Winter is well under way in Montana.  Yellowstone has been open to over-snow traffic for a week now and many ski resorts have been open since Thanksgiving.  The image above was taken in November as I drove to Bozeman and shows Lone Mountain at Big Sky.  When viewed large enough, ski lifts and such can be seen on the mountain and even at this size, two buildings can be spotted if looking close enough.  I’m personally not a down-hill skier but my wife will be on the lower slopes here soon enough.  Wishing everyone a very merry Christmas and happy holidays!

Of all the images I shot while at Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, none of them captured the experience I expected more than this one.  There’s at least two bird species here, sandhill cranes and snow geese, if not one or more others.  Ross’s geese look a lot like snow geese and can be difficult to tell apart at times.  Plus there were around 500 to 1,000 red-winged blackbirds swarming around at the same time I captured this image.  But the chaos of birds along with the unimaginable sound at this moment was pretty much the experience I hoped for when planning my trip.  This was only a small portion of the scene, captured with a 500mm lens.  In all, along with the mentioned red-winged blackbirds, there were hundreds of Ross’s geese, thousands of snow geese, and the sandhill cranes numbered in the hundreds up to maybe a thousand.  It was quite an experience to say the least.

The only time Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge feels crowded is at sunrise when photographers and bird lovers line up either to watch the snow geese or sandhill cranes take flight in the morning.  But there’s a good reason for it as photos like this present themselves every few minutes as the cranes depart to their feeding grounds.  They begin flying off well before sunrise so one hopes there’s cranes left once the sun comes up.  But if there are, the resulting photos can be beautiful, especially with the mountains as a backdrop.

Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge is a popular birding and photography destination starting late November through December and for good reason.  Sandhill cranes migrate here for the winter, numbering in the 1,000s and are the main attraction while snow and Ross’s geese come in the 1,000s as well and are a close second.  While I certainly spent my time with those species and came away with some great shots, I also hoped to photograph some new species for me but didn’t really dream I’d get a hooded merganser.  These tiny ducks have a tendency to quickly swim the other way when a car pulls up, if not fly off completely.  So, at sunset on my last day, I was thrilled to finish my trip with this handsome merganser as he swam through a small cove where the light reflected stunningly in the water.  I actually watched him and his mate for about an hour hoping he would come into this cove and my commitment paid off as this was among the last photos of the trip.

I just returned from a trip to New Mexico so I could photograph at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge.  It was an amazing trip and while down there I made a side trip to White Sands National Monument.  “Side trip” is an understatement as it’s a 2 1/2 drive to get to it, but it’s an incredible place to see.  If going, just make sure the nearby air force base isn’t doing bombing runs as it closes everything down!  I did check prior to going down, so didn’t have any problems.  I wanted to start with this photo from a sunset shoot at White Sands but I’ll get to posting birds from Bosque real soon!

First, since it’s the holiday season, I need to post that, if in the US, the last day to order and have it arrive in time for Christmas is December 9th.  If you’re outside the US, then any orders will probably not arrive before December 25th at this point.  This image was taken last week and shows a wood duck hen as she flapped her wings after preening.  I saw she was about to do this and, since I had a 500mm lens on my camera at the time, thought to myself that I have way too much lens for this moment.  But it worked out great!  I focused on her head so as to have her eyes in focus, a critical focal point for wildlife images, and let the rest of the image fall where it did.  I might have preferred a little more depth of field so her wings were in focus too, but then the shutterspeed would have been too slow and they would have blurred anyway.  While the drake may have been more colorful, I was still happy to capture this girl flexing her wings.