BLAME IT ON THE CRANES
Lobo football practice fields become feast for flocks
HALBUQUERQUE ired the week before Christmas to rebuild a program in disarray, University of New Mexico football coach Danny Gonzales took advantage of his new gig to take an early morning gander at his surroundings.
What he saw was for the birds. Literally.
“I got here about 6 or 6:30 a couple times — and, remember it’s still pretty dark and pretty cold that time of day — so there’s not that much going on,” Gonzales said. “I couldn’t believe how many birds I’d see out on the grass. Like, hundreds of them. Everywhere.”
Those birds, which Gonzales independently identified as sandhill cranes, had a morning ritual of making a giant snack out of UNM’s grass practice fields south of Dreamstyle Stadium. Flocks of birds combined to leave patches of exposed subsoil, some as large as coffee tables, all around the two fields the Lobos use when not in the stadium or inside the indoor practice facility to the east.
The stadium remains immune because it has artificial turf. The birds, by Gonzales’ telling, flew right over the stadium and found a perfect place to chow down on the thick grass fields protected from public access by chainlink fences.
For whatever reason, the school’s other
grass fields appeared to be left alone. The Bermuda grass in the soccer stadium was undamaged while the football fields were a regular all-you-can-eat buffet.
It’s enough to make Gonzales laugh it off because the damage turned out to be minimal. UNM grounds crews serviced the bare spots by filling them with a mixture of playground sand, clay and fresh seed.
Officials say they expect the grass to be as thick and healthy as it ever was by the time the football team reconvenes for preseason practice in August — assuming the whole global pandemic thing isn’t as disruptive as it is right now.
“I’m not worried about it at all,” Gonzales said. “We have a lot to worry about around here and that’s not really one of them.”
The birds did manage to dig deep enough to pull out the roots and leave holes as deep as your golfing buddy’s divots on the driving range. They would also leave behind droppings from one end of the field to the other.
UNM countered with lawn ornaments. Athletic department officials said they put plastic dog-shaped figurines on both fields in a desperate attempt — a Hail Mary, in football parlance — to shoo the airborne invaders away.
“Yeah, that didn’t work,” Gonzales said. “Didn’t scare the birds one bit.”
Gonzales joked that a real lobo or two might do the trick. He reasoned that nothing is scarier than an energetic canine with a penchant for early morning bird-chasing.
“That’s when someone said we might get in trouble with PETA,” Gonzales joked. “So, no lobos. Not the real kind. Last thing we need is trouble for having live dogs attack birds.”
Gonzales rearranged his team’s spring practice schedule to deal with the flock, having his team use the stadium and indoor facility for the first week of practice. NCAA rules allow each college football team to spread 15 organized workouts over a five-week period.
The Lobos were in the middle of Week 2 when the coronavirus shutdown ended things after just seven practices.
“We did get back out there for the second week, so it wasn’t bad,” Gonzales said. “Our grounds crew guys did such a good job putting it back together. They made sure it was safe and, honestly, I don’t think anyone even noticed.”
Exactly how UNM plans to keep the birds away is still a work in progress. An athletics department official said they’ve considered using sound-suppression techniques and even giant fans.
At this point, anything short of live Mexican wolves, air rifles or poison pellets is a possibility.
“Or maybe,” Gonzales said, “maybe this is just a seasonal kind of thing and they’ll go away once it warms up.”
LOBOS NOTES
The shortened spring drills didn’t give the Lobo coaching staff enough time to properly evaluate most of the team’s personnel, namely the crowded quarterback position that has four strong candidates to win the starting job.
“We’ve studied these players on film and done things with them in conditioning that give us an idea of who they are, but we really needed those [remaining] spring practices to help us get a better feel of what we have,” Gonzales said.
For now, the plan is to have student-athletes begin returning to UNM’s campus as early as March 29 in hopes of resuming off-field conditioning drills in early April. Most of those plans, Gonzales said, are tentative at best.
“All we can do now is keep everyone safe by keeping a safe distance [from one another],” he said. “Just kind of sit and wait, I guess.”