Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM
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Coming to Roost, Sandhill Cranes, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, January 26, 2010
I like this silhouette enough to put a larger copy over at my Birds Series of photos.
The new camera I ordered yesterday, a Canon EOS 7D 18 MP CMOS Digital SLR Camera with 3-inch LCD and 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM Standard Zoom Lens, arrived from Amazon this afternoon and I managed to get a battery charged and learn enough about the camera to go off with Kate & Terry on a sunset photo shoot at the Bosque.
This is one of the few keepers I got out of about 150 shots. Trying to capture the wonderful birds here at the Bosque has made me so aware of the limitations of my old Panasonic DMC-FZ28 that I've been concentrating so much on learning to manually control my camera that I've been taking way to many poorly thought out "oh, look, a bird!" pictures. The DMC-FZ28 is a great little point & shoot camera but it just isn't up to shooting birds in low light. It will be nice to get enough control of this new beast that I can pay more attention to what I'm shooting than to the camera.
Facing South, Sandhill Cranes, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, January 26, 2010
Why do the cranes so often face southward at the evening roost?
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
Sweet, Rich Hickory Milk
Hickory was another favorite. Rambling through the Southeast in the 1770s, the naturalist William Bartram observed Creek families storing a hundred bushels of hickory nuts at a time. "They pound them to pieces, and then cast them into boiling water, which, after passing through fine strainers, preserves the most oily part of the liquid" to make a thick milk, "as sweet as fresh cream, an ingredient in most of their cookery, especially hominy and corncakes." Years ago a friend and I were served hickory milk in rural Georgia by an eccentric backwoods artist named St. EOM who claimed Creek descent. Despite the unsanitary presentation, the milk was ambrosial - fragrantly nutty, delightfully heavy on the tongue, unlike anything I had encountered before.