Bird Watchers Notebook
I wish I could update you every day on all the wonderful bird sightings I am enjoying as we drive and camp our way across New Mexico. I've added a number of new birds to my life list and could add more if I could see faster - LOL.
My most hated words have come to be "He just flew away". My husband is a great bird spotter - he'll spot and point and then I fumble for ten minutes with glasses and binoculars - and the bird "just now flew away". LOL。
Some of the birds at least try. One poor Osprey teetered around on a tree top way too small for him for at least two full minutes this morning so I could find a pair of binoculars and get switched. I got just a glimpse and then...he not only flew away, he flew around a corner into an area that I could not follow because of water and regulations about rock climbing in that particular area!
What I really wanted to tell you about, though, was the Dragonfly Festival we totally lucked into in Roswell, NM this weekend - actually, held at Bitter Lake Wildlife Refuge outside Roswell. And I do mean, we just lucked into it, being in Roswell a day ahead of schedule, finding the festival advertised in the paper, and getting in on the last tour as a "standby" reservation!
What a treat to explore the wildlife refuge in the company of two very experienced and knowledgeable volunteers. I learned so much about dragonflies and saw an amazing variety.
One hundred and one different dragonfly species have been found at the refuge, with another 125 considered "possible" because of their unique combination of both saline and freshwater wetlands. The numbers are increasing, too. The volunteer told us that last year they were lucky to see eleven species per tour. This year they had been seeing eighteen or so, and just that day one very rare species, and another species that had never been recorded on the refuge previously.
We were lucky to see a specimen captured of a marine dragonfly, usually found only on the Atlantic coast - but again, on the refuge because of the saline environment.
Another spectacular capture was a male desert fork tail damselfly, also found only in this type of saline environment. A few minutes later, my husband actually captured, by hand, a beautiful golden colored female of the same species!
We also got to see a Halloween Pendant, a Russet Tail Club tail, a Comanche Skimmer, a Meadow Hawk, and both male and female Green Darters. I'm sure there are many that I have left out.
One that I missed that I really wanted to see was the hot pink colored Roseate Skimmer - I've never seen a pink dragonfly! They had been spotted earlier on a particular pond - but as the volunteers told us, they seem to get wise to the humans with nets by the fourth or fifth trip and sometimes clear out for a while! It was this pond where my poor dear husband took one step too many on what looked like a thick cushion of high prairie grass -and sank through the fragile ground up to his knee in black mud. Took two of us to pull him back out. Nothing hurt but his ego. Poor guy got teased all the rest of the trip.
The volunteers told him they had not seen those crafty dragonflies lure anyone into a sink hole yet - although they had been lured into grass mazes full of blood thirsty mosquitoes before.
When the driver of our van realized that several of his participants were leaning out with binoculars at every bird, he also started kindly stopping and pointing out some of the many birds they have at the refuge. Of course, the big bird migrations haven't started yet, but we did see a flock of Snowy Egrets, a Great Blue Heron, a Great White Egret, and a flock of White Pelicans. He also identified a black bird as a White faced Ibis, but I didn't get a good enough look to say anything but...big black bird.
It is odd, to me, for the Great Blue Herons, so long a daily feature of my life, to now be almost a rare sighting, even though we are staying largely at parks with water features.
Speaking of which, if you love swimming in natural water like I do, make sure you get out to Bottomless Lakes State Park while you are at the Bitter Lake area. They are just a few miles apart. Lea Lake is crystal clear, mixed freezing cold and warm water due to the several springs feeding it, and 90 feet deep! The most wonderful "swimming' hole" I've ever seen, let alone swum in. I had to be torn away with the promise of Carlsbad Caverns as our next stop...
I'm briefly at Carlsbad Campgrounds enjoying a night of Internet access before it is back to the wilds for another week or so. Hope you are having some great birding, too. I'll stop by as often as I can!
Good birding!
