The ever-changing landscape of Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge
I remarked recently in a Facebook post that a photograph is a lie; it implies that the image really portrays the subject as static.
In truth, everything is always in motion, constantly in transition, or as innovator and author George Land said, “Growing or dying.”
Here are some examples of things that I have seen and thought about at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in the last few months. One changes in a few minutes’ time, another over a season and finally one, unfortunately, over hundreds or even thousands of years.
Ground fog
When cool air moves over the warmer ground still moist from the previous night’s rain, fog may occur low to the ground.
The fog, nearly transparent, has an otherworldly, ethereal quality to it. This ghostly band lasts briefly as the air warms quickly with the rising sun. If you are not there before sunrise, you may miss it.
The river of fog lends gravitas to the moment because it is so brief.
Common sunflowers and the summer season
Visitors to Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge this summer have marveled at the prolific bloom of the common sunflower.
Even just the 3 inches of rain the refuge received from the summer monsoons has been enough to cause an explosion of blossoms across the refuge tour loops.
Sunflowers are everywhere — from an entire field of blossoms in the North Loop area to rows of flowers aligned along depressed areas on the South Loop and the road leading to the Flight Deck. Their yellow-rayed blossoms have dominated the landscape the last few months.
The flowers have provided nectar for native bees, honeybees, bumblebees and numerous other insects that are attracted to the blossoms and help them fulfill their role as pollinators.
Only recently since the days and nights have started to cool have the petals begun to drop away.
Seeing the dark seed heads jutting out from tall stalks starts me thinking of sunflowers as the birds and animals might. Now starts the process of the seeds drying out to become food for the clouds of blackbirds, goldfinch, sparrows, quail and numerous songbirds. Squirrels, turkeys, ravens, field and pocket mice, and desert cardinals all consume the seeds, and muskrats eat the stems and foliage.
To see so many sunflower plants on the refuge heightens my anticipation of the birds that will soon arrive on their annual journey.
I want to be cautious about implying I know how birds think and feel, or that our joyful emotions at seeing such a brilliant palette of yellow is akin to their experience upon arriving at such an abundant harvest. What for we humans was the apex of the sunflower’s life was just a prelude to something necessary to prolong theirs.
For us, in this instance, beauty is its own reward, but the birds are interested in something more practical.
In summer months, the activity
slows down. Animals move around less in the heat of the day.
The black-crowned night herons are still around as are some ever-present great blue herons, dragonflies and a few American and least bitterns. The large airborne and ground-borne predators are fewer in number, and those remaining seem more sensitive to and warier of human presence.
Swainson’s hawks, including their adult-sized offspring, have waited to the end of summer to leave and begin their southern migration to central Argentina, completing an annual 10,000-mile round trip.
Changing animal relationships Bear with me a moment as I make an effort to illustrate how much our minds have changed in how we regard the natural world in the last several thousand years.
Early Homo sapiens were painting images of the animals they lived among on the ceilings of the Chauvet Cave in France 36,000 years ago. Those paintings depict 9-foot-tall cave bears, lions, mammoths, rhinos, musk oxen, ibex, horses, aurochs (cattle progenitors), panthers, owls and numerous other animals.
Living in small groups of 20 to 25 people, their daily lives were consumed with thinking about the animals they lived among and both feared and depended on.
Outnumbered by Neanderthals, Homo sapiens were not only the
minority human types at this time in the world, they were a minority population among all the animals. Animals far outnumbered them.
While our world in the American Southwest hasn’t been filled with the same number of megafauna as those ancestor Homo sapiens, at the time the first people crossed Beringia (now covered by the Bering Sea) and made their way to the American Southwest, they too were the minority among the mammoths, mastodons, bison, 9-foot-tall short-faced bears, horses, giant ground sloths, wolves, cheetahs and camels. Their daily thoughts and plans were of the animals that surrounded them.
Surely, those European predecessors did not think of animals as inferior to them; in fact, they painted them with such awareness and intimacy that the images from the cave, now thousands of years old, seem more alive than anything we can produce today. In early Native American stories, animals are often referred to as brothers, on whose lives they depended and whose help they often entreated.
When I go daily to the refuge, I am continually reminded of how this riparian area along an increasingly drought-challenged refuge is missing the animals, birds and plants that were here in large numbers as recently as a few hundred years ago.
I did not grow up thinking of animals as beings whose entitlement
to life on this planet equaled my own. Their role being to serve my life, dominion over them seemed such a given that thinking about it any other way would not have made sense. We seem to have concluded the same for all of the rest of the natural world.
And now, as we begin to see the degrading consequence to our planet of that thinking, I am reflecting on what I can do to bring my relationship with not just the animals but everything else seen as non-human back into balance.
So, I reflect on the animals that are gone and those still here.
When thousands of fall and winter birds arrive shortly, I know that I can experience a bit of what it must have been like when the first humans happened on this place along the Rio Grande, when I, too, would have known that our lives were forever intertwined.
Across the centuries, I have lost the understanding and importance of that connection and now must work to renew it. When the birds come, my ancestors and I will be sharing a quickening and beating heart. It seems a good place to start.