Wednesday, December 9, 2009

New Mexico vacation

ANNOUNCEMENT

In the past two weeks I have been spammed to the point of annoyance. I have chosen, for now, to allow only blogger members of my blog to be allowed to leave comments. I apologize for this inconvenience. If you are not a blogger member and want to leave a comment you can contact me via email: marycarlson10@gmail.com.

NOW ON TO MY VACATION!

This year the annual Festival of the Cranes held at Bosque del Apache was November 17-22. My husband, Dave, and I flew from San Jose into Albuquerque on Monday, Nov 16. We arrived shortly after 11 a.m., but our baggage "missed the flight." It was a good thing that we had a few hours to spare; we had a long drive ahead of us to get to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. So after filling out a missing baggage report we picked up our rental car and headed over to the Rio Grande Nature Center to see some wildlife, mostly birds, and wait for the airlines to call us about our bags. We were there less than an hour when we got the call, and so we headed back to the airport to pick up our luggage. Meanwhile, here are some photos of what we saw at the Nature Center.

As it is most everywhere else in the country and Canada there is an abundance of Canada Geese.

And there seems to be an abundance of mallards, too.
On the path/trail to the visitor center there is a bird feeder where many passerines catch a bite to eat, including Mourning Doves.
There are several white-winged doves that visit the feeder, too. At quick glance they look like mourning doves, but the white edging on their wings catches our attention. Then if you look closer you can tell the color of their eyes are different -- they have red eyes. And an even closer look you can see the dove has a dark malar spot and lacks the black spots on its back.

My next post will be Elephant Butte Lake State Park. That was our first event we attended for the Festival of the Cranes.

3 comments:

Ruth said...

The spam on blogger is a problem right now. I am getting it even with word verification. I wish I had looked closer at the doves I tended to ignore on our recent trip. Glad your luggage arrived!

KGMom said...

Sorry to read that you too have been plagued by spammers on blog comments. I think almost all of us have been.
Phooey--these people with too much time and too little common courtesy ruin it for we (good) folk.
Love the photos of the ducks--that's a lot of ducks.

Mary C said...

Hi Ruth -- spammers need to "get a life." Nevertheless, we busy folk continue to face extra challenges. I have noted before that word verification does not really work with some spammers; that's why I have chosen to only allow those commenters who are "registered" or have an OpenID. As for our luggage, I certainly was relieved since I had my binoculars and "meds" in my bag. It was a few years ago when I noticed/realized that there were a couple of different doves that reside in the southwest. We are all so used to seeing MODOs or rock pigeons that we forget there are other doves "out there." ;o) I'm so glad you had such an enjoyable vacation out here in the west. I surely enjoy reading all your blog posts (even if I don't leave a comment).

Hi Donna - yes, I've noticed that a number of my blogging friends have been "hit," too. And I've noticed that the word verification did not work for several of them, so I decided to get a little more "drastic." Note my comment above to Ruth. So far, so good with restricting who comments. And it seems like we both agree that these "idiots" need to get a life!

 

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