I leave the refuge at 9 am planning to return by 5 pm for some shots at sunset. I'm told the birds are pretty consistent and roost at the same places every night. I get back to the refuge on schedule and set up where I was in the morning. The birds start flying in just as the sun starts going down behind the mountains to the west.
Here's a pair of Sandhill Cranes coming in to roost. This was taken at about 630 pm looking to the west.
This was taken about 15 minutes later. Again, Sandhill Cranes coming in to roost.
Taken at about 7 pm. A full view of the sunset. The clouds make for a more dramatic shot than it would have otherwise. you can see the water on the flats.
The weather report is calling for rain the rest of the week.
Same drill as yesterday - up early for sunrise at 6:30 and then move around looking for where the birds feed during the day.
A pair of Sandhill Cranes leaving the roost at about 640 am.
Twenty minutes later and the sky is a little lighter. There's more clouds than yesterday - perhaps the weatherman is on to something. Rain is forecast for this afternoon and the next couple days.
The sunrise lighting up the hills to the East. You can see a line of Cottonwoods in full fall color across the bottom of the picture. This is the Rio Grande Valley - as you drive up and down the valley, you can pretty much mark the location of the river itself by the presence of the Cottonwoods. At this point, the Rio Grande is perhaps 40 feet wide - not very grand at all, nothing more than a small stream. By the time the river gets here, most of the water has been siphoned off for irrigation and public water supply.
Sometimes when the birds are feeding, thousands will all of a sudden take flight at once.
When that happens, because I usually have a long lens on the camera, about all I can do is get a shot like this -- a blind mix of crows, Snow Geese and Sandhill Cranes coming up out of the corn fields.
Seemingly spontaneous - these flights are really caused by one of the local predators trying to sample the buffet - here, a well fed coyote slinking off after an unsuccessful try.
A panorama of the fields with Cottonwoods and the mountains to the west.
If the weather holds, I'll come back out here this evening. To fill in the time in-between, I plan on a short trip west through Magdalena to what's called in the scientific community the Very Large Array (VLA), one of the largest radio telescopes in the world.