Tag Archives: Bosque del Apache

The Narcissistic Plover

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NarcissiticPlover5850Killdeer a member in good standing of the Plover family – Bosque del Apache N.M.

“Hello, Noticing you looking back at me to see if I was looking back at you to see if you were looking back at me took up most of my morning. I nearly missed lunch. By the way did I mention you are very good-looking. Well yes, thank you, I may be good-looking too but, no, stop it, you’re too kind, really, I couldn’t help noticing you there and now I just can’t stop looking at you. It’s as if I am looking at myself but a more handsome version. Yes I do come here often. Well it’s been wonderful seeing you here too, but I have to go now. Perhaps I’ll see you here again later? Great, you are a handsome devil”.

Overheard at the Bosque del Apache wildlife refuge center. I would imagine you never knew Killdeer thought so highly of themselves but these are some of the things you learn as you study the wildlife around you. I knew that they tended to be self-centered but this is a whole new character trait that demands further investigation. The entire conversation above was taken verbatim from the field notes of one of our top wildlife researchers and will be used as a part of our grant proposal to obtain funds to explore whether other animals have idiosyncrasies that can be exploited for monetary gain.

You can help in this endeavor by donating anything of value you have, old diamonds, gold, or other precious metals, or by simply wadding up that money you were going to send to NPR, stuff it in a sack and send it directly to the blog. Knowing that by sending your hard-earned money, that you were going to use for frivolous purposes anyway, to this blog so that we may spend your hard-earned money frivolously instead, will give you that warm feeling in your heart that you get when you realize you have just squandered the rent money on something totally worthless. As you know we believe we can put it (your money) to a much better frivolous use and you get the benefit of knowing that our crucial wildlife research goes on un-interrupted. Thank you for your generosity readers and know that deep down this will make you a better person, not that all of you need to be a better person, but there are some of you that could use a little improvement, you know who you are, I’m just saying.

P.S. Old cigarette boats and vintage airplanes are excepted also. And unused deeds to any endeavor in the oil and natural gas industry would work also, thank you.

Ducks of Death

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DucksofDeath6233Snow Geese Bosque del Apache  New  Mexico             click to enlarge

While on a recent trip to visit Bosque del Apache, a bird sanctuary in New Mexico, something very upsetting happened. We were witness to some disturbing activity that affects the lives of our feathered friends. It seems that an extreme element has inserted itself into the tranquil life of the birds there. We’ve all heard about the “gang problem” that exists in our society today but never would we have imagined that it has wormed its way into the animal world and especially into the serene surroundings of this winter stopover for some of our most popular birds.

Apparently some extremely aggressive South American Fuegian Steamer Ducks (Tachyeres pteneres) formed a gang back in the early 60’s to control the importation and distribution of high yield, high sugar corn products to the other species of waterfowl in the area. This corn derivative colloquially known as “Poppers” or “Kernelitos” on the street or waterways as it were, soon became an incredibly lucrative source of income for these feathered gangsters.

It wasn’t long before the gangs who had primarily been found in the backwaters of Columbia, gained more and more control and power until even the local (CIWY) or Comunidad Inti Wara Yassi, a non-governmental organization dedicated to environmental education and the care of sick, mistreated and abandoned wildlife, were able to contain them.

Things were rapidly spiraling out of control and the gang now known as the “Ducks of Death” for their heavy-handed violent methods of enforcement and intimidation soon began their migration North. It wasn’t long before “Poppers” and the gangs that introduced them were being found in some of the winter resting areas of migratory waterfowl in northern Mexico. Young ducks and geese were being invited to try “Kernelitos” at “Popper” parties and soon birds barely fledged were hooked on this “cool gruel” as it was called in the underground language of the users. Some of the younger birds began calling themselves “gruelers” and sporting tattoos of corn kernels on their exposed areas.

Along with this “grain of destruction” came all the violence and terrifying problems that accompany any kind of illegal substance use. Groups of hit-ducks employing their strongwing tactics were soon intimidating the locals. Stories of pulling out primary feathers, breaking wing bones, and using their drug enhanced mandibles to bite the necks and other lethal areas of those they were intimidating were soon making the rounds. They became enforcers of the worst kind and ruled the waterways with an iron-bill policy. No one was safe.

Despite wildlife officials best efforts they were unable to stem the trafficking in this insidious addicting menace and due to the porous nature of our borders they feared it wouldn’t be long before this terrible debilitating habit and all its accompanying violence would be found in the US. Well now it has and we have the photographic proof. See image above (Interpol ID# 88560283472).

The Institute, although not normally known as an LEA or Law enforcement agency, we sometimes work closely with different branches of law enforcement when we see obvious wrongdoing occur. So far we have notified every agency that may have any connection to this problem but have not heard back yet with any results. The image above which shows incontrovertible proof of the infiltration and application of terror that has now reached our shores, as it were, is just a wake up call. It’s here and it needs to be dealt with.

Your help as auxiliary observers is needed and will help stem the tide of this implacable menace by reporting any violent behavior you witness in your local bird population. How you  can help; Watch for unexplained kernels of corn laying on the ground in and around waterways, look for signs of unusual behavior in young birds, such as ‘strutting’ or unusual or different hairstyles like ‘ducktails’. Manic wing flapping and uncontrollable squawking are signs of being in the throes of a “sugar high” as is lying listlessly in the water with their heads submerged. Beware of anti-social actions such as laughing or giggling by young birds with excessively yellow or orange feet, these can be signs of “popping” or “using”, and immediately notify law enforcement if you see any type of aggression in the bird population you are observing. This is a sure sign of gang activity. Do not be afraid to inform local law enforcement of anything you deem suspicious. They’ll thank you for it and you’ll feel better knowing you’ve done your part to help stem this horrible problem. It is better to be known as a quack than to have done nothing at all.

Night Patrol

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NightPatrol6375Sandhill cranes Bosque del Apache                            click to enlarge

There are unsung heroes in the animal world and this squadron of Sandhill cranes on Night Patrol are some of the best and bravest. Every evening as the sun goes down and the main flock settles in for the night, these brave birds take off on a lonely mission to patrol the shorelines around the nesting ponds at Bosque del Apache.

They watch for predators, the ponds are shallow and it would only take one enterprising coyote in hip boots to decimate the flock as it was peacefully sleeping. Those who have fallen asleep in the reeds are monitored closely for smoking as one careless individual with a cigarette could ignite the whole pond causing untold destruction. And of course there are the owls and eagles, those Raptors of the Darkness. Most dangerous of all they’re like the Pawnee in Dances with Wolves, big screaming devils that swoop down out of the sky when they’re least expected and steal young Sandhills who stray too far from their parents, leaving behind only ripples and the occasional blood-flecked feather to mark the passing of the unlucky.

It’s a thankless dangerous job flying at night without lights or instruments for guidance and there is the occasional tragic accident where one of these watchers in the night are lost after hitting the high tension lines near the ponds. When you see that bright orange flash against the coal black sky and hear that soul wrenching squawk you know we’ve lost another one. Some have also become disoriented and flown off into the darkness to wake up in Mexico or alone on the Tundra cold and weary. But they persevere night after night, ignoring the cold, the loneliness, the danger, doing their duty, flying the night skies to protect those below, taking the risks so that the ones at rest can wake to a safer dawn.

Thank you Night Patrol, Thanks IronBeak and RocketButt, Thanks CoyoteSniffer and Blivet, you big lug, Thank you IceBird and DivetMaker for all those crazy landings and thank you all the nameless ones that have gone before you. Thanks for keeping the night safe for the innocents and for being true heroes. We salute you.

A Remarkable Discovery

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2013-10-30HeatSensors1162click to enlarge

For some time one of our more promising projects here at the Institute has been in the field of Thermodynamics as Applied to Migrating Species as a Method of Determining Geospatial Locations and Direction. Or in other words “How do birds like the Sandhill crane know where they are and how they got there as well as where they’re going and how they’re going to get back”. I know right, That’s a big hairy question.

As you know we send out researchers to all parts of the globe to study thorny problems like these. Most of them have had some training in the field that they’re working in, especially the PhD’s, and those that we can trust to come back, are provided with all the necessary equipment and materials to do a bang up job. To ensure they do we hold back their per diem until we get results and as they get hungry we usually have an immediate inflow of data. It’s been found through trial and error that not feeding them until the uplink starts working, regularly gets more uniform results. Send us data, we send you a Hostess Ho-Ho. That’s our deal.

What about the quality of the data you might ask, well go ahead ask, it had better be good that’s all we say, the data, I mean. We have a dialup connection to the internet where we can cross check this information, so they better not try any funny stuff. The internet is pretty darn powerful and full of information, sometimes I wonder why we even bother sending some of these people out on these jobs, but we’ve found that dialup is so slow that many times we can send someone to Dubai for instance, and get the data back by UPS faster than we can over our dialup connection. Our ISP has told us that there is something new on the horizon called DSL that will work really, really fast and if we get caught up on our bill and stay current for 36 months they will install it here at the Institute. Then those guys better watch out.

The initial data we have received is promising if not electrifying.  Our researchers tell us that on some of the more remarkable birds they have found a direct connection to the Sandhills cranes ability to get somewhere and our project. It appears that some of the more mature cranes have primary feathers that are actually IFR sensors that are hard-wired directly into their bird brains and that as soon as their wing tips are struck by the early morning rays of the sun, their primary feathers turn golden with the heat of a non-sensical bio-directional whammy, chock full of data, and they get all the information they need to get wherever they are going.

It’s an instant download, apparently from one of those super-secret spy satellites that we used to use to spy on Cuba, that gives them real-time information on wind-speed, barometric pressure, GPS coordinates, maps, updates on how successful the NRA has been in expanding Sandhill Crane hunting seasons, a currency converter, what kind of harvest they had in the Ukraine, a universal translator so they can talk to cranes from any country, etc. Anything and everything they need to know in a nano-second. If you have ever seen one of these cranes falter as they begin their ascent, or gone all over wonky of a sudden, that was exactly when the download hit. The feathers light up, their little bird brains go all Jesus Christo and it’s done. They got it. The reason all cranes do not have this ability is due to the fact that it takes a mature, reasonable, old brain to receive this mega load of info and that means a mature stable adult.

Of course any theory this important must be tested to make sure our researchers aren’t making this crap up, and test it we did. Since one of our researchers here at the Institute is a fallen away NSA techie and knew all the frequencies that those old Cuba spy satellites used, we were able to reprogram his remote that he uses to fly his new HydroSpiff drone and take over control of some of the Sandhill cranes leaders and make them do all kinds of goofy stuff.

He made them fly straight down the highway about 8 feet off the ground to see how many Winnebago’s he could put in the ditch. He’d take the flock up to about 800′ and make them spell out dirty words. But the kicker that nearly got the entire program shut down was when he had them occupy the drive thru at the Socorro McDonald’s so no one could order. Man you do not mess with the franchises  during peak periods. Those guys know people. They had the FCC down there so fast we barely had time to hide the gear and say “No we don’t know nothing about that”.

So far the research looks promising, it’s not done yet but we’re saying there’s a paper in here, and we’re going to publish. Nature, Scientific American, Ham Operators Gazette, Huffington Post, we don’t care. We publish, we get paid. Remember it’s the Institute bringing you the information the others won’t print. So watch for it at a newsstand near you.

Bosque Banshee

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BosqueBanshee4448click to enlarge

Screaming down out of the great white north, a snow goose comes in for a landing. One of thousands of birds heading south for the winter she is usually accompanied by the rest of her clan and the clan by the flock and the flocks by each other until the sky is filled to the horizons with birds. They literally darken the sky as they come in to feed at the cornfields and settle in to the ponds for the night.

When I was young, way last century, my maternal grandmother would yell at us kids out the back door “You kids knock it off you sound like a bunch of banshees”. We never knew what banshees were, unless they were a bunch of 8 and 9 year old kids that yelled a lot but we also knew that the razor strap hung on the nail next to the key that never locked the back door so we’d quiet down for a while.

When the snow geese are coming in they must be the banshees that my grandmother yelled about. The sounds they make are incredible and constant and fill the air until you can’t hear anything else. Your very skin seems to resonate with the sound. At sunset when they’re returning to the ponds and filling them with their bodies until it would be impossible for one more bird to land they keep up a constant volume of noise that must soothe them just through being exposed to the standing waves of the sound. Kind of like an audible massage.

The next morning when the magic of the ascension happens the thousands upon thousands of geese lift into the air in unison and at first all you hear is the soft gentle thunder of their wing beats that gets louder and louder as they start to pass over you. They lift off just moments before the sun comes over the hills surrounding the ponds and as the first rays strike them they begin to call in what can only be a song of celebration of a new day.

Banshees or not it is a sound I have come to love and believe that everyone should hear once, although it’s probably a good thing for the geese that my grandmother wasn’t along though.

Fishkiller

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FishKiller5761click to enlarge

Bosque del Apache can sometimes be a rough place if you’re a bird or more likely if you’re a fish. Located in the southern part of New Mexico near Socorro, it is nestled right where lots of drama of the most violent kind has occurred. The entire area has been a hotbed of bad behavior since people have known about it, with more than its share of seedy characters of all sorts hanging around doing dastardly deeds and generally being unrepentantly unrepentant.

You can go far enough back in history to find that even one patch of dirt didn’t like the patch next to it in the area around Bosque del Apache and it didn’t get any better as time went on. Just recently, like in the 1700’s, the Comanche’s, the bad boys of the southwestern tribes were active and doing every manner of awful stuff, raiding settlements, capturing or killing the inhabitants, causing a high level of fearfulness to the point where people just said the hell with it and moved back to where ever they came from.

Then you had the Mexicans who ran the place with a pretty tough hand in the early 1800’s, they forced everybody to eat those really hot little green chilies, habernos I think they’re called, it makes my mouth burn just to say the name, whether they wanted to or not. That ought to have been a hanging offense right there. Even Kit Carson, and you know how bad he was, he was like the Honey Badger who wasn’t scared of nothing said “OK I was going to retire here and start a sheep ranch, but these people are just too damn hard to get along with.” and he packed up and went somewhere safer like the Indian Nation or somewhere, and this was in the mid-1800’s already. They had movable type back east and weren’t far off from electric lights and radios by then, and he was scared to live there. Kit Carson! That would be like John Wayne saying he was scared to live near L.A.

Billy the Kid was a regular and you know he liked to tear stuff up. The place was just stuffed to the gills with outlaws. Even today in the 21st century they will charge you more for gasoline down there than anywhere else and just laugh at you when you complain about it. It’s a rough place that New Mexico, just watch it when you go down there.

All through its history the desperadoes, malcontents and just downright mean characters have passed through this neighborhood and one of the worst to come down the pike has been this guy. Simply known as Fishkiller, no ones knows his real name, where he’s from or  how long he’s going to stay, nothing at all, except they know not to mess with him. When you see him sitting there on the bank putting out that evil eye you know that soon some fish is going to die. Known to be a holy terror with that rapier-like bill he has no compunction what so ever about removing the life force from any living fish he sees. There’s many a grieving carp widow hiding in the long grass under the bank sobbing over her missing husband because he went out for a minnow and never came home. All that remained was the sinister shadow of the Fishkiller splayed across the calm surface of the stream and the spreading ripples of the departed.

I told you Bosque del Apache could be dangerous. I wasn’t kidding. So if you’re going to be down there some time and you have a favorite fish don’t be calling for him if you even think the Fishkiller is in the area. I’m just saying. Not wanting to tell you what to do or anything but now you know and if you go ahead and get that fish killed it’s on you. I warned you. OK then, have a nice day.

Traffic On The Runway

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TrafficOnRunway0823click to enlarge

Everyone knows about the hassles of flying today. The crowds, the lines, TSA, extra charges for baggage, ugly people being allowed to be in the same line as you, having only one of your shoes come out on the conveyor, being told that the missing shoe isn’t on the conveyor and could you step over here please, the list goes on and on. But what isn’t widely known is that the congestion, and dangers of flying has entered the wildlife world.

The risks of flying seem greater lately with the increase in air traffic and reports of collisions and near misses a normal occurrence and nearly a daily event. An example of this phenomenon is just the other day a JAL flight out of Narita took off in a westerly direction the exact same time a British Airways flight left Heathrow in a northerly direction, the aircraft were barely 4800 miles apart. How there wasn’t a collision has been the main topic of conversation around the local air controllers’ water cooler ever since. It is estimated that by using this logic, and why wouldn’t you, there are nearly 800,209 potential accidents a day. That’s scary enough to put you off your eggnog without even trying to do the math.

If the possibilities of the comingling of two aircraft in mid-air aren’t enough there are threats of air traffic controllers striking, baggage handlers striking, food concessionaires striking, people writing about aviation employees striking, striking, it’s a wonder that you can get from point A to point B anymore.

This is just as true in the natural world as it is in the unnatural one. A case in point is the mystery that occurred in Bosque del Apache, a heavily used flyway in New Mexico, in December of 2009 when Flight 19, a squadron of Sandhill cranes stationed out of the wetlands near Socorro, New Mexico attempted a daylight landing on runway 00-Bravo during the morning of December 5th. With clear skies, an unlimited ceiling and no reported obstacles they were on their final approach to land when there was brief squawk of “Mayday! Mayday! Abort!… ” and the transmission ended.

The five Sandhill cranes that comprised that flight were never heard from again and to this day their whereabouts are unknown and the disappearance has never been explained. For weeks an area wide search was conducted without any results. “It is as if they have simply flown away” said one government searcher who wished to remain anonymous as he was not authorized to speak about this matter.

It has become one of the legendary mysteries of our times and one that has become the daily fodder of conspirator theorists everywhere. After all Bosque del Apache is only 143.79 air miles due West from Roswell, New Mexico and you’d have to have been abducted by aliens and probed to near exhaustion not to know the importance of what is located there.

Fortunately, as far as this mystery is concerned, runway 00-Bravo is one that the Institute has had “funny feelings” about for years and we had placed a hidden camera there without the knowledge and permission of the Powers-That-Be just in case something Very Weird might happen there someday. Well, as you can see it was really lucky we did because in going over a piece of long-lost digital film we came across this extraordinary image of Flight 19 actually attempting to make that fateful landing. How’s that for having your crap together?

Of course our image of Flight 19 and what really happened to it has been plastered all over the government billboards and forums and derided as being fake and made up and a visual lie, but we know the truth and now so do you. We will not be silenced, and black helicopters on silent running, hovering night after night over the headquarters building here at the Institute don’t scare us either. In fact nothing human will make us stop writing and unless we are actually abducted ourselves by some kind of ungodly alien kidnappers, the truth will out. Stay tuned for further bulletins about this secret Gov…..

Note from the ISP Blog relayers: Unfortunately the above post was truncated and ceased publishing suddenly. We have been unable to reach the Institute headquarters to find out what the problem is. In fact there is some kind of electronic blackout over that entire area that we are attempting to identify but as of right now there appears to be a government sanctioned news suspension in effect. We will report any changes in this situation as they occur. At this time we are not accepting calls regarding this startling development. Thank you for your patience.