Writing from Socorro Best Western as my images download. I was using the Z9 on 15fps with a heavy finger, a lot of images. Bosque is so devoid of birds that there was a "bear" jam (it's a Yellowstone term) yesterday over a fluffy hawk on a log! A handful of cranes scattered about here and there. Someone said that corn was planted in the park but not in public areas. Any feed that might have been around was cut and removed, or so it seemed. I did see, around 2:30 this afternoon (Wednesday) two coyotes hunting, way too far away for a shot, and a small group of female mule deer far out in a field, neither was a shot for me but I was encouraged to see wildlife there. As I was heading out of the park there was a good number of Rosses geese landing in the pond outside the park so I'll head there tomorrow morning for the fly off. On the good side, Ladd Gordon has all of the sandhill cranes in the area, numbering in the thousands I think, no way to count! I go mainly for the sandhill cranes so I was happy to find them there and I'll spend the majority of my time there. Really nice in-flight shots, both morning and evening. So, there are birds in the area, just not much at Bosque right now. The sandhill crane festival starts tomorrow, they did it later this year because of the lack of cranes but there are still no cranes there, bad planning on my part as far as timing, but it does not seem to be mainly about photography so I'm hoping it does not impact the area too much; I"ll just have to beat the busload going out tomorrow morning for the fly off! The brochure said everything takes place at Bosque and I'm hoping they don't head over to Ladd Gordon. That's the report from Socorro.
