Thursday, April 15, 2010 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM
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Say's Phoebe, San Antonio NM, April 15, 2010
I bagged a new bird!
New to me anyway. It was a beautiful spring morning for this mornings camera walk up the road toward San Antonio and the birds were out getting their breakfast. There were House Finches and American Goldfinches eating fresh elm seeds, Killdeer chasing worms across the cow pasture, and Western Kingbirds and this new-to-me Say's Phoebe hunting insects from their fence-wire perches. I got some great pictures too.
Yeah, I know
I got behind again in my posts here. But now I'm caught up from where I left off on Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM.
Night camp
Site 16 - 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.