I had heard about Bosque del Apache from early 2005 when I started reading bulletins by bird photographer Art Morris. I had never gone on a trip just to take photographs, but I knew this is the place I would like to go.
Finally, I retir
ed in June 2007, and Susan gave this trip to me as a retirement gift. I planned for the trip for almost five months. I finally went from December 12th through December 16th.
Bosque is Spanish for woods. Bosque del Apache is located in central New Mexico, at the south part of a desert region. Floodplains provide enough water for an oasis, which allows longer grasses and trees to grow. Thousands of birds, primarily sandhill cranes and snow geese, along with water fowl, spend the winter here. Various raptors, passerines, and predators such as hawks, eagles, and coyotes, along with deer are present, but they tend to stay away from the road and are not as easy to photograph.
The National Wildlife department bird count for the week I was there included over 33,000 snow geese and more than 7700 sandhill cranes. These are the birds that attract photographers and bird lovers to this site in winter.
The highlights of each day occur in the hours around sunrise and sunset. The geese and cranes roost in the hallow ponds after spending the day in the fields. Each morning the birds fly from the ponds. The cranes do so in small numbers, but the geese often take off in large groups of perhaps a thousand or more. One moment, the geese are all in the water. Suddenly, they all take off and within a minute are gone for the day, off to the fields. In the late afternoon they return to the ponds. The site of the large cranes flapping their wide wings reminded me of the flying monkey scene in The Wizard of Oz.
In the remaining hours of each day, I drove the tour loop in the refuge, looking for other birds. One highlight for me was capturing an American roadrunner, the must-have bird of the trip. I was able to capture more birds, but some, such as the pheasant, eluded me. I saw several fly across the road, ten feet in front of me and only 4 feet off the ground. However, the only one I saw on the ground ran into brush before I was anywhere near close enough to photograph.
I usually went back to Socorro, New Mexico, during the middle of each day to download images to my laptop. On Saturday, I shot with David Cramer, whom I met on NikonCafe.