Sunday, February 6, 2011 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM
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Impaled, Sandhill Crane, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 6, 2011
What can I say?
Maybe the can will come off. Maybe not. Knowing now how cranes drink I can see this can becoming quickly lethal. It's one thing to be short on food - quite another to be short on water. In any case, help will be on the scene tomorrow morning to assess the situation.
There is only a narrow window of opportunity to help this poor crane. The crane must be weak enough to be netted (a healthy crane is not to be messed with - that beak can impale far more than a can. And that is backed up with two serious sets of claws) but strong enough to recover once freed.
Cross your fingers.
Pictures available
Here are larger versions of this picture and two others to download and distribute in any way you see fit under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License:
- Sandhill Crane with Can 235, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 6, 2011 2400 x 1800 px - 3.2MB
- Sandhill Crane with Can 265, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 6, 2011 2400 x 1800 px - 2.8MB
- Sandhill Crane with Can 274, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 6, 2011 2400 x 1800 px - 2.4MB
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
Listening
As the poet Gary Snyder said so well, "Beyond all this studying and managing and calculating, there's another level to nature. You can go about learning the names of things and doing inventories of trees, bushes, and flowers. But nature often just flits by and is not easily seen in a hard, clear light. Our actual experience of many birds and wildlife is chancy and quick. Wildlife is known as a call, a cough in the dark, a shadow in the shrubs. You can watch a cougar on a wildlife video for hours, but the real cougar shows herself only once or twice in a lifetime. One must be tuned to hints and nuances." After more than thirty years of living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and spending a great deal of that time out-of-doors, Snyder has seen the mountain lion on just a few occasions. One of these sightings was most unusual. Gary had been visiting a neighbor and was walking down from the nearby ridge to his home when he observed a cougar sitting near one of the windows of the house. The animal appeared to be listening intently as one of Snyder's stepdaughters practiced the piano.