Tuesday, February 8, 2011 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM
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Ready, Set, .., Snow Geese, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 8, 2011
Explosion
People travel miles to see what comes next. Now I know why. A few thousand Snow Geese resting on the ice out beyond the cranes suddenly stood up en masse, turned, and blasted off in a furious, roaring, quacking, cloud of flapping wings.
This neophyte didn't know this was coming and wasn't ready to get a worthy picture but maybe I can tease something from the few caught by my urgently flapping of the shutter that'll give some hint of this startling, awesome eruption to put up here tomorrow.
Night camp
Site 10 - Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park, San Antonio NM
- This is a basic, small Mom & Pop RV Park with full hookups.
- Verizon cell phone and Broadband service are available here with a strong signal.
- Locate Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park on my Night Camps map
- Click for Google street view
- Check the weather in San Antonio NM
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.