Five years ago, Lissa and I stopped to talk to a ranger on the Petroglyph Point Trail at Mesa Verde. We’d been admiring the turkey vultures soaring above the canyon, and the ranger clued us in. If you like turkey vultures, she told us, go to the Spruce Tree House overlook at dusk tonight and …
This is our 21st spring in the house on Aliso Drive, the longest (by a significant margin) that I’ve lived in the same place. The utility pole in the back corner of our yard has been at the fringe of my perception that whole time. I never completely ignored it, but I never thought much …
One more from yesterday’s road trip to the Bosque del Apache, the National Wildlife Refuge 90 minutes’ drive south of Albuquerque. As I’ve written before, snow goose overpopulation is an ecological disaster. But when they take flight? Yowza.
My friend Judy Liddell posted a lovely picture of a Rio Grande bosque great blue heron on her Facebook page yesterday, to which I had this comment: I have a lot of birds for which I say “That’s my favorite bird!” But I think the great blue heron may really be my favorite, the first bird …
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 …
I’d come to take the wood ducks living on the Rio Grande Nature Center pond for granted, until I recently picked up a camera. Really lovely birds:
A snowy egret showed up this afternoon amid the turtles sunning themselves on the Rio Grande Nature Center’s pond. We took some pictures. [slideshow_deploy id=’8238′]
In the last five years, I’ve somewhat haphazardly accumulated what’s turning into a pretty good time series of data on the ecology of my backyard. Or, more specifically, the birds therein. Since 2008, when I caught the eBird bug, I’ve submitted 483 lists for the yard. Number 484, collected this evening, is a puzzle. Sometimes …
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