Bosque del Apache

If you could take just one photo: Year-round birding and wildlife

The Bosque del Apache offers an excellent birding experience for experts or beginners, the physically fit or disabled. Famous among birders for the number and varieties of birds that winter in these well-maintained wetlands set in the New Mexico desert, the Bosque is equally interesting in spring, fall, and summer. Avoid the crowds, and enjoy a variety of dragonflies, wildlife, and birds in the off seasons. Boardwalks hover over ponds, giving you closer access to cormorants, red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds, and other water birds. The visitors center offers a gift shop with field guides, binoculars, and butterfly nets with sales helping to support the bosque. The history of the refuge is documented with photographs of the building of the bosque and many of the birds seen there. If you're tired, have a seat by the large picture window and watch the many small birds who come to the feeders outside the visitors center.

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On a frigid morning before sunrise, you stand on the “flight deck” and wait. This is no airport for humans, however. It’s a platform built expressly for viewing hundreds of thousands of snow geese at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico. The birds over-winter here at this refuge, which is deliberately managed for all those snow geese as well as thousands of sandhill cranes. With the sunrise aglow to the east and your breath visible in the chilly air, something at sometime will cause the birds to fly. They go up en masse, and the honking and beating of all those wings reverberates through the air and right into your soul.

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