New Mexico Desert Life - Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge

The air is hot and the ground is warm.  Things are starting to stir here on the refuge.  Most of the migratory activity is done and we are settling down to the birds that will be with us for the duration of the summer.  Some are migrators that decided they like it here just fine and let their compadres move on while they set up housekeeping right where they are.

White-faced Ibis

It's not a very good shot because it was taken at such great distance but this is fourteen white-faced ibis on a pond in the north sector, a section that is restricted to public access.  I'm going to keep stalking these guys and see if I can get a close-up.

Red-winged blackbird

The red-winged blackbird we have aplenty.  Between them and the dove I can't hardly keep food in the bird feeder.  But the picture above is where I caught one perching out near a marsh.  All those little spots in the picture are not dust on the lens, but gnats on the wing.  Those gnats have gotten so thick it makes it almost impossible to sit out in the evenings.

Some of the parks most famous residents, dragonflies, are beginning to emerge from their watery nursery.  Bitter Lake has more species of dragonflies than anywhere else.  Sixty-five of them at last count.  They'll be everywhere by late summer and they will peak with the Dragonfly Festival that is held the beginning of September every year.

Cyndee captured this blue one on a branch in the vegetation island in the parking lot.

Got this guy just outside the visitor center, near the butterfly trail.

Not everything is about winged animals.  Capitan to our west has been providing some pretty nice sunsets lately.  With air so dry there is very little haze around these parts.  Taking pictures of large vistas is much easier than it is when in humid country.

Capitan Mountain
View from our RV at Bitter Lake NWR

We finally got some rain, just a tad over half an inch.  But that little bit of rain changed the light tremendously.  Before, anytime I tried to shoot a landscape the light was completely flat.  There was barely any distinction between sky and ground and the ground was featureless.  But that little bit of rain changed it all.  On one of our routine patrols around the refuge I snapped over sixty shots.  For the month prior to this I snapped zero.

Driving Tour Overlook.
Looking North-Northeast

Driving Tour Overlook.
Looking South-Southeast

As I mentioned earlier, the ground is warming up and this has the cold-blooded residents starting to move.  People have been reporting snake sightings almost daily for the past couple of weeks.  For the most part the Fish and Wildlife employees say: "Thanks for letting us know", and go on about their business.  But when a report of a rattlesnake at a trail head or door of a building they go into action and deploy their snake sticks and snake cans.

Western Diamondback Rattlesnake
Captured at the entrance to the butterfly trail near the visitor center.

 The snake will be carefully captured, placed in a snake can (a lined 35 gallon trash can with a locking lid) and relocated to a part of the refuge where they are less likely to come in contact with people.

On the same day that the lighting improved for shooting landscapes it also was the best we have seen for photographing anything outside.  Up to this point all pictures taken of wading birds came out little more than dull silhouettes.  But on this day it was possible to get shots clear enough to see the eyes of the bird.

American Avocet

Black-necked Stilt

Snakes are not the only cold-blooded critters that are coming out.  This yellow mud turtle was spotted by Cyndee along the edge of the driving tour road.  That's saying something since this full-grown turtle achieves a shell length of only 4 -5 inches.  The one below was barely 3 inches.

Yellow Mud Turtle

After getting this photograph we came home and ID'd what she was (yes we can confirm it was a female by the lack of a barb on its tail).  The thing that surprised us both was its lifespan - 50 to 65 years!  That's a long, long time for any animal to live in this harsh desert environment.

While the warmer temperatures have brought the animals out, the people have been not so much.  Our visitor-ship has dropped from 30 to 50 a day, it has been running 7 to 10 lately.  Maybe when the schools let out and people start vacation it will pick up again.  But hey, after our experience at Victoria Campground on Lake Allatoona in Georgia we are thoroughly enjoying the less-intense public interaction.  The best part is that the public we do interact with have been genuinely nice.

Stay tuned, we'll be going after more New Mexico life in coming days.

Spring has Sprung - Desert Bloom

While temperatures have been plenty warm since we arrived the first of April at Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge (Roswell, New Mexico), desert life has been a little hard to come by.  But in recent days here in the middle of May things are starting to emerge.

One of the duties of volunteers at the refuge are to water the vegetation "islands" in the visitor center parking lot and around the building.  These islands are made up of native, hardy desert plants but a lack of measurable rain for the past eight months is even a little much for them so we are hand watering every week or so.  This little bit of moisture has made a difference, we are getting blooms here at the visitor center.

Claret Cup Cactus

Ocotillo

Butterflies and hummingbirds come in for these Ocotillo blooms.

We had not been near an ocotillo since our volunteer days at Big Bend National Park in 2013/14.  We had almost forgotten how extraordinary the transformation from what looked like dead, brown "rain sticks" to green and white-striped branches topped with clumps of orange blooms that call in butterflies and hummingbirds from afar.

I don't know what this cactus is but it burst with blooms.  The buds took days to develop but once they started opening up, it was only minutes before the cactus was covered over by blooms.  And it is a good thing I took the picture when I did because they were very short-lived.  They were completely gone by the end of the next day.













The Desert Willows are doing very well on their own.  We have noticed these trees blooming all around the area.  It would seem that the bees are particularly fond of these blooms as they can be seen all around these trees but ignoring the cactus flowers at the base of the tree.

Desert Willow and local pollinator.

Desert bloomers are not the only ones showing a little color lately.  This refuge is big on things that fly and over the course of all four seasons it sees a tremendous variety of winged animals.  Even though we grew up in a similar semi-arid environment, we were to the east and north of Bitter Lake and on the edge of the central flyway.  Bitter Lake NWR is smack in the middle of the flyway and all the birds know this is a good place to rest and refuel.

Yellow Headed Blackbird.
Our first time to see one of these.

 Our RV pad, which is near the old visitor center/admin building that is now home to the biology group, is a favored habitat for the non-wading birds in the refuge.  We have year-round residents, a covey of 10 scaled quail that are visible almost all day long, scratching around in the brush or getting water from the weather station's evaporation tank.  These guys are comical to watch.  The covey travels loosely together with pairs staying closer together.

Scaled Quail (aka Blue Quail)

You can see the pecking order at work when they come together under the bird feeder.  There is always one bigger bird that decides who gets access to the best spot and works hard at being sure the other birds keep their distance.  But the most comical part is when they are on the move.  They stand so erect, with their necks stretched straight up and their little cotton crest standing out.  They run from one spot to the next, legs moving furiously but bodies gliding as they zig-zag through the brush.

We've had a mass of beautiful purple flowers growing all around us since arriving.  They have recently matured and become big enough that one could see there was a uniqueness to their stem shape.  We clipped a few stems and brought them inside to research what it was.  It didn't take long before we discovered it was called Scorpion Weed.  The distinctive curl at the end of its stems giving rise to its name.  But much to our surprise we also learned that the weed had an oil with properties similar to that of poison oak.  The oil does not affect as many people as poison oak does and for those that do react to it, it is a milder rash, but it is still a rash.  We took those clipping outside post haste and washed thoroughly.  We'll just enjoy them from a safe distance from now on.

This next specimen, a Bullocks Oriole, was very difficult to photograph.  It was a very nervous feeder.  He only made an appearance at the feeder (suet cake only) for a few seconds a couple of times a day for about a week and then he was gone.  The picture below was a matter of having the camera setting on the table that looked out onto the feeder and doing a very quick point-and-shoot through heavily tinted glass.

Bullock's Oriole

On the other hand, this guy below is the opposite of nervous.  We call him our lounge rabbit.  He just eases up to the RV pad, picks out a tasty clump of grass, sometimes right at our feet, and kicks back for a leisurely meal.

Once he is done with his munching he will find a comfortable spot nearby, lay down, front paws stretched out in front, rear end like he's sitting side-saddle and there he'll stay for the better part of an hour.

If it weren't for the wind this place would be awesome.  But we do have wind, and plenty of it.  Now, as spring nears its end the heat is kicking in.  We've already spent five days at a time with temperatures in the mid and upper 90's, broke 100 deg a half dozen times.  It won't be long that we will have long stretches of days well above 100.  That's the desert for you, we knew about it coming in and it is everything we remember.

We Be Tourists! South-Central New Mexico

Today's adventure takes us to the middle of New Mexico.  Our activities will center around Socorro, NM, beginning to its south at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge.  We've a 3-hour drive to get to the refuge.  We'll repeat some of the same track as yesterday, passing through part of the Hondo Valley, turning in Hondo itself to stay on highway 380 towards Capitan and then on to San Antonio (the New Mexico one, not Texas).  At San Antonio we turn due south arriving at Bosque del Apache in just a few minutes.

Bosque is very much like Bitter Lake, only more than twice the size at just over 57,000 acres.  There are managed marshes with a plethora of birds.  We visited with the volunteer visitor center hosts for a short while before heading out on the driving tour.

Herons and Egrets

My new favorite duck, the Cinnamon Teal.  It's not the black one in this photo.

My former favorite duck, the Mallard.

Great White Herons

Got close enough to this one to see the color of his eyes.

Since there was a lot of ground to cover on this day we took the short driving loop, about 10 miles, and then headed for our next destination, The Very Large Array (VLA).  This is definitely a geek trip, the VLA is gigantic science project.  There are 27 eighty-two foot tall radio telescopes spread out over thirty miles of desert floor in a "Y" shape.  These receiver dishes peer deep into space and record radio wave emissions that produce images of astronomical formations such as galaxies, nebulae and events like the birth of a supernova.  Not to mention an occasional eavesdropping in on ET.

Once you get past the above entrance sign they want to have complete radio silence.  You have to turn off anything that emits a signal - cell phones, bluetooth devices, fitness watches, etc.  If it emits a radio wave of any kind, they want it shut down.

Once that was accomplished we wound our way to the visitor center.  At one point near there there were signs at entrances to service roads that said: "Diesel engines only" and then showed an icon of a spark plug with a red circle and line through it.  They are really serious about stray radio waves.

VLA Visitor Center

The VLA's visitor center is a small, cramped space but has a considerable amount of information for those that want to get the full geek experience of the technology behind the operation.  There is also a self-guided walking tour behind this building with a good deal more information.  Unfortunately the wind was howling this day.  The dirt blowing in your face made it uncomfortable and the gustiness made it all but impossible to hold the camera still.  We resorted to driving to what we could and using the inside of the cab of the truck as a wind-break.

Two of the twenty-seven antennas spread out over 30 miles of high desert (7,200 ft elevation)

Big Dude!
That's me (standing 6'5") barely visible at the base.
I am just a bit taller than the concrete pylons this thing is bolted to.

Intellectually I knew these were large antenna dishes but their enormity did not really sink until we got there and and stood in their shadow.  At 82 feet tall and weighing in at 230 tons a piece, these are not diminutive structures.

What is even more impressive, to me, is that they can not only point the dish at something and track it across the sky, but they can move the entire antenna up and down the 30 miles of railroad track they put in to effectively change the array's performance for specific jobs.  The work entails sliding a special rail car under one antenna at a time, unbolting it from its moorings, moving onto the main line and transporting it to its desired location.  Then reverse the process to get it off the rail car and back onto a mooring.  And they do this a couple times a year for most of the twenty-seven dishes.

Looking down the length of one of the legs of the "Y"

I came away with one photograph I particularly like.  It is essentially one third of the entire array configured to have the array in its largest formation.  I kept going back and looking at this photo so often that I decided to have the image put on a mouse pad.  That's a great solution for a full-time RV'er.  Space and weight are a huge issue, hanging photos or art is just not practical.  We've got family photos (small ones) in the few places that can hold them but practically speaking, there is just no good place to put wall art.  We do have a digital photo frame that has been great for doing a slide show of all the photos that we have loaded onto it, about 500.  But this personalized mouse pad afforded us the opportunity to have another way to enjoy one of our pictures.

Going to Bosque del Apache first put us a little late getting to the VLA.  They pretty much locked up behind us as we left.  We got back on the route that would take us through Hondo Valley and Lincoln, NM.  We tried to get some photographs of historical western landmarks from the Lincoln County War but the sun had set and the photos we took weren't worth the electrons they were made of.  Guess we'll just have to make another trip so we can do it right.