In early December my wife and I travelled to New Mexico for some birding, good Mexican food and margaritas!  We fly into Albuquerque then drive to Socorro which forms the base of our operations to access the Bosque del Apache NWR which is located about 16 miles further south.  During the winter thousands of Sandhill cranes, Snow geese and many other species of waterfowl use the refuge as a winter base.  The refuge grows corn and other grains which provide food for the birds through the winter.  (This is an interesting story too long to detail here, but you can obtain more information by asking me or referring to The Friends of the Bosque website.)

The big events occur twice a day, the “fly-out” where thousands of birds fly in the early morning from ponds on the refuge to the farm fields in surrounding areas, and the “fly-in” in the afternoon when the birds fly back to the relative safety of the ponds on the refuge for the night.  The events attract hundreds of photographers from at least North America, if not the world.

The following photos of Sandhill cranes were taken in the early morning with the sun shining on the departing birds… with probably about a hundred photographers lined up along a berm overlooking one of the ponds where the birds spend the night.

And here’s a photo of a couple of cranes returning to the refuge in the late afternoon…

This year we saw several Loggerhead shrikes at various places on the preserve.

Some years we see quite a few Say’s phoebes, but this was the only one we saw on this trip…