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Friday, December 31, 2010 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM

Snow Goose, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 4, 2010
Snow Goose, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 4, 2010

Only twenty thousand pictures to sort

Ha! I was so busy playing with the new Canon EOS 7D 18 MP CMOS Digital SLR Camera with 3-inch LCD and 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM Standard Zoom Lens I bought from Amazon last January I didn't take the time to organize the thousands of pictures I was taking. Big mistake.

I was staying at the Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park and spent at lot of time at the nearby Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge experimenting and practicing panning on birds in flight in High Speed Continuous mode to see if I could get some decent shots of birds in flight. I was doing this hand held and trying to teach my body to swing smoothly enough to get pictures that were reasonably sharp. That takes some practice and at 8 shots a second adds up to a lot of pictures.

At the time I didn't do much more than give them a quick look to see what I was getting - often nothing worth keeping - before moving on to the next shoot. I didn't even take the time to delete the obvious clunkers.

So here I sit, throwing away tons of junk and stumbling on a few keepers like this one.

Night camp

Site 8 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM

Absolute Silence

I remembered hearing of a backcountry Park Service ranger who was cleaning up after dinner one evening when he heard a chilling scream. He ran out of his cabin in time to see a mountain lion standing with a dead deer next to her. The lion saw the ranger and bounded off. The ranger realized this might be a rare opportunity to closely observe a mountain lion, so he stationed himself a short distance away from the deer carcase. He sat in absolute silence, and listened closely as night deepened. After sitting in darkness for well over an hour, he gave up hope of the lion's returning and stood up. In the powerful beam of his flashlight, he could clearly see that the dead deer was no longer there. ...

Caught in Fading Light: Mountain Lions, Zen Masters, and Wild Nature by Gary Thorp

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