Lens on Nature

Bosque Del Apache (BDA) National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) is in southern New Mexico, not far from Socorro. BDANWR is a prime over-wintering location for tens of thousands of sandhill cranes, snow geese, blue geese (a variant of snow geese), and many kinds of ducks including American pintails, wigeons, and many others. Also present are bald eagles, roadrunners, and coyotes.

BDA NWR is famous throughout the world as a great spot to photograph all of these birds, but is famous for its "blast offs" of tens of thousands of light geese, as depicted in the upper left photograph.

That's a rare (in the U.S.) Aplomado Falcon in the lower right photograph. Two of these were released in the area recently. Other than these released birds, they have not been seen in the wild in this area in many years.