A perfect late-fall day in New Mexico–sun, blue sky, snow on Mount Baldy. A crow was preening on top of this road sign when we turned north on NM 76 to travel the last few miles to Chimayó.
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Once seated in one of the many dining rooms of the adobe hacienda, we had to decide: turkey and dressing with cranberry sauce, or tacos and enchiladas with red chile.
After pumpkin pie and sopapillas we stopped in the courtyard to take photos of each other and to pay our respects to St. Francis.
On Wednesday afternoon I drove in rain from Santa Fe to Albuquerque to attend a public hearing about wolves. Overnight the sunny, dry weather had changed to overcast and wet. Rain was still falling several hours later as dusk settled over downtown Albuquerque and I wondered if it was an omen, but of what, I couldn’t say.
I found one of the last open slots on the periphery of the Embassy Suites parking lot and debated a moment before I decided to carry my leopard print umbrella, not knowing if its pointed tip might be perceived as a weapon and confiscated. On my way in to the hotel, I noticed a few cars from Colorado and California scattered among the New Mexico license plates.
Inside, the doors to the ballroom had opened and people were filling out forms requesting the opportunity to speak. I didn’t sign up. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), who was conducting the hearing, stressed that written comments would bear equal weight to spoken and I had submitted my letter a few weeks earlier. I came armed with my recorder and a notebook so I could focus on listening and observing.
Two Views
With a few minutes until the hearing was to start I stopped by the conference rooms where the meetings and rallies representing those for and against wolves had recently concluded. Out in the hallway both groups had exhibits: a life-sized photo of four children in a wolf shelter or “kid cage”, constructed of plywood and wire, designed to provide a safe haven for rural children waiting for the school bus sat just a few feet away from a small nylon camping tent with snapshots of wolves mounted above it.
Back in the ballroom the seats were filling up. Security consisted of an armed guard and a yellow sign stating that weapons, food, and drinks were not allowed inside. A woman wearing a Wolves Are Essential sign was turned away, but I got in with my umbrella.
I took a seat midway back in the room. In the row in front of me sat a family, the two parents with their son and daughter, both grade-school-age. The boy and his dad held their cowboy hats in their laps. Milling about in the aisle were wolf supporters wearing Let the Lobo Live and National Rally to Protect America’s Wolves.
At six o’clock the meeting was called to order and three FWS employees presented and explained their proposed rule changes.
The first proposal is to de-list the gray wolf, meaning that it would be removed from the threatened and endangered species list and would no longer receive federal protection. It would include all wolves in the lower forty-eight states except the Mexican gray wolf, a subspecies.
The other proposals involve the complex management of the Mexican wolf recovery program and would allow the direct release of wolves throughout the recovery area, limit the wolves’ movement to the recovery area, and re-designate the existing wild population as experimental, non-essential. This complicated set of changes would be the focus of most of the evening’s testimony.
Each speaker was limited to two minutes. I sat with pen poised above my notebook as each one stood at the microphone. Were they for or against the wolf? Sometimes it was hard to tell. The proposed rule changes were generally not favored by either side. What soon became evident was the huge chasm between those who want all wolves de-listed (including the Mexican wolf) and those who think all wolves (including the gray wolf) should continue to be protected.
One speaker stood out for me: Colin Henderson, a rancher in favor of expanding the Mexican wolf’s range. He raises Navajo churro sheep just north of the New Mexico border in Colorado. After relating that he had two ewes injured and one sheep killed the prior week, either by coyotes or dogs, he said that he felt that the expansion was necessary to create a healthy, genetically sound wolf population. If the wolves were allowed to roam without intervention, his sheep could be at risk.
By the time the hearing concluded three hours after it began, my unofficial tally showed that seventy-two had testified with forty-nine speaking in favor of the wolves and twenty-three against, which agreed with the Albuquerque Journal’s “two to one in favor of expansion of the wolf recovery program.”
I walked outside after the hearing surprised to find that the rain had stopped.
Note: With one more public hearing in Arizona and the comment period extended until December 17th, it will be several weeks before the FWS issues their final decision.
I wish more of my camera trap shots were like this one of the black bear that passed through my yard several times during the summer and early fall, but, alas, they are rare.
Every Sunday I bring the camera in from the back fence to see who walked by during the week. Lately, there hasn’t been anything to get excited about, but as I studied my recent photos I did notice a couple of things.
At first this seemed to be a mundane picture of a deer’s butt, until it occurred to me that it could help answer a question about the deer that frequently saunter through our backyard: are they mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) or white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virgineanus)?
Maybe it should have been obvious from this picture I took through the screen door this summer–those are some awfully large ears–but I wasn’t certain.
The best way to tell the difference is from the back. White-tailed deer have white tails and mule deer have white tails with a black tip. Now I know.
I had to take a second or third look before I noticed the bobbed tail in the lower left-hand corner of this photo. It brought back memories of the only bobcat I have ever seen outside of the zoo. It was a warm mid-September Saturday in 2010.
My cousins, Tristan and Sean, were visiting and their five kids were having a great time exploring our wooded yard. The adults were inside drinking coffee and planning the day’s activities, when the quiet of the morning was shattered by a scream.
We all ran outside and discovered that Drew, the youngest, had tried to leap over a prickly pear cactus, but misjudging the distance had landed in the middle of it. His family gathered around to comfort and help, but the misery of the cure was worse than the fall.
After the barbed spines had been removed and the tears dried, Tristan and her daughter, Grace, sat on the porch swing while I stood talking to them. When Grace pointed, we fell silent. A bobcat walked, discreetly and deliberately, along the fence line, just passing through, paying no attention to us.
Better than any picture that I have ever taken is the memory of that tawny, spotted cat with tufted ears and bobbed tail, padding through the yard.
Sunday’s winds blew the last remnants of summer out of New Mexico. My patio garden is a sad collection of drooping tomato plants, blackened basil, and a few tenacious pink petunias.
I checked the wildlife camera yesterday and for the first time in three weeks I didn’t find a picture of the bear. Instead, I found shots of a skunk, a rabbit, a chipmunk, and a bushy tail that must belong to a coyote.
The bear never got into the trash or bothered any of the pets in the neighborhood, as far as I know, just passed through every few days. Karen Eagleson of The Wildlife Center in Española gave this advice in a recent Santa Fe New Mexican editorial: Let the bears alone. They will go home soon enough.
Fall has arrived in New Mexico. Temperatures dropped into the thirties the last couple of nights, but no hard freeze-yet. Days are warm with clear blue skies and the chamisa is at its prettiest, full of golden flowers. Small patches of yellow are starting to appear up high in the cottonwoods.
Several weeks ago the green chile harvest began to trickle into Santa Fe. Vendors haul burlap bags full of the New Mexico state vegetable (actually we have two, the honor is shared with the pinto bean) in from fields near Hatch and Socorro. The air fills with the scent of roasting chiles and you can choose–mild, medium, or hot–at the temporary stands that pop up in the parking lots of restaurants, grocery stores, and strip shopping centers all over town.
I never get around to buying my yearly supply until mid-September, trying to delay the end of summer as long as possible. But it was time last week. I paid the $25 for a roasted bushel at Jackalope without comparison shopping. Another potential customer moved on when he heard the price.
The chiles sat in a cooler in my kitchen for a couple of days before I got around to the bagging. At my house we don’t eat too many at once so it takes a lot of sandwich bags, each filled with a few chiles before they are loaded into the wire drawer at the bottom of the freezer, more than enough to get us through the winter and probably all the way through until next chile season. We eat them with everything, not just tacos and enchiladas, but in macaroni and cheese, tuna salad, and mixed with garlic on top of grilled steaks.
After living in New Mexico for sixteen years, I still remember a woman I met at a shop in Albuquerque shortly after I moved here. She told me she could never leave the state; she would miss the sunshine and green chile too much.
Photo Credit: P. Nixon
A year and a half ago Dave gave me a camera trap for my birthday and over time I have gotten lots of pictures of curious towhees, startled mule deer, and the occasional coyote.
There have been numerous reports of bears in Santa Fe this year (from the Santa Fe Reporter this week: “13th bear sighting in nine days sets local record”) and I knew bears had passed through our yard before. Two years ago one mangled my suet bird feeders; I never replaced them.
Even though I was aware that they were around, I was still surprised to find this shot of a black bear (Ursus americanus) on my camera this afternoon. He passed through our yard quietly on Monday morning, probably while we were eating breakfast. It’s a little late to report it to New Mexico Game and Fish, which I did the first time. The agent I spoke to then convinced me to stop putting out bird seed during the summer and also discouraged setting out trash the night before pickup. He stressed that it is not good for people or the bears if they get used to eating out of bird feeders or dumpsters. It almost always ends badly for the bear.
It’s thrilling to live close to these creatures and Elizabeth Bradfield captures that feeling so well in her poem “We All Want to See a Mammal” with the lines:
Our day our lives incomplete without a mammal. The gaze of something unafraid, that we’re afraid of, meeting ours before it runs off.
I hope this bear has moved on–no food here–gone back up into the mountains where he belongs.
When we built a coyote fence earlier this year, I was concerned that the wildlife that passes through our yard would have to look for a new route. Dave designed this gap to allow access and based on the deer that we have seen, they must have figured it out.
Last weekend I set up my camera trap near the gap and will take it down later today. I am curious to see who has wandered by since I have heard reports of two bears and a badger in the neighborhood this week.
This is a test post from my cell phone to see how it works for some of my upcoming travels.
Photo Credit: Rebecca Bose
The two Mexican gray wolves pictured above remind me of my favorite wolf story, recounted by Barry Lopez in his 1978 book Of Wolves and Men.
Before a wolf was brought into their classroom, a group of grade-school children were asked to draw pictures of wolves. The wolves in the pictures all had enormous fangs. The wolf was brought in, and the person with him began speaking about wolves. The children were awed by the animal. When the wolf left, the teacher asked the children to do another drawing. The new drawings had no large fangs, They all had enormous feet.
Once native in portions of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and northern Mexico, Mexican gray wolves, or lobos as they are called in Spanish, are critically endangered with only about 75 living in the wild. Rebecca Bose, curator at the Wolf Conservation Center, gives us a closer look at these wolves in her photographic essay.
Fifteen years ago the first lobos were reintroduced in Arizona. Today, proposed changes to the rules governing the recovery effort may help their numbers increase. According to this article in the Santa Fe New Mexican from a few days ago, the new deal would allow the wolves to be released directly into New Mexico for the first time and they would also have more room to roam.
If all goes as planned, we New Mexicans will be more likely to hear the howl of wolves in our state once again.
Photo Credit: c.fuentes2007 via Compfight cc
I arrived at home last night just in time to see the blue moon (the third of four full moons in a season) at its peak, 7:45 pm in New Mexico. I was ready to step out on the front porch to enjoy it when we received an email from a neighbor.
He had seen this
or was it this?
Photo Credit: Garret Voight via Compfight cc
just moments before in the backyard. I once saw a bobcat during the day walking along our fence line and it didn’t scare me much at 25 pounds or so, but I still don’t really want to startle one in the dark. The mountain lion is a whole different deal. I don’t fancy encountering one of them day or night.
I decided the best place to view the full moon was from the window in my study.
(Wild Horse by James Marvin Phelps)
It’s been a tough summer for the horses of New Mexico. The news has been filled with stories about a starving herd of wild horses near Placitas and the ongoing debate (pro and con) about the proposed horse meat processing plant in Roswell.
(Photo by David Betzler)
It was a relief to leave behind the heartbreak and rancor of those horse stories and drive out to Trinity Ranch in Lamy to attend a Buck Brannaman horsemanship clinic last weekend. A red-tailed hawk soared overhead as Dave and I set up our folding chairs. Behind us in a nearby corral, a horse whinnied loudly as we settled in.
Outfitted with a microphone headset, Brannaman was in the middle of the arena surrounded by the class participants each standing by his horse, holding a lead in one hand and a training flag in the other. It was day two of a four-day clinic and Buck was telling a story about his father counting squares of toilet paper.
The 2011 documentary about Brannaman was my introduction to his natural-style horsemanship which encourages the rider to see things from the horse’s point of view. My own experience with horses has been limited to a few vacation trail rides where I was either dragged under low-hanging tree branches or bounced back to the barn by a bored horse looking for a bucket of oats. Although I am an unlikely candidate for a spot in the arena, something about Buck’s plainspoken approach (Don’t make me look over there and see you loafin’) compelled me to check out his horse clinic.
A little ways into the ground work exercise, Buck could see that one of the riders, Laura, was have trouble; her pretty black horse was skittish and unresponsive. He took the horse to the center of the arena where she continued to rear her head and whinny. Buck showed her what he wanted using his training flag in his calm, unflappable way, over and over. Within fifteen minutes the horse was more gentle and receptive, hooked on to Buck, recognizing and accepting his leadership. Handing the reins back to Laura he said, “. . . probably when you go back to work you’ll ruin half of my work, but that’s just because you haven’t learned all this yet.”
And, what about the toilet paper story? When Buck and his brother were kids they enraged their father by using more than their allotment, probably got a whipping for it, and were in trouble for a week. Buck remembered that a few years later when his stepfather, Ray Hunt, got angry with him for leaving a gate open and letting a cow get out. But after the chewing out, Ray let it go; it was over. Buck’s lesson from that, “. . .(Ray would) make his point and get out. It wasn’t vengeful. It wasn’t malicious. He simply did what it took to be effective to get a change and he was done. In and out.” And that’s pretty good advice even if you never get on a horse.
It’s Wednesday night. The Valley Meat Company has still not been able to begin operations at their horse meat processing plant in Roswell due to a restraining order. Good people are taking hay to the Placitas horses and Buck is probably already in Colorado. He starts his next clinic in Kiowa on Friday.
