Bosque de Apache National Wildlife Refuge

Having another beautiful day, we planned to take a trip north to visit the Bosque de Apache National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is the winter home to roughly 17,000 Sandhill Cranes as well as a multitude of geese, other waterfowl, and raptors. Thousands are drawn here to watch the cranes fly out to feed and the fly in to roost. It must be an amazing sight.

The refuge has a 12 mile, one-way graded road, with two additional loops to tour April to October. As the cranes have long been gone from the refuge, we were treated to shorebirds and waterfowl. The refuge seems to be intelligently run using water from Rio Grande through channels where they can flood fields or dry fields for planting of corn and alfalfa. The Visitor Center was interesting and they played us a 15 minute video about the refuge that was very interesting.

Here you are in the middle of nowhere out in the New Mexico desert and low and behold here is all sort of wetlands.

We spotted this little buck feeding.
Here are some herons and cormorants just enjoying a beautiful day.
This guy is a Cattle Egret (a new bird for us).

We really enjoyed the refuge even though the "stars" have gone north. If we are ever in the area November through mid-March, we would certainly stop in the area.

After the refuge, we headed north to Socorro in search of food. We drove past a Mexican restaurant that had a number of cars in the parking lot so John pulled in. Actually, the meal was good and they served sopapilla's with the meal. Sopapilla's are fried dough that you open up, put honey inside, and eat. So good (not good for you) and we really enjoyed them. We ate ours for desert but they were meant to be like bread for the meal.

From there we headed to Elephant Butte to see if our mail had arrived which it had. It is always fun see what the mail brings.

Thankfully, I have put our meal in the crock pot before we left for the refuge so dinner was taken care of after we got home. I'm am still enjoying the sound of silence but soon we will be back with strong winds revisiting us.

Our time here in Elephant Butte is almost up. As there is no place in New Mexico safe from the winds and we don't need to be in Albuquerque until the 17th, we have decided to stay here for another week as the rent is cheaper than we could get anywhere else. We will need to pack up, go to the dump station, and pick out a non-reserved site for the next week. We are hoping to chose one that won't have us side on to the winds. We need to move as our site is reserved for the weekend. It appears that all of the reservable sites are booked for the weekend so it should be interesting to see this place jumping as more sites are empty that they are full.