New Mexico

Backlit oak forest

The only constant is change

I was cleaning up my archive of nature sound recordings and ran across a lovely pre-dawn recording from the mountains north of Mimbres, New Mexico. In this rather remote area between two large wilderness areas was a small USFS campground where I stayed for a couple of nights back in June of 2015. It was […]

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Sunrise on the lower Colorado River, California

Best laid plans

I recently returned from a 7-week sound recording expedition to the southwest U.S.  From Carson City, to southern California, southern Arizona, southern Texas, western New Mexico, central and southern Arizona, a quick trip to Albuquerque to see friends, back to Arizona, and finally home through Utah and central Nevada.  Almost 7,500 miles, and almost all

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Retrospective

Well, it’s been quite a while since I posted here, as I’ve been recovering from knee replacement surgery.  Recovery has been quite the ordeal, with hours and hours of physical therapy every day.  But the strength and flexibility is coming back, just in time, as the trees and shrubs are starting to bud, the spring

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Thunderstorm at Quemado Lake

Last fall I moved from southeastern Arizona to northern Nevada.  As part of the move, I incorporated a recording excursion that included southern Arizona, western New Mexico, southern Colorado, southern Utah and eastern Nevada.  Part of the reason I chose that path was to stop by Quemado Lake in western New Mexico.  This is a

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Changes in latitude

The final days of my fall 2016 border-to-border journey I awoke to a beautiful, calm and sunny morning along Disappointment Creek in Colorado; the silence only broken by a light whisper through the sage brush and a car on the distant highway.  After breakfast, I packed up the car and headed south. I made a

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Crane reflections, Bosque del Apache.

The language of Sandhill Cranes

I visited Bosque del Apache wildlife refuge in early December, 2015.  I had visited a couple of years ago, but was unsuccessful in getting many decent recordings (see Bosque del Apache).  This time my goal was to get some recordings of the tens of thousands of Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese that winter at the

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Sounds of Autumn

Another autumn has rolled around, leaves are changing, days growing shorter, and temperatures are getting cooler.  Once again, the fall finds me in pursuit of autumn sounds, of which my favorite is the bugle of rutting bull elk.  A couple of years ago, I had a successful time recording elk at Quemado Lake in New

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Back to the Gila River

The Upper Gila River ecosystem occupies a good chunk of southwestern New Mexico.  It includes the first federally-designated wilderness area, 2.7 million acres of national forest, and is home to mountain lions, black bears, elk, eagles, and Mexican wolves.  It’s been occupied by humans as long as almost any place in the country, but because

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Alert Grackles

Bird Conversations

My last stop on my summer journey from Carson City to Tucson, after a brief stay in Pinetop, Arizona, was the San Francisco River in New Mexico.  There is a designated birding area south of Glenwood that provides a parking lot and access to the river. It was mid-day and sweltering when the dog and

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Wolf close up

El lobo, part 1: Restoring balance

Humans have had a long, uncomfortable relationship with wolves.  Revered, feared, hated, and persecuted to within an inch of extinction, their survival to this day says more about their resilience than our ability to understand and tolerate what we are now learning to be one of the most important predators in the northern hemisphere. We

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Recording at Lake Tahoe

“What are you going to do with those recordings?”

It’s a sad irony that one of our most important senses, hearing, is so taken for granted.  So much information about the world around us comes in through our ears, but we place such precedence on what comes through our eyes.  We are very visual creatures, granted, with an ability to see color and detail,

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Snow geese at sunrise

Bosque del Apache

I’ve been hearing about Bosque del Apache for years: this wondrous wildlife refuge in the center of New Mexico that hosts thousands of wintering snow geese, sandhill cranes, other waterfowl, and even a few dozen whooping cranes.  The sight and sounds of tens of thousands of snow geese taking off at dawn as they leave

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