Saturday, January 23, 2010 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM
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Coming to Roost, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, January 22, 2010
Last night about sunset I walked the mile and a half from the RV park down to the first pond to watch the Sandhill Cranes come to roost and managed to get this fun shot in the fading light. These amazing birds don't seem to pay any attention to the camera crews. They make their landing, settle in, tuck their head under a wing and call it a day.
What an awesome experience it is to have these huge magnificent birds glide over not 20 feet above your head. Jaw dropping.
Ready or not.... , Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, January 23, 2010
Today I walked down early to eavesdrop on their morning ritual and takeoff and found the birders as entertaining as the birds. There were folks here with some really good gear. Huge, long lenses, gimbaled tracking tripods, fill flashes - very impressive equipment. And me with my little Panasonic DMC-FZ28 point & shoot trying my best to get any shot at all on this cloudy morning. If it weren't for a good noise reduction plugin and some creative license in Photoshop I wouldn't have recovered anything from the 90 images I shot.
Maybe it isn’t where I am, but what I do.
Night camp
Site 16 - Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park, San Antonio NM
- This is a basic, small Mom & Pop RV Park with full hookups.
- Verizon cell phone and Broadband service are available here with a strong signal.
- Locate Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park on my Night Camps map
- Click for Google street view
- Check the weather in San Antonio NM
Alex Can Think
Animal researchers are finally beginning to catch up to the little old ladies in tennis shoes who say Fifi the poodle can think. The fights are always between a big group of experts who think animals don't have a lot of feelings or aren't very smart, and a much smaller group of researchers who think there's a lot more going on inside an animal's head than we know. The really nasty fights always seem to go one way: it's always the animal "debunkers" who are on the attack. At least, I don't remember a single big academic fight where someone got fired or lost their funding for doing a study where the animal turned out to be dumber than people thought, and lots of studies like that have been done. Claiming that an animal can't do something isn't considered blasphemous.