Saturday, November 24, 2012 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM
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Eared Grebe, Juvenile, Diving, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, November 22, 2012
Picture this
Getting a picture of these little grebes is a bit of a challenge. When feeding they spend maybe 10 seconds on the surface followed by 45 seconds submerged in this turbid water. They go down here ... and pop up over there just long enough to get the camera focused on them and down they go again only to pop up way ... over ... there. Rinse and repeat.
Nightcamp
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
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.