CuRVWander

For the last two weeks of May the temperatures here in the New Mexico desert have been frequently exceeding 105 degrees (40.5 C).  I know everybody says "it's a dry heat", but once at that temperature, and above, it's HOT!  Our poor old RV air conditioners just can't overcome the solar gain being put into the rig every day.  We are fully broadside to the glaring sun all day long.  Temperatures in our living area are hovering around 84 deg by mid-day and we don't get below 80 again until after 9:00 pm.  They will continue to run a good part of the night to get the temperature down to its set point of 75.  The bedroom being a much smaller area does a little better by about 5 degrees.  We have taken to putting a fan at the top of the steps and having it blow air from the bedroom down into the living/galley area.  It only makes a small difference but we're taking anything we can get. My brother and his family are coming to Roswell for the Memorial D...

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 ...

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...

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 G...

New Mexico is not an unknown to us.  We grew up (our first 30 years) in the panhandle of Texas, just a short four or five hour drive to Angle Fire or Taos.  We could leave home at 4:00 am and be standing at the ski lift by the time they opened.  In the summer Wheeler Peak was our favorite backpacking destination.  Park at the trail head at 9,000 ft, hike the seven miles to base camp at 11,500 ft, barf for a couple hours until the altitude sickness let up, and then do the peak the next day, topping out at 13,160 ft. But that is all northern New Mexico.  We've squeaked out a couple of quick trips to Santa Fe and Ruidoso but didn't really get to explore outside of those towns.  Now, thirty more years later, we are back in the "neighborhood" and we are going to take advantage of it and explore a little. This set of four days off, with cooperative weather, will give us the opportunity to explore a national park, White Sands, another NWR, Bosque del Apache an...

We are getting settled in to our new volunteer assignment at Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge.  Life in a wildlife refuge is different than our previous positions in national and state parks.  In the latter, the departments we worked for, their primary (or so it seemed) mission was to serve the people, at this wildlife refuge people are not first on the list. But that is by design, it is a wildlife refuge, not a public park or zoo.  This refuge has just shy of 25,000 acres in its borders, only about 3,000 of it is accessible to the public.  The rest is fragile habitat and wildlife that is limited to human exposure. However, that does not mean that Bitter Lake NWR is unfriendly to the public, just the opposite.  This facility has a really nice and relatively new (2011) Visitor Center and Headquarters building that was designed with the public very much in mind.  And this is where we work out of each day we are on duty. The entrance to the visitor c...