My World: Bosque del Apache

In the middle of New Mexico, surrounded by Mountains and dessert, lies an oasis that is one of the top birding locations in the United States, the Bosque del Apache.

The Bosque is a 57,000 acre National Wildlife Refuge that straddles the Rio Grande River in Central New Mexico. It is comprised of 3,800 acres of active flood plane from the Rio Grande as well as 9,100 acres of wetlands, farm land and riparian forest which was created through a system of water management. These wetlands are surrounded by arid foothills, mesas and dessert.

Because it is the only extensive wetlands in an arid region the Bosque attracts many different types of birds, over 340 species, through out the year. However many people choose to bird the Bosque during the winter months when large flocks of water fowl descend on the wetlands making it their winter home.
My last visit to the Bosque was in January of 2007, which is when I took all of the pictures in this post. It was great to be there during the peak waterfowl season.

There were a lot of ducks out on the lakes and pools when I was there. A lot of them are pretty common back home in Minnesota during the warmer months, like coots and mallards, but there were other ducks that I rarely get to see back home. In Minnesota we do not see northern pintails all that often, at least not in the eastern portions of the state, so it was a treat to get many very close views of them down at the Bosque.
There were also a few northern shovelers swimming around. Shovelers are another duck that tends to spend their time more in the western portions of the continent.

I also got a chance to see a small group of greater white-fronted geese. This was a life bird for me. These birds breed up near the arctic circle and then spend their winters down in the southern US and Mexico.

The greater white-fronted geese were on the outskirts of a large flock of snow geese. Although snow geese where not a lifer for me on this trip, we sometimes see snow geese as they migrate south plus I had seen them on a previous trip to the Bosque, they are still a bird that I have only seen a couple of times. The Bosque is usually home to over 30,000 snow and Ross geese each winter.

The snow geese are not the only things that winter at the Bosque in large numbers. Approximately 14,000 sandhill cranes spend the winter on the refuge.

Sandhill cranes nest in parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin so these are birds that I have seen and photographed often but we do not usually see them in as great of numbers as is possible down at the Bosque.

The big spectacle, during the winter, are the "fly in" at dusk and the "fly out" at dawn. Each day large flocks of birds spend their day out in the fields and farmland looking for food, but at night they come back to roost on the shallow pools of the Bosque. The times when the birds are coming in "fly in" or leaving "fly out" attract large crowds of spectators.

The Bosque has many different types of habitat, besides the wetlands, to explore. The arid hilly regions were habitat that was different then anything that I have near home.
Some of the birds preferred the habitat of these dry open hills. Many raptors could be found circling these areas looking for prey. The raptors that I saw at the Bosque were eagles, red-tailed hawks, coopers hawks, American kestrel and mostly northern harrier, like pictured above.
There were also quite a few passerines and other small birds that were birds that I do not often see like roadrunners, spotted towhee and red shafted northern flickers, the northern flickers that we see in Minnesota or typically yellow-shafted.