I love Vermont.  It’s one of my favorite places in New England.  It’s even one of my favorite places in the country.  But there are other places with colors and patterns we pretty much never see here and from time to time it’s worth a visit.  

New Mexico is one such place, and specifically Bosque Del Apache.

The trip to New Mexico didn’t go exactly as planned.  Our original plan involved going north before going down to Bosque, but a fairly major snowstorm came in.  Bandolier National Monument may happen eventually, but it wasn’t going to be on this trip.   I even tried to go east of Albuquerque to the foothills going to look for Pinyon Jays and Juniper Titmouse, but snow ruled that out, too.  So, on Friday, a day before planning to go to Bosque, I decided to go ahead and swing down there for the day to check it out and get the lay of the land for the weekend.  If I’d known how bad the Thursday weather was going to be, I probably would have gone down to Bosque then, too, but by the time I’d figured it out, it was a little late.

But either way, the extra trip was worth it.  Over the course of those three days I had some amazingly close looks at familiar birds as well as some fairly unusual birds (at least where I come from) as well as a few life birds and some extraordinary views of things that didn’t involve birds at all (and one that involved one bird in a very unfortunate fashion.

I’ll start with the familiar ones:

American Coots

Pied-Billed Grebe

Northern Shovelers

 

Merlin

Northern Pintail

And perhaps some of the best photos of a Northern Harrier I’ve ever had:

Other birds I’ve seen before, but not in New England:

Last time we visited New Mexico, I got a Black Phoebe at percha dam, but not close.  This one pretty much posed for me.

Similarly, Gambel’s Quail did their best to thwart me last time, but this time one just popped up on top of a feeder at the Bosque visitor’s center:

        Chihuahuan Raven’s are cool to look at — similar to our Northern Ravens, but a little smaller and more willing to interact with crows– they are not as skittish of humans as the common ravens we get in New England:

The only previous photo I’ve had of a White-Winged Dove was pretty awful, so it was awesome to get this outside our Bread and Breakfast in San Antonio:

       

This Eurasian Collared Dove was the last bird photo I took before we headed out Sunday morning:

       

               It was taken at sunrise, right around the same time I took this photo:

   

       At Percha Dam last time around, we got Ladder Backed Woodpecker, but not this nicely and not at the refuge itself:

        Ladder-Backed Woodpecker

          Last time, I got one photo of a Pyrrhuloxia, but it was obscured by trees and only a partial.  This time, I got a bit luckier:

I never get decent photos of Eastern Meadowlarks.  I have a couple spectacularly bad ones.  Western Meadowlarks, however?  Both visits to Bosuqe presented amazing opportunities to photograph them, but I never quite expected something this nice:

One of the things I regretted last time we went to New Mexico is that I didn’t attempt any night photography.  This time I took some evening time to get outside for a bit.  The first shot is of a church in San Antonion I photographed last time, but in the morning.  I particularly like this shot– it’s almost exactly what I was looking to do but actually a little better.  The second shot is not at all what I expected, but I still love it.  It’s 38 minutes of eposure time.  During that time, there were cranes and snow geese nearby and I could hear them constantly.  At one point, a train went by, and the birds all flew.  I could see snow geese flying against the clouds illumated by the full moon, though I knew there was no possible way to capture that in photograph.  

        Speaking of cranes and snow geese:

Of course, with such numbers, there are always predators:

And some of the scenery was incredible.  This is a photostich photo– several photos merged into a single one to get the whole scene together in once from the canyon trail:

And some of the non-bird wildlife was pretty cool as well:





Mule Deer

Random Fish (I have no idea how I got this photo)

           And though red-tails are common, I’ve never seen a Harlan’s before:

And I think this is also a red-tailed, but the marking on the back of its head is very odd to me:

  So now– a question to western birders.  These birds?   Verdins?  Bushtits?

(and if they’re verdins, did I mislabel this image from my last visit?)

Aside from those guys, I managed to get a few other life birds during the trip: Boat Tailed Grackles (hanging out on a wire outside a power station)

Western Grebes (very distant view– I’m amazed these photos worked at all)

Yellow-Headed Blackbirds, mixed in with a larger flock of red-winged.  I didn’t know I’d photogaphed these at the time.  I was just getting the flock as a whole, but looking at the photos later, I spotted the yellow-headed in the mix:

And finally, while we were eating lunch, this Curve-Billed Thrasher just sort of popped its head up so I stalked it for a bit:

        All in all, it was a wonderful trip.  Not sure when we’ll be able to get out West again, but I think that if we go to New Mexico again, we’ll put more effort into heading north towards Taos and Bandolier National Monument.  I’ve loved our time at Bosque, and it is an amazing place, but there are birds we’ll never get at its relatively low elevations.  The sweetie was there a few days before me (for work) and she found black-billed magpies, a ferrunginous hawk and golden eagles in the north end, and I’d love to investigate that area some.

As I write this, I’m sitting in the in-laws place in upstate New York, looking out at their feeders.  There are goldfinches, black-capped chickadees, titmouses, downy and hairy woodpeckers, tree sparrows, red-breasted nuthatches, juncos, blue jays and a red-bellied woodpecker coming back and forth to the feeders.  New Mexico was awesome, but I love the Northeast.  

As usual, these are not the only photos I got.  I didn’t see a way to fit 160 photos into Dawn Chorus (I probably have overdone it as is).  The whole set of New Mexico photos (including a bit more landscape work and a lot more photos of the birds, including Spotted Towhee, Say’s Phoebe, Ring-Necked Duck, Canvasback — another life bird for me–, Kestrels, Eagles, White-Crowned Sparrow, Northern Flicker,) is on my web site via the New Mexico keyword.

An addendum: among the Christmas gifts I do not desreve, but somehow received nontheless, is a new lens: it’s a relatively low end 800mm mirror lens from Opteka.  I’ll be playing with it to get more distant birds and shots of the moon and other astronomical phenomenon.  I’m hoping that combining it with a 1.4x converter (making for a 1120mm equivalent) will produce some very nice results.  This may or may not improve the sort of photographs I get, but it will be fun to experiment 🙂

Also, as I’ve mentioned before, I sell prints and I design web pages.  If anyone’s interested in either, please feel free to touch base with me.  I also have a 2011 Calendar of Birding for sale:

I obviously didn’t include everything, so here’s a quick text link to thumbnails of pretty much every photo I took this trip:

• Adobe Church at night (2 images)
• American Coots (6 images)
• American Kestrels (2 images)
• Black phoebe (2 images)
• Blackbirds in flight (3 images)
• Boat-tailed grackles (3 images)
• Bosque Del Apache at Night (2 images)
• Bosque Del Apache landscape (17 images)
• Chihuahuan Raven (1 image)
• Coyote (4 images)
• Curve-billed thrasher (2 images)
• Downy woodpecker (1 image)
• Eagles (2 images)
• Eurasian Collared Dove (1 image)
• Fish, jumping (1 image)
• Gadwall (2 images)
• Gambels Quail (2 images)
• Garden (2 images)
• Hodded merganser (1 image)
• House finch (1 image)
• Ladder-backed woodpecker (1 image)
• Merlin (prairie subspecies) (1 image)
• Mule Deer (3 images)
• Mystery butterfly (1 image)
• Mystery Dove (1 image)
• Northern Flicker (1 image)
• Northern Harrier (5 images)
• Northern pintail (4 images)
• Northern Pintail and Green Winged Teal (1 image)
• Northern shovelers (11 images)
• Peacock (3 images)
• Pied-Billed Grebe (6 images)
• Possibly Verdins (1 image)
• Pyrrhuloxia (2 images)
• Red-tailed hawk (13 images)
• Ring-necked duck (2 images)
• Ring-necked duck  and Lesser Scaup (1 image)
• Ring-necked ducks and canvasback (2 images)
• Ross goose (1 image)
• Ruby-crowned kinglet (1 image)
• San Antonio at Dawn (2 images)
• Sandhill cranes (29 images)
• Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese (17 images)
• Says Phoebe (4 images)
• Snow Geese (7 images)
• Spotted towhee (4 images)
• Sunset moon, almost full (1 image)
• View from canyon trail (1 image)
• Western Grebes (2 images)
• Western Meadowlark (1 image)
• White-breasted nuthatch (1 image)
• White-crowned sparrow (6 images)
• White-winged Dove (3 images)

I also put together this video slideshow covering a lot of the trip: