SEARCH Travels With LD

Sunday, December 20, 2009 - Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park, San Antonio NM

Bald Eagles, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, December 20, 2009
Bald Eagles, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, December 20, 2009

The Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge is a must see if you are into birdwatching. I'm not really a birdwatcher but today was such a beautiful sunny Sunday I couldn't resist taking a bike ride through the refuge before I head off to Ghost Ranch.

Those three big birds were so far away I couldn't tell what they were with these old naked eyes so I zoomed in to 18x with the Panasonic DMC-FZ28 I was carrying and fired away. Surprise! They weren't some big buzzard or hawk - they were bald eagles. Four bald eagles - an adult and three juveniles. I hadn't even seen the adult camouflaged by the tree. Way cool.

Maybe I oughta come back here....

Night camp

Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park, San Antonio NM

A Voyage and a Harbor

The native American was forced westward by the young escaping the limits of east coast villages that had been established only a generation or two earlier by parents escaping the limits of European villages. From then on, whether seeking a whale, rafting with Huck Finn, easy riding with Peter Fonda, or next week in Cancun, there has been a strong belief in America that happiness lies somewhere else. And yet as we find freedom we also rediscover loneliness. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says, we require both shelter and venture. We need freedom and support, silence and cacophony, the vast and distant but also the warm and near, a voyage and a harbor, the great adventure and the hobbit hole. Much of the iconography of our times gives little sense of this. Instead, the individual is treated as a self-sufficient, self-propelled vehicle moving across a background of other things, other places, and other people.

more...