We have finished our first two days of volunteering at the Bitter Lake NWR VC. Tomorrow we will be on the road to Carlsbad to put up some posters. And then we will be done for the week. Three days on, Monday - Wednesday, and the rest of the time is our own. Our work is primarily at the VC, but we will also do other work as needed. VC work not only includes the usual routine behind the front desk, but also some custodial and maintenance chores. It seems like it will be a good mix of things to keep our attention. Visitor numbers are not high right now; both of our days the visitor numbers were in the 20's to 30's. On Saturday, we noticed the number of visitors was 8. All the refuge staff have offices in the VC; so, there is lots of comings and goings.

How the heck did we get here? Good question. The last blog entry was from our time in Twin Falls, ID in early September, and that seems like eons ago. The next stop after Twin Falls was Grand Junction where we visited with Shannon's sister, Fern, Shannon got her hair dyed turquoise to get her psyched for returning to New Mexico, and visited with Shannon's cousin Joan and her husband Ron who we last saw when they visited us in OR. We then made our way to ABQ, NM stopping in Gallup to have lunch with Barb, a friend from many lifetimes ago growing up in Lititz. We then spent almost two weeks in ABQ getting caught up with doctors and dentists and RV repair technicians. We left ABQ on Friday, September 30 ahead of the masses arriving for the Balloon Fiesta, and we arrived at Bitter Lake NWR that afternoon.

We are at Bitter Lake until the end of December. Right now it is hot and dry, and we are under constant assault by house flies and mosquitos and rattlesnakes. Kind of the opposite of our 4 months in OR. First frost might occur in November and maybe we will get some relief. And then again the first cold weather to knock out at least the flying varmints may be in January. When we are in places such as eastern New Mexico, we are always reminded of our MN friends Ken and Ruth who visited us when we were in TX down along the Rio Grande in 2011 at our first volunteer gig. Ken said, "What are you doing in such a god-forsaken place." If he would visit again he would probably say, You haven't gotten any smarter in 5 years of traveling."

Bitter Lake NWR was established in 1937 to protect waterfowl. It is along the Pecos River, but the river is not a major player in creating the habitat the refuge protects. Most of the water on the refuge comes from underground aquifers with water coming to the surface via artesian wells. The marshy areas are fed by the artesian wells, and the excess water flows to the Pecos River. There is a unique area of the refuge that has sinkholes filled with water some as deep as 60 feet. The geology of the area is dominated by limestone and gypsum, and underground water weakens areas of gypsum resulting in a collapse and a sinkhole. Bitter Lake was so named by early settlers who found the lake had a high alkaline content.

Despite the dryness of the refuge, it does serve as an important stop over location for migrating birds. We are told that thousands of lesser sand hill cranes and light geese (snow and Ross) spend time here. In fact we have been told that the cranes are starting to arrive, but we have not seen or heard any. At  Bosque del Apache NWR where we were last fall, the crane population there was dominated by the greater sand hill cranes migrating from Idaho and Montana. The lessers that will be showing up at Bitter Lake spend the summer in the Arctic. And unlike Bosque, Bitter Lake NWR does not plant and cultivate food crops for the cranes. During the days, the cranes disperse looking for food, but come back to the refuge at night for roosting. It will be fun to observe the differences between the two refuges and the crane populations.