We are now starting our last week of volunteering at Bosque del Apache. We arrived here on September 15 and will pull out on December 18 if the slides come in, the jacks go up, and there is sufficient air in the tires. We will be making our way to California where we are scheduled to attend the Rose Bowl Parade unless the predicted El Nino doesn’t wash away California before we get there. On our way to CA, we will do some poking around, stop at a Camping World in Tucson, oh boy!, to fix some deficiencies in our motor home, and hope we get out of Tucson with our shirts still on our backs to arrive at the campground in CA on Christmas Day.

The birds that most people travel here to see are sandhill cranes, both the greater and the lesser. There was a 5-day crane festive, or rightly known as the Festival of the Cranes, the week before Thanksgiving. This place was crazy-busy with attendance in excess of 5,000 people, a large tent full of exhibitors (mostly cameras and binoculars), 100-plus workshops, seminars and tours, and traffic jams at key locations where people were expecting the birds to land or take off.

Photographers abound. This place has a reputation as being one of the best bird photography locations in the country. This month there are a number of photography workshops going on every day, and it makes it difficult for non-photographers to get good vantage points to watch the cranes fly in at sunset. Photographers are very aggressive and woe to anyone who gets in their way. It is incredible the number of folks with long telephoto lenses. There is a fortune in camera lenses coming into the refuge every day. The lesson I have learned, contrary to what I thought I knew, is that size does matter and bigger is better.

The other species of birds that people come to see are the light geese, both snow and Ross's. The big events are the fly-ins at sunset and the fly-outs at sunrise. Unlike the cranes that take off and arrive in small groups, the geese all move together. When there are 60,000 geese, fly-ins and fly-outs are spectacular. However, this year there are two things with the geese. The geese are flying in well after sunset, and in fact it’s pitch black usually when they arrive. Ditto for the morning. They take off well before sunrise and no one can see the mass ascension. We do see it during the day when they decide to move from resting on water to feeding in fields, or when a bald or golden eagle shows up. Lots of geese flight happens then. The second thing is that the numbers are way down this year. The estimate last week was 8,800. The count last year during this same week was 61,000. People visiting this year are disappointed. Crane numbers are also down. Last week we had an estimated 3,100 cranes; last year it was 12,000. However, 40 miles north of the refuge is a state wildlife management area where there are thousands of cranes. The state has a much better corn crop than the refuge, and the cranes go where their needs are met.

Our stay here has been good and positive. Toward the end of October many more volunteers arrived so that there was full volunteer staffing for the Festival and the busy winter season. We went from a total of 4 volunteers when we first arrived to 20 volunteers as we prepare to leave. Generally we have all gotten along, and we now have a great group of volunteers. However, there is a little overkill of volunteers. Operations could function very nicely with half the number of volunteers. But I’m just a volunteer; I do my job, and make an effort not to get involved in refuge policy and operations.  

I have always wanted to say this and now after waiting 70 years I can finally utter those famous words: California here we come!