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Monday, February 15, 2010 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM

Illuminated, Sandhill Crane, Bosque National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 15, 2010
Illuminated, Sandhill Crane, Bosque National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 15, 2010

I got one!

Getting interesting shots of these magnificent cranes in flight leaving the roost in the early morning light has turned into quite a project. Many many thousands of shots later I'm beginning to see the light - how positioning myself to catch the cranes leaving the roost in just the right light from just the right angle and firing away - taking hundreds of shots - can yield a satisfying one once in a while. What fun! And what an honor and privilege it is that the cranes will let all of us out here on a frosty morning to get so so close to their roost and flight path.

Night camp

Site 16 - 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.

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