Bosque Del Apache

Cold, really cold, dark and quiet except for a very low, almost imperceptible, muted sibilance, like voices at a distance, heard but not understood. Waiting for the day to give enough light to see and then photograph the hundreds of birds also waiting out the dark on an iced over pond in the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. Winter here brings tens of thousands of ducks, geese and Sandhill Cranes to the wetlands and farmed fields along the Rio Grande River south of Socorro, New Mexico. Morning does arrive and the cold is forgotten as the thousands of lives in front of us unfold in a myriad of ways.

Bosque Sunrise

Dawn brings the masses

I don’t look at morning in quite the same way as I had since reading “Becoming Animal” by David Abram. Actually his perception and sense of the world should change the readers perception about a lot of things but the chapter titled The Discourse of The Birds describes morning (and evening) in a way I had never before imagined. As the light of day chases the dark of night endlessly around the planet, so too does bird song bring day to our ears. Late afternoon is followed by dusk accompanied by the continuous voices of birds. Abram says it best: “Such is the strange world we inhabit: an immense sphere around whose surface two long lines of birdsong are steadily sweeping – always opposite one another, two breaking waves of vocal exuberance rolling ceaselessly around the planet.”

Tiptoeing through the geese

Awake

Pintails

The refuge brings not only huge numbers of birds but also large numbers of wildlife photographers and birders to witness a very rare sight in this country today, masses of wildlife on a scale that takes the breath away. To see and hear a mass ascension of Snow Geese numbering in the thousands is never to be forgotten. Brilliant white birds with black tipped wings roaring through the sky only a few dozen feet overhead, those muted voices now raised to a deafening wall of cries, probably hurled skyward by the sudden appearance of hunting coyotes, leaving clusters of Sandhill Cranes standing undisturbed.

Hawks and Ravens

Raven

Before the scrim of ice is melted off the ponds by the sun and morning breezes, Bald Eagles look for easy targets among the massed geese, sometimes having to settle for the carcass of a bird that didn’t survive the night, sharing breakfast with Chihuahuan Ravens and Northern Harriers.

There are plenty of opportunities to photograph the wildlife found here with about 15 miles of roads open to the public (depending on weather, heavy snow will shut things down for a bit but is pretty rare) as well as several trails that give access to areas vehicles can not get to. Keep your eyes open for Javelina, Roadrunners and the raptors that some days seem to be everywhere. And this is a wonderful place to watch coyotes hunting mice and gophers on the ditch banks and, the real show, Snow Geese.

Here you can have a front row seat to the ageless contest between predator and prey. A decoy coyote (do they take turns?) will get the attention of the geese feeding near a stand of brown and gold corn stalks while one or more (usually 2 or 3) leap wildly at the birds as they bolt skyward. A collision that disables, or a goose slow to fly will feed the coyotes and possibly a raven or two. Make no mistake, the coyotes will feed but it may take a full morning of running, leaping and hiding before they feast.

Better Luck Next Time

Here is the primal power of the wild with all of its beauty and mystery, easily accessed and should not be missed.

Filling the Sky

Closer still

Macro photography adds a wonderful dimension that allows us to see beyond the norm, no matter what your interests may be, natural or man made.  And you don’t have to spend a lot of time traveling, backyards offer a huge number of potential subjects.  Don’t have a yard, head to a nearby park.  Let’s see what we need to have some fun with this.

Now you need to have a SLR(single lens reflex camera), film or digital because there are a  few lens options you might want to explore.  Having said that, a “normal” (not macro, which just has built in extension to focus close) lens can work for many macro applications.  Starting with the simplest and generally least expensive way to get a closer view is to use screw- on lenses usually called diopters.  They come in increasing magnifications, listed as +1,+2, +3, etc.  These can be stacked for additional magnification, start with the strongest next to the lens, add the next strongest and so on.  Easy to use but with a very real caution, adding another layer of glass to even a good lens can degrade the resulting image.  The best of the diopter add- ons are two-element lenses and are corrected to give better edge to edge sharpness and will give better results than the less expensive single element lenses.  Nikon no longer makes their iteration of these but they are still available on line.  Canon still manufactures a two-element supplementary lens.

Cougar: on sighting the ghost of the forest

It is laying there among large gray boulders in the dappled shade, body relaxed, yet alertly watching as we sit among autumn colored wild roses with their bright red rose hips.  A distance away to be sure, yellow Aspen and Willows coloring the gray boulders, a small waterfall nearby.  Mountain Lion, there is no other  animal in our mountains that says “wild” as these big cats do.  While traveling back roads in western Colorado, looking for some jaw-dropping autumn scenery  Barb said something like “There! Its a, a, stop! See it? Stop, it’s a…..Stop!”  OK, you get it, and no, she isn’t usually incoherent, I stopped but ol’ Eagle Eye here didn’t see the Lion in the tawny grass of the road side.  It quickly disappeared down the steep slope to our left and even though having stopped, I had only a small glimmer of hope that we might get a very brief view of the cat moving off through the trees.   Across the space of  a small mountain canyon, below us was the lion.  To see a Puma, Cougar,  Mountain Lion, Catamount, Painter, and whatever else people call these big , solitary cats is rare and is usually a very brief flash in the headlights.

Sleepy Cat

Where does the time go?

Don’t know if you have noticed but there has been a lack of posting here lately, seems as I’m not so good at doing this in a timely manner and I will try to do better.   Want to take macro photos, or better macro images?  Stay tuned.

After a very hot, dry and windy spring, a summer with almost no moisture, we are greening.  The rains  may have been rare but makes them all the sweeter after a summer of smoke from multiple wildfires, one of them, not too many miles from home burned over 4,000 acres.  With the advent of rain has come cooler temps, a one day lurch from summer to fall and you can hear the collective sigh of relief from everything that lives here.  The bears know and are trying to gorge on anything and everything that will help add calories, but then they have been doing that all summer.  It’s not easy trying to find the volume of food a bear needs when there is no rain and so no appreciable growth of anything.  That is not to say they weren’t trying, a sow with two cubs of the year had broken into neighbors houses looking , one assumes, for anything edible.  I can certainly imagine the intense need of a black bear sow with 2 cubs to find sustenance.  Of course, a few people in the area were upset that a wild animal would invade their space, never thinking that those of us that live here are in THEIR space.

Piñoneros !

Many apologies for our sluggishness in getting a new post out to you.  Here in southern Colorado as in the rest of the country it’s summer and hard at times to sit down at the computer. Even with high temps and smokey skies from the fires blazing all around, we’ve been busy photographing the backyard birds. One of the many is the Pinyon Jay and with their flock numbers, they are a dominant presence………..

Adult Pinyon Jay

Forty, fifty, seventy birds form a long undulating dragon of life moving through the sky silently and arriving, they fall through the air with the sound of wind over rock or through tall pines. Sometimes even while feeding they will remain quiet but more commonly they will call to one another with the raucous yelling that even at a distance you would know there were jays about. Pinyon Jays (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus) or the piñoneros have a fairly small repertoire of sounds, not all are uncomfortable to hear and they have a trill that is almost magic. These are western birds unique to the drier evergreen forests of the Pinyon-Juniper zone, known as the PJ and are found from southern Montana to New Mexico, west to California and Oregon. Here in Colorado they are not found out on the eastern plains or in the big mountain parks like South Park and the San Luis Valley nor much above 8,000 ft but they do occur in the west of the state wherever there are pinyons or junipers and from about Chaffee County south to New Mexico and east almost to Kansas.

Pinyon Jay adult feeding fledgling

If you live in the PJ and feed birds during the winter as we do, then you probably know these jays and their amazing ability to eat or at least carry off a lot of seed. We affectionately call them “little blue pigs.”  While like most jays they are omnivores and forage for many different seeds, insects, fruits and anything else that they can subdue, including the eggs from other bird’s nests and even snatch the occasional lizard. They depend on the Pinyon Pine and as cones mature, on sometimes widely separate trees these jays move in communal flocks from one Pinyon nut banquet to the next. In some areas with few pinyons, the Juniper becomes a primary food source. Pinyon Jays cache huge numbers of pine nuts, a good-sized flock will cache literally several million. Like all Corvids (the Family to which all Jays, Crows, Ravens and Magpies belong) they have amazing memories and along with the Clark’s Nutcracker, Pinyon Jays are considered among the best. Although, not all of those caches are retrieved for a variety of reasons, those few missed nuts or seeds help re-seed Pinyon and Juniper forests.

Spring in the Canyon Country

Morning light; Colorado National Monument, Colorado

Colorado National Monument is positioned  in the north-east part of the Colorado Plateau, that big chunk of canyon country that Ed Abbey so eloquently wrote the praises of.  It sits west of Grand Junction, Colorado and north-east of Moab, Utah, its dry country, bisected by some great gulch topography, vertical sandstone walls, hot in summer and cold in winter.  Spring is pretty close to perfect, especially if you come from country not yet released from winters drab cold.  We arrived in late afternoon with warm light on the rock walls, red, buff, salmon and all gradations between.   A few electric blue Penstemons were blooming under the ridge of a rocky hogback, along with radiant carmine Paintbrush, next to a beautiful purple Milk Vetch.

How to Catch A Hummingbird

When spring and summer give us a mind-boggling number of potential photo subjects it’s sometimes difficult to narrow down the field and concentrate on a particular thing.  If one of your interests is in capturing images of wild birds and would like to concentrate on hummingbirds either to add to your files or just figure out how to capture images you can be proud of, stay with me.

Digital cameras allow us a lot of flexibility when trying to capture fast-moving subjects. High speed flash has been the standard solution and still is for many subjects but with adjustable ISO settings it is now quite easy to get a shot that in the past required an elaborate set up. Finding an open shady place with room for multiple flashes, some on light stands; floral arrangements with a hummingbird feeder,  a suitable background and possibly a commercial or at least homemade backdrop; as well as a spot for you and your camera with long lens on a tripod and perhaps in a blind can be difficult not to mention a little intimidating.  Expensive comes to mind as well.  Such a set up can yield excellent images. It’s hard to argue with the consistent lighting and framing that can result from all of this attention to detail.  Let’s make this a little easier.

Broad-tailed Hummingbird by Larry Kimball. Nikon D300, focal length 500mm, f4 at 1/2500, ISO 1000

Hello world!

This blog is a new experience and an experiment, we don’t know where it’s going and the direction it takes will at least some of the time be up to you.  Hope you enjoy the ride.

We will share some of our insights on image capture , the equipment used, as well as environmental and natural history tidbits. We pretend to no expertise in all things photographic but we manage to have some success at capturing interesting and beautiful creatures (they are all beautiful) as well as the land that they and we share. Please check out our web site Pronghorn Wildlife Photography  for more images.

When Nikon released the D2x we snapped up a couple of them and our transformation from using film (remember?) to digital began.  Suddenly we needed more computing power, Photoshop and Lightroom, external hard drives, copying to dvd, and on and on.  Sometimes shooting with film seems like a really fine idea, and then I look at my camera histogram or increase or decrease the ISO and I think this digital thing is good, it might even catch on.  In truth I really wish we had todays digital cameras back when we were working on our book The Common Plants of Costa Rica. Slow film in the rain forest?  Oh yeah, but it all worked out, and we learned a lot, not just about photographing in difficult situations but about one of the most beautiful and environmentally diverse places on Earth.

So let’s see where this ends up.  We look forward to you sharing your comments and or questions and we will endeavor to reply to all.