Friday, December 31, 2010 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
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Snow Goose, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 4, 2010
Only twenty thousand pictures to sort
Ha! I was so busy playing with the new 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 I bought from Amazon last January I didn't take the time to organize the thousands of pictures I was taking. Big mistake.
I was staying at the Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park and spent at lot of time at the nearby Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge experimenting and practicing panning on birds in flight in High Speed Continuous mode to see if I could get some decent shots of birds in flight. I was doing this hand held and trying to teach my body to swing smoothly enough to get pictures that were reasonably sharp. That takes some practice and at 8 shots a second adds up to a lot of pictures.
At the time I didn't do much more than give them a quick look to see what I was getting - often nothing worth keeping - before moving on to the next shoot. I didn't even take the time to delete the obvious clunkers.
So here I sit, throwing away tons of junk and stumbling on a few keepers like this one.
Night camp
Site 8 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
- This is a spacious 65 site campground with most sites offering full hookups.
- Locate LoW-HI RV Ranch on my Night Camps map
- Verizon cell phone - strong signal
- Verizon Broadband - strong signal but often slow
- Check the weather in Deming NM
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.