Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Bosque del Apache - Feb 8-10
Greetings from Bosque del Apache NWR -- "Woods of the Apache". This has been a beautiful, too short stay. We have viewed wildlife, mainly birds, for hours at a time and are not tired of it.There are 26,000 Snow Geese and 17,000 Sandhill Cranes which have both wintered here. The quantities are truly amazing. When the Snow Geese are flying around in groups, it looks like those glass balls with fake snow in them swirling around. And the sound of them all calling is wonderful. The Sandhill Cranes fly in much smaller groups, but they just keep coming -- and their sound, too, is amazing. They cry out while flying and when on the ground feeding make sort of a chuckling noise. We can hear them from our campground. We can also hear lots of coyotes.
The Bosque is an artificial re-creation of the way the Rio Grande used to be before man engineered it to his will. So in this one part they produce annual flooding and revegetation so that the migrating birds have a refuge in the dry desert. The birds that winter here usually go on to the refuge in Monte Vista, CO, in March.
Each morning, right after sunrise, the cranes and geese "fly out" to the cornfields that have been planted and cut down for them to feed on. Then each evening, right around sundown, they "fly in" to sleep in the lagoons, standing in or floating on the water so they aren't such easy prey for the coyotes. We have seen "fly in" for each of the three days we were here, and this morning we left at 6:40 and got to see "fly out". Both are truly spectacular.
Also, there are two whooping cranes here, and we managed to see them twice. They must know how rare they are, because they are always very far away and quite difficult to see.
We saw numerous varieties of ducks and hawks. We also walked on two nature trails. One of them went into an overgrown river's edge area. The dense foliage was still winter brown, but it was so tall it arched over our heads, and it was like when you were a child in a tunnel of tall grasses. It was warm enough today that we were glad of the shade. Our campground has been perfect. Small, uncrowded, with no extraneous lights, and very quiet.
# posted by Doug and Willie @ 9:53 PM 
