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
It was the Crickets
Now then: it isn't so much that one way of dying beats another, though that certainly is the case, but rather that when you KNOW the jig could be up any second or any decade -- it's the awareness that's important -- that just might make a difference. I'm like everybody else, I have these moments and then forget, lapsing back into "immortality." But there was a thing that happened in my back yard maybe 18 months before we split from Maryland that hit me as hard as seeing their president drop dead on stage must have hit those graduating seniors.
It was the crickets. I'd gone outside one warm fall evening to shut the garage door and suddenly realized I couldn't hear the crickets! No wait, I could, but only if I turned my head a certain way. Oh God, oh no: I had almost no high-frequency hearing in my right ear, or was it my left? That doesn't matter. The point is, a part of me had shut down permanently. No, it hadn't happened suddenly, but I had finally noticed, and that was hard to take. I'd never again hear crickets like I once had. Never! I walked back to the house in tears. All right, I'm sensitive. But I understood at once what all this meant.