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Sunday, February 20, 2011 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM

Morning at the Pond, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 18, 2011
Morning at the Pond, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 18, 2011

Territorial display

One often sees Sandhill Cranes jumping and bobbing and fluffing their feathers and generally making a ruckus settling territorial disputes. They can be quite entertaining. The International Crane Foundation offers a nicely illustrated field guide to crane behavior {link} (pdf) that describes the meaning of these displays.

Night camp

Site 10 - Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park, San Antonio NM

Alex Can Spell

Not very long ago, Dr. Pepperberg began trying to teach Alex and another gray parrot, Griffin, to sound out phonemes, which are the sounds that letters and letter combinations represent. English has forty phonemes altogether. She and her colleagues wanted to see if the birds understood that words are made out of letters that could be recombined to make other words, so they started training the birds with magnetic refrigerator letters.

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