Early Birds

This week Socorro has been hosting the 20th annual Festival of the Cranes. Last year we made it to the evening "Fly In" which is something to behold - around dusk, flock after flock of ducks and geese and cranes coming in to the Bosque del Apache Refuge to rest for the night. This year, we got up before dawn to see the morning "Fly Out" - in theory, flocks and flocks of birds heading out for a day's flying and foraging and dodging bullets, or whatever it is birds do all day.

Perhaps I was too bleary-eyed to appreciate what was going on, but it seemed like the cranes, in particular, weren't in a hurry to get moving. Or perhaps we were watching the Special Ed cranes, because they mostly just walked around, occasionally jumping up and down and talking to each other. Every once in a while, a small family group would get its act together and take off, flying low, and the ones walking around on the ground would walk around in circles some more and talk amongst themselves, and five or ten minutes later another little family group would get going.


We saw a lot of $8000 cameras and $2000 telephoto lenses, or maybe it's the other way around. I made a remark about how I was almost embarrassed to take out my $200 jobbie that's got the electrical tape wound around it to the keep the batteries in, and some wiseguy leaned over and said "A good carpenter never blames his tools." So I guess that's the lesson of the day - a good carpenter never blames his tools.