversion dam north of Albuquerque. No water is being diverted. That’s the whole river you see. This is not unusual. The flow measures about 600 cubic feet per second at the San Felipe gauge a …
Shortage on the Colorado River
I was reminded at a talk last night that farmers in the Elephant Butte Irrigation District in southern New Mexico got less than 10 percent of a full irrigation allotment last year. I say that by way of a preface to noting Juliet McKenna’s observation that there’s a 50-50 chance of a formal shortage declaration in …
Rivers and plumbing
Filing some pictures this evening, I came across this, taken in the bed of the Rio Grande beneath the Hatch bridge in southern New Mexico on April 29, 2013: This is the sort of thing Jack Schmidt of the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center was talking about at a conference in Boulder last August when he …
Water vs. rivers
Talking about water, and talking about water as a commodity, is not the same as talking about a river. Jack Schmidt, Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, speaking at the Clyde Martz Summer Water Conference, August 2013, University of Colorado
The Sandias
“To say Albuquerque is located in a valley,” Paul Bauer and his colleagues wrote in Albuquerque: A Guide to Its Geology and Culture, “is geologically imprecise.” From Colorado to Texas, the river we today call the “Rio Grande” follows the path of what the geologists call “the Rio Grande rift”. As earth’s crust pulled apart, …