We got a little snow before I went to class at UNM this afternoon, then the clouds broke up for a couple of hours, regrouped and it started snowing again. We got over an inch in Corrales, and I drove most of the way home in a blizzard. The storm let up as I got on the west side of Albuquerque, where I was able to get a panorama of it snowing on the east side. The snow had hardly settled on a wall at UNM before a student walked in it.
A storm system is moving in and the temperatures are dropping rapidly. The weather widget is forecasting 6 degrees F over the weekend in Corrales, but since it’s always 10 to 15 degrees lower at our house, we may see sub-zero temperatures over the next couple of nights.
Rosencrantz gave me mad dogs when I told him the temperatures were going to drop below zero, and Laurie is making all the stews that feature in our latest fine cooking so we will at least have a variety of delicious hot stews to help us weather the cold. Rosencrantz was a bit of a skeptic when I told him he could have some stew to help keep warm.
Our electricity went out for about 40 minutes or so last night. We used the black-out as a good excuse to run to the store, so we didn’t have to go in the morning.
Cranes in flight, shot with a super -telephoto lens (600 mm).
I’ve been so busy photographing birds, mountains, and shows that I’ve neglected the spiders. A daddy longlegs was hanging out being a willing subject when I got home tonight.
I went out to the river late this afternoon to see what birds were out — the crows were swarming, the cranes were coming in for the night, and the geese were standing around watching the action. There was a hawk flying along the east side of the river when the crows flew in and several of the crows started chasing it, and a crows vs. hawk dog fight ensued. I attempted to photograph the battle, but they were too high and too far away to get clear shots of it.
Tristan adopted an Eclectus Parrot named Joey which turned out to be a rescue. Joey, who is probably around 9 years old, had been left in a house that one of Tristan’s friends moved into. The bird apparently had not ever had its beak trimmed and there was nothing in its cage for it to chew on to keep its beak trimmed back, so its beak had grown out so long that it was rubbing the feathers off Joey’s chest. Joey’s beak would have punctured his sternum and killed him if it had been left untrimmed much longer. The feathers on his head look good, but the rest of his feathers are scraggly and rough because he couldn’t groom himself with his long beak. He also hadn’t bathed himself or been bathed in who knows how long, so he smelled bad as well. Tristan called the vet on our way back to her house with Joey, and fortunately they had an opening within an hour, so we drove straight over to PetsMart and got Joey a new cage and lots of chew toys before taking him to the vet.
Joey was very well-behaved in the carrier as we drove around. He imitated noises from video games and gave us an occasional squawk. It didn’t take long after we got into PetsMart for people to start noticing him making cute noises. He squawked loudly at the sight of dogs, which really got the attention of the other shoppers. Once we got to the vet, Tristan turned the carrier around so the door was against the back of the bench so Joey wouldn’t react to the dogs in the waiting area. He would peek at me through the holes in the carrier, but when I first tried to photograph him peeking at me, he would back away to the other end of the carrier and then come back up and peak at me again with on eye, back off and peak at me again with the other eye. I finally got some photos of him peeking at me, but it was like a game to him.
His next adventure was his absolute refusal to get in the basket so the Vet-tech could weigh him in the exam room. He got on Tristan’s shoulder, then I got him on my arm, but when we got the basket near him, he ran upon my shoulder, then ran back and forth from one shoulder to the other ducking the Vet-tech. Then he got onto Tristan’s arm and climbed up and took refuse on her shoulder until the Vet came in. The Vet stood there in shock for an instance and then said she had never seen a beak that had grown out that long before. As we gave the Vet as many details as we had learned about Joey in the hour we had him, he sat on Tristan’s shoulder and groomed her until he tore off her pesky glasses that were getting in his way. The Vet got him wrapped in a towel and took him back to trim his beak and draw blood so they could test him for communicable diseases. When the Vet-tech brought him back in to us with his newly trimmed beak, Joey was happily chewing on the towel, something he hadn’t been able to do for most of his life.
He was pretty traumatized, and rode home in total silence, looking tired and worn out from his big adventure. When we got him home, he sat on a roost and posed proudly for me showing off his newly trimmed beak, then he watched me put his new cage together. As he watched Tristan and I fill his new cage up with things to climb on and lots of toys to play with and chew on, he started making cute noises again. When we put him in the cage he first checked out the water dish, and then started messing with the food. At first he turned his head sideways to compensate for a long beak, then he discovered he could pick up the food without cocking his head and started happily rooting around in the mixture of seeds, nuts and bird crackers able to eat normally for the first time in many years.
I went out about 30 minutes before sunset to photograph the Sandias when they turned pink, and ended up getting bird photos along the way. The Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese where still hanging out in the apple orchard with light streaking across them from the low sun. When I got out to the river, a Great Blue Heron was wading around feeding, until it noticed me and flew off. I figured I wouldn’t see it again, but when I focused on the large bird coming toward me (figuring it would be a Sandhill Crane) it turned out to be the heron. The Heron noticed me about the time I got it in focus and it banked left and started hightailing it south, offering me a shot of it in profile, then it turned eastward to circle back out of range of my lens.
A group of ducks where floating down the Rio Grande, diving under the water and popping their heads up several yards down current from where they dived. When they came up from their third dive, they saw me on the bank and took off, leaving little splashes behind them. Just before the sun went down, a hawk flew over at high speed, but I managed to get a fairly clear shot of it. I got my photos of the dark pink Sandias, and as I was walking back to the house, a large group of geese took flight from the apple orchard, heading to the river — they reminded of bats flying out of a cave at sunset.
We met the tour van in Truth or Consequences, NM to take us to the Space Port yesterday. Truth or consequences, or T or C for short, is 150 miles south of Albuquerque, NM just off of I-25. Today it is probably best known for Elephant Butte Lake and State Park, but it also is known for its odorless hot springs, and before 1950 it was named Hot Springs, NM. In 1950, Ralph Edwards, the host of the popular radio show that eventually became the popular television show Truth or Consequences, announced that he would air the show from any town that would change its name to Truth or Consequences. Hot Springs won the honor, officially changed its name, and Edwards visited the town for a fiesta every May for many years after that. T or C voted to keep the name in 1967, but there is new talk of changing the name back to Hot Springs since many people today do not associate it with the game show that went off the air in the late 1980’s.
Another attraction in T or C is Elephant Butte Dam. Construction started in 1911 and the dam was completed in 1916 (20 years before Hoover Dam). The dam was a high tech engineering marvel of its day at 300 feet high, almost 1700 feet long and 228 feet wide at the base. The project made irrigation available to about 180,000 acres of farmland. There is also a 28,000 kilowatt generating station at the base of the dam that was installed in the 1940’s; it currently generates enough power for about 20 homes.
Water has gone over the spillway twice in its 100 year history, and I got to pull a “you saw water going over the spillway when you were just 9 months old,” on my daughter yesterday. The 1980’s were a wet decade for NM, with 1986 was the high water mark for Elephant Butte. I raced the first Tour of the Gila bicycle race in Silver City, NM at the end of May 1987, and we stopped to see the water running over the spillway on the way home from the race. Of course Tristan didn’t remember, but I got a certain satisfaction out of telling her she saw it, because my parents did that to me all the time — “Oh yeah you were there with us when you were 2 years old!” they would tell me. Thanks! Like I remember places we visited when I was two. Fortunately for Tristan, we didn’t take her to very many places worth remembering until she was old enough to remember them, however, the historic water going over the spillway at Elephant Butte Dam happened to be an exception.
As you can see from the photos, the lake is very low right now. New Mexico is a high, arid desert and wet decades like the 1980’s are not normal. So what people have been calling a drought for the past 20 years or so, is really more normal for New Mexico; although the past few years have been very dry, so the cycle has probably swung to the opposite extreme from the wet period we had in the 1980s. The peaks between very wet periods and really dry periods for New Mexico seem to run in 50 to 60 year cycles based on the NOAA weather data we got when we had a NOAA weather station on the property.
We had cloud cover most of the day, but no precipitation. I went out on the river an hour before sunset and got the cranes flying in for the night. They often dance around after they land. I don’t know if the duck was stretching, dancing or saw something threatening, but he was putting on a show, also.
Wagner plowed the corn field under. The cranes are sparse so far, and there were a few geese, but the crows are really taking advantage of the corn scattered by the plowing.
Off Center & Not Even 