Fear and Love at Bosque del Apache

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. How do I fear thee? Now that I can answer pretty quickly: I fear rattlesnakes. However, not as much as I fear mountain lions. Both were present amid all that I love at Bosque del Apache, in New Mexico, a few weeks ago. Just enough fear to keep my feet firmly planted on the ground, so to speak, and my heart thumping as Mary Jean and I rounded the corner of a trail and came within just a few feet of a sizzling rattlesnake that looked as if it were digesting something large. "A human being," Scott quipped later in the car when we told him about our adventures with the snake sighting. At the visitor's center, the overly enthusiastic staff were all a twitter (no pun intended) about the sighting of a mountain lion and subsequently had closed off a trail we had wanted to hike. I thought this was overkill. I mean, we could have gone in and informed them of the rattlesnake and insisted they close that trail too! But, seriously, even though a mountain lion's daily appearances are usually early, early morning or early evening, they are so stealthy and unpredictable, I'm not surprised they closed the trail. But on to birds. It was so good to be back there. What a gorgeous, gorgeous national refuge for the sandhill crane migration and snow geese and all the other array of birds that make this place their resting stop. We woke every morning and hustled out of our hotel in order to watch the sunrise and take photos of the sandhill cranes and snow geese as they lifted off from the marsh waters. My camera in no way could capture the beauty and spectacle of thousands of birds in the air. The numbers were staggering. When you first pull up to the park's entrance there is a sign listing the numbers of each type of bird present. The sandhill cranes were about 1,600, the snow geese were something like 20,000 (I kid you not!) and then there were an assortment of other numbers in the thousands of various ducks, geese, quail, roadrunners, etc. We wondered how the park arrived at those numbers. Later, we saw helicopters circling the fields where the snow geese had settled, covering the ground so completely as to look like snow from a distance. We figured the helicopters must be manned by biologists who had some kind of tracking system whereby they could count the number of birds.

The sunrises were poetic and breathtaking. I tried, with my little digital "toy" camera to capture its essence, but I believe you really need a very expensive camera with a very large lens to completely render an image true to the experience. But, sometimes, like Mary Jean pointed out, when you are busy taking photos, you really miss the quiet, almost imperceptible movement of the sun as it makes its slow wave of pink and orange, yellow and red sweep across the tall grasses, the willows, the marsh waters, the cottonwoods still heavy with leaves that are not quite turned to gold yet. Sometimes, it's nice to just sit and watch and listen and be in that moment, as witness, as participant in the wondrous.