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Bosque del Apache is a wildlife preserve located in New Mexico near the town of Socorro. Primarily a bird sanctuary it is the place to go if you want to see almost all the snow geese alive in the world today. OK, That might be a slight exaggeration but only a little. There are a lot of snow geese down here. They number in the thousands during the winter months and completely fill up the ponds so that it seems like there isn’t space for one more bird to land, but they do. Having said all that these are not Snow geese pictured here. These are Sandhill cranes. I’ll show you Snow geese in another post later. The Sandhills are here in record numbers too and they are really the main attraction for me as far as I’m concerned. Where the Snow geese are noisy and spectacular in the morning when they all take off at the same time, these guys, the Sandhills, are more graceful and sophisticated. They can be noisy also but it is usually when they land, or are calling their mates, or telling that neighbor he is way too close. They have a stately walk, they don’t scramble, they are polite to their mates bowing and nodding and will often engage in an impromptu dance to reaffirm how much they like each other. All in all, very nice birds. They congregate in small groups and those groups will make larger flocks and so on, but they seem to find smaller family gatherings preferable. In the early morning as they are getting ready to go to work they collect their other group members and begin the preparations to leave. In the evening as they return they glide in to the pond areas in formation and settle down for the night. This is the time when they seem to interact with each other the most. They talk over the days events, decide where they’re going tomorrow and then settle down until morning.