Sunday, January 23, 2011 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM
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Glug, Sandhill Crane, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, January 17, 2011
How cranes drink
When I was rummaging through my files looking for a picture to put up yesterday, I stumbled on a series of pictures of this crane moving in a strange way. Drinking I decided. I guess it wouldn't work to sip through that long beak, hence the dip-and-swoop to let water run downhill.
A quick Google search turned this up:
The muscles that would be needed for sucking are just not present in most birds, probably to minimize weight. Also, birds have a reflex that shuts the glottis (the passageway to the trachea) when they raise the head to swallow food or water. The only birds that do suck are pigeons and doves, one specific finch of northern Australia (the Australian Gouldian Finch), and some oceanic birds called fulmars. Source: Ornithologist Laura Erickson at Learner.org
[Update] I took my regular sundown walk down to the roost at the ponds to watch the watchers watch the cranes come in for the night. Posting this composite picture had me watching the cranes instead; watching for the dip-and-swoop. Yup, it's a regular thing. Photography is giving me a glimpse into the bird world normally too fleeting to grasp. What a hoot! Are the birds we see drinking from birdbaths doing the dip-and-swoop too? Bet they are.
Night camp
Site 10 - 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
Wind on the Gangplank
There was almost no soil in that part of the range - just twelve miles' breadth of rough pink rock. "As you go from Chicago west, soil diminishes in thickness and fertility, and when you get to the gangplank and up here on top of the Laramie Range there is virtually none," Love said. "It's had ten million years to develop, and there's none. Why? Wind - that's why. The wind blows away everything smaller than gravel."
Standing in that wind was like standing in river rapids. It was a wind embellished with gusts, but, over all, it was primordially steady: a consistent southwest wind, which had been blowing that way not just through human history but in every age since the creation of the mountains - a record written clearly in wind - scored rock. Trees were widely scattered up there and, where they existed, appeared to be rooted in the rock itself. Their crowns looked like umbrellas that had been turned inside out and were streaming off the trunks downwind. "Wind erosion has tremendous significance in this part of the Rocky Mountain region," Love said, "Even down in Laramie, the trees are tilted. Old-timers used to say that a Wyoming wind gauge was an anvil on a length of chain. When the land was surveyed, the surveyors couldn't keep their tripods steady. They had to work by night or near sunrise. People went insane because of the wind." His mother, in her 1905 journal, said that Old Hanley, passing by the Twin Creek school, would disrupt lessons by making some excuse to step inside and light his pipe. She also described a man who was evidently losing to the wind his struggle to build a cabin: