Wings In The Sunrise

Posted on October 22, 2016 by Dwight Lutsey

The time is 7:48:47 am, February 9th of a year gone past. It is bitter, bitterly cold. And it is the exact moment that the conditions are just right for the thousands of Snow Geese wintering here at Bosque del Apache to lift into the air en masse. The rushing noise of their wings punctuated by their coarse honking calls creates a sound unique to this moment. As they lift and try for altitude they will pass overhead so closely you can feel the downward force of the wind from their wings, perhaps only a dozen feet or more over your head.

It is a mesmerizing sight to see, with sometimes 30,000 birds clustered together on long rafts that nearly fill the ponds they spend the night in suddenly, at some unknown cue explode into the air. They rarely circle the pond as they ascend, instead the various family groups, or tribes, or however they relate to each other begin to separate and choose the course to their day’s feeding area. Soon in mere seconds it seems, the pond is empty and quiet. Perhaps there may be one or two stragglers left on the ponds flat surface, those who have decided that they’re going to take the day off today, or perhaps the floating bodies of a few who have given up the ghost during the night, due to age or injury or just plain fatigue, but quiet. The silence is deafening.

This event takes place every morning the Snow geese are here at Bosque del Apache until one morning, again on some unknown cue, they rise once more but instead of returning they head North to their summer range and the ponds are quiet and still until the coming Fall. Then each morning without fail you can take part in the wings in the sunrise experience. It is truly an unforgettable moment.

Caught In A Murder

Posted on January 9, 2016 by Dwight Lutsey

Many dastardly deeds are done in Bosque del Apache under the cover of darkness. But some are done even in bright sunlight. Drugs and violence and the arrival of gangs never before seen in the refuge are now common place. It’s gotten much worse since the advent of the internet and being able to get restricted bad seed and other prescription only drugs from Canada with nothing but a fake prescription and a fax machine. Consequently gangs have formed to take advantage of this situation and have infiltrated nearly every level of society in the Refuge.

Here we see a murder of Crows swarm a lone Eagle, a peace officer who had accidentally stumbled on them distributing bags of hallucinogenic seed. This was a shipment of treated Bulgar seed that had just arrived on the refuge disguised as medical supplies and food for indigent migratory birds.

Undeterred by his unexpected presence they brazenly rose up in a swarm to surround him and to force him to the ground where they in their superior numbers could do him in, thereby fulfilling their designation as a “Murder of Crows”, the most ruthless gang in the refuge. Filled with crows from Columbia and other South American countries they will stop at nothing to defend their territory and protect their profits. These are very bad crows.

Fortunately for the eagle the crows had been distracted by the business of cutting the seed with cheaper non-hallucinatory wild bird seed available in bulk from any of the big box stores. This is done to allow them to maximize their profits even more. One 50lb. bag when cut to street tolerances will provide enough seed for several thousand birds. It takes more and more seed per bird to get high, so the sales, and of course profits, go high-sky. Due to their being occupied with this process he was able to fly the through the crime site before most of the crows even noticed he was there. This didn’t stop the crows from rising up to confront him however and soon he was surrounded. The eagle was able to gain enough altitude to avoid the crows tactic of flying over him and pecking at his back with their needle sharp bills, causing him to fly lower and lower until he was grounded and then swarmed and pecked to death.

Due to surprising the crows and his superior ability to gain altitude quickly from the use of his powerful wings, our eagle was able to make his escape and return to headquarters. There a task force of Eagles and a few of the larger hawks were able to return to the sight of the crime to try and catch the perps in the act. Unfortunately the crows were able to make their escape by eating as much of the seed as they could carry and still get off the ground. The rest they pushed into the pond hoping to retrieve it later.

The peace eagle didn’t make the bust that he wanted to, but at least he foiled the Murder of Crows from creating one more victim. The crows will be back though, the possibility of making this much profit is too compelling for them to be run off by one lone eagle. And once the other birds get hooked they’ll be back in business again. The good news is our eagle didn’t get caught in a murder. His. He did cause one more drug center to be closed and for that we’re all thankful.

Italian Morning Bosque del Apache

Posted on January 6, 2016 by Dwight Lutsey

It has been said that if an artist has real talent they will often have an aura about them that extends outward from his presence. This aura extends out to a distance that corresponds to the artists talent. The more accomplished the artist the further out his influence or aura spreads. Leonardo Da Vinci had an aura that went out approximately 1130 miles. This would be a radius not a diameter. This aura will leave its influence on anything that it touches. This is why some of those old European towns like Venice and Florence look the way they do. Leo walked down their streets.

There are many of those old retired painters of the Renaissance, Leo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Giorgione and many others. Most of these painters have made their money and are no longer painting. What many people don’t know is that all of these artists traveled extensively looking for inspiration, seeing the sights, trying to find new colors that they could incorporate into their work and generally taking advantage of frequent sailing miles they had built up in their travels.

Of course everywhere they went they left their indelible mark on the landscape. Giorgione was a frequent traveler to the New World and one of his favorite spots was to hit Bosque del Apache whenever he was in the neighborhood. Since passport control was fairly lax at that time, there aren’t many records left that document exactly where in his travels he visited, but there is one telltale method that can be used to determine where he has been.

That would be an aura check. Each of the artists had a distinct and identifiable aura once you learned how to identify them. Rembrandt and Michelangelo both leaned heavily into the Chiaroscuro style which was very heavy influenced by extreme contrast and heavy use of brighter colors, gold, silver, etc, which is why if you walk by the coliseum you will see part of it in bright golden sunshine and the other side of it in deep shadows. That’s the Michelangelo effect. Giorgione liked a lighter more open palette, lots of soft backgrounds, muted shades, not so much contrast, earth tones, and highlighting the primary subject in his painting.

Since the last undocumented visit by Giorgione was roughly March 18, 1510, which was a Friday, his aura is beginning to fade a little. While when it was new, you couldn’t even walk in Bosque without tripping over his aura. Now not so much. But every once in a while when you least expect it the landscape will explode into his palette that had been imprinted onto the landscape when he was here as if he stood right beside you. That is exactly what happened when this image was made. Prior to taking the photo the landscape had been drab and uninteresting, almost boring. Then the sun came over the rise and activated the Giorgione aura and you can see the result. Soft muted colors, perfect earth tones, it’s all there. What a joy to be able to see and bask in the reflection of such talent, let alone document these events. We heard that Michelangelo had visited the Grand Canyon so we’re off to see what effects his aura has had on that masterpiece. We’ll try and post that visit later.

Last Tango In Bosque

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Dwight Lutsey

Sandhill cranes are one of the bird species that uses dance as part of their mating ritual. Many species do this but since we’re talking about Sandhill cranes we don’t care about them. In fact let’s ignore them entirely. They can get their own post from some other blogger.

Sandhills have a unique childhood as they are constantly uprooted, traveling back and forth between various nesting and feeding grounds, never staying in one place for more than a few months. They are the avian equivalent of the Roma or as they ‘re more commonly known, travelers, or gypsies. Consequently they have developed some bad habits such as stealing grain out of farm fields, throwing raucous parties where they spend the day singing ribald songs and dancing, and consequently are unwelcome in many of the areas they frequent.

It’s the dancing we’re addressing in this post. The uninhibited, wildly abandoned, provocative dancing. This is primarily a “G” rated blog but occasionally we come across behavior that we simply must point out so that you, the reader, can take what ever protective measures you choose to keep your children, or even yourselves, from being unduly influenced by this hedonistic display of licentiousness.

We were shocked when we came across this overt display in the normally sedate Bosque del Apache bird refuge in southern New Mexico. This is a place where thousands of birds congregate during the winter. Snow geese, Ross’s goose, ducks of all kinds and you could move from one place in the refuge to another and see these various birds and ducks behaving in a civilized, normal manner, and aside from an infrequent squabble, never exhibiting any aberrant behavior.

But then this quiet garden of Eden was discovered by the travelers, or lets call a bird a bird, the Sandhill cranes. Suddenly the harmony of this gentle resting place was shattered all to heck, excuse us but an event like this moves us to use harsh language, by the arrival of flocks upon flocks of these noisy, argumentative, unapologetic, cranes and everything changed.

Suddenly the blatant exhibition of their sexually charged mating rituals, which they held right out in the open for anyone to observe, was rampant. Everywhere you looked there was dancing, and as the more worldly among you surely know what that leads to, we don’t need to follow that path to its conclusion.

Surely a group of individuals whose moral compass has gone so wildly astray could not prevail but sadly, that is not the case. Due to their unrestricted behavior there are now thousands more of these Sandhill cranes and there has been a huge effect on the surrounding areas. Where once this had been a quiet farming area, now the fields are decimated by the hungry opportunistic cranes. Farms have been abandoned and the empty homesteads litter the edges of the refuge. What were once prosperous farms have been turned into the playgrounds of these dancing, squawking, devil-may-care, footloose wanderers.

Above you can see two of these young cranes beginning what is one of the favorite dances of these unfortunately immoral birds, the Tango. Brought up from South America by a group of Argentinian travelers and introduced to their naive American cousins this new dance has swept through the flocks like the pox it is. Now you can see countless pairs of Sandhills performing this dance before heading into the privacy of the surrounding reeds to complete their mating ritual.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any antidote to this terrible affliction and all we can expect is to see more and more of it in the future. One hesitates to use the word shameful on a group of individuals whose only way of defending their actions is by a strangled sort of gargling that is their voice, but for civilized people it is hard to accept their licentiousness. At this point we are suggesting that the public refrains from bringing small children to the refuge during what is now called the mating season. We hope that by person-cotting the refuge the birds will get the hint to tone down their behavior and we’ll see the last tango at Bosque.

Dawns Early Light

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Dwight Lutsey

Why eagles fly. If you’ve ever asked yourself that question I’m sure you’ve come up with the most obvious answer. Because they can. But I think there’s a deeper answer and that is because they want to.

I’m not talking about the fact that they’ve come down the pike genetically designed to fly, or they need to fly to hunt and eat, or to find mates, all the stuff biologists and those other folks who collect facts and figures about them talk about when they describe birds, of course those are reasons.

I’m talking about the feelings that one gets when seeing a bird gliding effortlessly across the sky, hawks riding the thermals or matching the pitch and shape of their wings so that they hover there against the bright blue sky, motionless for as long as they want to be, before swooping down in a breathtaking dive to collect their next meal. Or seeing two Golden eagles performing the most amazing aerobatics during their mating flights, rushing past each other with all the speed they can gather then turning at the very last moment and grasping each others talons to tumble-down towards the earth in a dizzying spiral, letting go just before they strike the earth to swoop away and climb to the very heights of their abilities, to repeat it again and again.

Or just the gentle flight from last nights perch to a new one, one better placed to catch the dawns early light. Watching the subtle shades of the morning light turn from the warm colors of the early sun towards the harsher colors of full day as they make the flight, exercising those wings stiff from last nights cold. If we see this and experience that feeling of intense but quiet joy at their limitless freedom imagine what the bird feels.

When I was younger I read a book called “The Once And Future King” by T. H. White. You may have read it yourself, I know you’ve probably seen the Disney movie “The Sword In The Stone” which is the first part of The Once and Future King and it is where Wart, who is to become King Arthur in the not too distant future is changed into various animals and birds as lessons in life by Merlin, his wizard tutor.

The part where he is turned into several different hawks and other birds has always stuck in my mind. I want to do that. I mean it, change me into a Peregrine falcon right now. T.H. White’s descriptions of the various changes that Wart goes through are written in such a way that you almost feel you could understand how that would work. What it would feel like. It is one of the reasons that I try and capture the feeling in my images in the hope that I can bring to life what I’m seeing and feeling when I get to see sights like the one above. This is a shot of a Bald Eagle heading for a sunnier perch than he spent the night on, at Bosque del Apache wildlife refuge. The colors are courtesy of the early morning sun.

Into The Sun

Posted on August 29, 2014 by Dwight Lutsey

I don’t know what’s happening around your house but here at the Institute the weather is changing. The other day I went out to make the rounds of the compound and chase the flickers off the side of the our main building and was suddenly struck with the fact that it smelled different. Not different like a teenagers room but different like you could almost smell the, and I’m going to have to speak very frankly here using language that may leave some of the more delicate among you lying on the floor gasping for air, “SNOW” in the air. I’m only going to use the ‘S’ word once here for fear of putting it in the minds of the weather gods and speeding up the process even more.

We’re not done with Summer yet. It’s only the end of August. Yeah I know all about the season’s change and it’s getting near Labor day and all that crap. I don’t care. It was cold the other morning and it seemed like it could do the white wet deed on us any time it felt like it. That’s not fair. I want to know why we pay all this money for taxes to send those phony-baloney congress people to Washington if they can’t do a simple thing like give us enough summer. They can change time whenever they feel like it, taking an hour here, giving it back there, why can’t they extend summer, like another month. I mean, I’d vote for a guy like that, even if he was a crooked, lying, womanizer from Arkansas, with a mean wife.

The Sandhill crane above feels the same way. Just the other day he was stuffing his gizzard with corn from the farmer’s field and now the water is getting cold, the days are shorter and he has to make a thousand mile flight somewhere just to stay warm. He is plenty cheesed off about it I can tell you. Normally he would laze around in the pond for a couple extra hours in the morning, just kicking back, taking life easy, hanging with his friends, letting the warm water flow all around his three toes, now everybody is up at the crack of dawn running around in the water, waiting for the sun to come up so they can get flying and warm up.

That red spot on his head we’ve discovered, is actually a solar collector and by the crane pointing it into the sun it warms the blood flowing through it and sends it down to his feet and the rest of his body so he can stand in that frigid water. In the late fall and winter there’s less sun so less warmth, so his blood gets cold , his wife gets irritable, and the next thing you know he and Margaret are flying off to the sunny shores of South America or wherever, where they don’t have Fall or the ‘S’ word. This exclusive bit of knowledge is the result of one of our many grants going right for once. This one was titled “Why are some tall birds red on the head? Is this Nature’s way of singling them out or simply a fashion statement?” That one was worth 2.9 mil in grant money. See why we do this? This is encouraging to us here at The Institute and we intend to file many more.

But there’s a lesson here people, and I think it is ‘get on your elected representative’s butt’ and let him know we’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore. Since term limits don’t scare them anymore use words like impeachment, or no more donations, that’ll get their attention. Otherwise we all better start learning Spanish if we don’t want to stay here freezing our keesters off. Know what I mean?

P.S. I don’t want a bunch of letters from you eleven people that like winter and snow and cold. I don’t care if you like to ski, or tramp around in the snow with stuff freezing on the end of your nose. I don’t care if it’s pretty or you like to catch dull-normal fish through a hole in the ice. I don’t care if you like to lick snow off the sides of trees. This is an aberration and you should seek medical help as soon as you can, or at least move to Northern Wisconsin where this is considered normal activity. But don’t waste our time by trying to sell us on the merits of the wonders of winter. The rest of us are trying to book flights out of here.

Did You See That !

Posted on May 13, 2014 by Dwight Lutsey

Sandhill Cranes Bosque del Apache

Whoa….Dude! Did you see that?

No Way

OMG Did he really….

That is not possible

WTF. What was he thinking?

He must have got into some bad grain.

You think !

I know that is going to hurt

HeySoos Christy, what do you think he’s going to say to her.

Too late, Oh man….

I cannot believe I just saw that.

Me neither

Wonder where he found that grain

I don’t know man but I want some.

Any of you guys get a picture of that?

That was totally awesome !

OK then, anyone want to get lunch?

BigShots Now

A conversation about Photography: Images and Commentary by Dwight Lutsey

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