Bosque Del Apache Trip Report, Dec 2008; Part 2

Go here for part 1.

- part 2 -

On christmas day, we started from our hotel early in the morning before dawn broke and reached the refuge by 5:30 am. It was a cold morning with winds exceeding 20 mph. The winds were so overpowering it didn't matter what the measured temperature were.

Face frozen and fingers aching to the bone, me and my friend waited on the flight deck patiently after we setup our tripod and camera while thinking back in our minds how great california must be that morning compared to this. But soon that temporary nostalgia was broken when we saw the light break through the thick clouds.

What a moment!. The sunrise we saw was fantastic, infact it was the best sunrise we saw in our whole trip or for that matter best ever I've seen. I was glad that I carried a wide angle lens with me, otherwise shots such as this wouldn't have been possible.
You can see here hundreds of snow geese against a sky lit by sunrise. The colors in these images are not photoshopped. This is what we really saw. Shot with my 100-400 mm lens.
Minutes later, the snow geese took off in an instant, much before than I had anticipated. Right before they took off, I was just fiddling with some settings on my camera and the blast off happened. Felt so unlucky that moment but I'm still happy with what I got.
Once the geese took off, the only remaining birds to be found are few sandhill cranes that usually hang around a bit longer than the geese. They make up for great silhouette shots.
During this time, I would experiment with different exposure compensation settings and shutter speed settings to capture the scenery as best as I could. I wish I could have gotten a lower angle but standing on the flight deck I can't go much lower.
Pretty soon, the sun rises above the horizon and the flight deck gets very quiet with no activity. Its time to move to another location.

There are three main loops that you can cover by car while you're inside the refuge. One is the tour loop where the flight deck is. The other two loops are the marsh loop and the farm loop. Each loop has several points of interest where there is a special lookout area. Often times we would pullover our car by the side of the loop to watch the wildlife as we spot them. Depending on the day and time, the level of activity may vary in each spot. It isn't easy to say there is one particular popular spot, all of them were equally interesting.

On several days, we often found a roadrunner on the tour loop which worked along the sideways of the road. This guy/gal was very easily approachable and gave us some good shots. We also spotted Ruby-crowned Kinglets, American Kestrels, several Red-tails, Northern Harriers and Bald Eagles. Other birds found were Say's Phoebe, several Northern Pintails, Northern Shovelers, Pheasant (not sure what kind), one Ferruginous Hawk, White-crowned Sparrows, Golden-crowned Sparrows and Song Sparrow. Of all three loops we took, tour loop always turned out to be more productive one, if you're counting the number of species.

By 11 a.m the activity goes down quite a bit, so we would return back to our hotel to rest, have our lunch and be back for the sunset.

- to be continued -