Photo Gallery
New Mexico in winter provides hugely scenic habitats to explore, including the dry and rocky southern deserts…
…Pinyon-Juniper filled canyons…
…open ponds supporting a wide array of waterfowl…
…often including hordes of Sandhill Cranes and Cackling, Canada and Snow Geese…
…and the Chihuahuan Desert grasslands, here at sunrise.
Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge is a place of extrordinary beauty and abundance; here Snow Geese depart at sunrise for their daytime foraging…
…and here large resting flocks of Snow (mostly) and Ross’s Geese and Sandhill Cranes.
With such waterfowl abundance, a few Bald Eagles are always around to prey on the weak…
…and many other raptors including Ferruginous Hawk are likely.
The birds are as varied as the habitats, and along the way we may be dazzled by a stunning male Mountain Bluebird…
…charmed by a diminutive Cackling Geese…
…inspected by curious Rufous-crowned Sparrows…
…studied by suspicious Curve-billed Thrashers…
…or amused by excitable Juniper Titmouse.
New Mexico is a great place to study wintering sparrows, such as this adult Gambel’s White-crowned Sparrow…
…the handsome Black-throated Sparrow…
…the uncommon red Fox Sparrow…
…and there is also the possibility of encountering a wintering rarities such as this Harris’s Sparrow…
We’ll also visit forested montane slopes…
…which are often covered in a fairy-like sheen of ice after winter storms.
We’ll look for some of the less common montane finches like Pine Grosbeak…
…and hope especially for rosy-finches in the Sandia Mountains, here a Gray-crowned.
We’ll look at everything; this Coyote probably finds the avian concentrations at Bosque as attractive as we do…
…and this Collared Peccary, seemingly comfortable in the cold.