Birdapalooza

Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, N.M. —  Nothing is safe when the snow geese fly. With a whoosh and an unstoppable whouking, they shred the sky and take the world with them. Cameras and binoculars, pink noses and cheeks, tamarisks and cottonwoods blur, and the colors of dawn, the clouds, the moon and the morning star spin like a galactic mobile gone haywire.

Ten feet off the ground, the geese swirl and circle, a cacophonous mess of flapping wings -- white-black, white-black, white-black -- and incessant honking. Spectacle and cheap thrill alike, they turn everyone into poets.

“It’s ... it’s like popcorn,” someone says.

“Shredded paper.”

“Confetti, no, snow.”

” ... like being caught in a whirlwind.”

“A snow dome.”

“A kaleidoscope.”

For experienced birders, this is the essential pilgrimage: the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern New Mexico. From mid-November through early March, if the water flows freely and the corn is plentiful, the Bosque is home for thousands of geese, ducks, raptors and cranes migrating along the Rocky Mountain flyway. And for six days each year in late November, it’s the site of birding’s biggest bash.

Today, on a small berm, some 400 yards up the road from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe train crossing, the patience of the early risers has been rewarded. The long vigil -- setting up cameras with lenses the size of Gatling guns, waiting in cars with heaters roaring at full blast, scarfing down breakfast burritos and swilling coffee from Acosta’s -- began when the stars were still in the sky and the temperature well below freezing.

But not everyone is impressed by the geese.

Robert Kruidenier peers through his spotting scope at the birds that remain on the pond. His birds. The cranes.

Among a crowd barely staving off frostbite, he is the only one not wearing gloves. If he shakes a little or seems to fidget, it’s not the cold. It’s the Parkinson’s, a diagnosis he received 11 years ago, eventually prompting him to quit his work in Santa Fe, N.M., as a job-site foreman. Today at 57, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service patch on his jacket identifies him as a volunteer. This title -- and his tolerance for the cold -- is the best measure of his affection for “our guys.”

Kruidenier is eager to answer questions and invites anyone to peer through his scope. “Open your eyes to what cranes are about,” he says.

The sandhill cranes stand behind him, no more than 50 feet away, their voices purring like broken rattles, bir-rrrrrrrt, bir-rrrrrrrt. Some have started to walk. Others lower their heads, long necks stretched out in front of them, almost off balance, a signal in anticipation of the quick steps, the awkward first wing flaps and flight.

Then, in pairs and threesomes, they take to the air. In one stroke of their wings they accomplish what takes the geese a dozen. That’s part of the mystique, why the cranes get top billing here, why the organizers call this the Festival of Cranes.

Rumors in the air

Rumors of the stars’ imminent arrival begin to drift down the Rio Grande Valley in late September. There are sightings in the San Luis Valley in Colorado, then Albuquerque, then the patchwork of fields in Socorro County where the Bosque is located.

A week before Thanksgiving, Bosque officials celebrate their arrival with six days of birding tours, field seminars and formal lectures. Spend a day wandering the crane fest’s venues and the passion of birders will seem ripe material for a mockumentary. Call it “A Mighty Wing.”

Where else will seminars on duck butts, sparrow banding and hummingbird identification sell out? Where else will you find people so interested in binoculars with automatic diopter compensation systems, nitrogen-filled housings and achromatic objective lens? Where else will you find someone talking so rapturously about, well, bird droppings?

But spend more than a day, and the Bosque casts a spell, turning cynics into aficionados. On an observation deck one frosty dawn, contractors from a suburb outside Huntsville, Ala., through with a weeklong job at neighboring White Sands Missile Range, shiver in anticipation. “Bring it on,” says the one who wears a single white athletic sock as a glove, as the geese begin to lift off.

At the Bosque del Apache, birding is writ large. You don’t need your Sibley’s. You don’t need to know the difference between a Western grebe and a Clark’s grebe.

One cold and windy twilight, a chemist from Britain stands in a crowd overlooking a field of birds, his camera poised. His 95-year-old father died last week, but there was no canceling the trip. “Dad would have wanted it that way.”

Survivalist species

“These are ancient, ancient birds,” says Kruidenier, “and the sound they make is ancient and unimitateable. It has echoed across geological time. They have seen mountains and rivers come and go. They have survived and adapted to everything.”

The oldest bird species in the world -- fossils suggest they’ve been around 6 million years or so -- cranes flew above continents well before our ancestors walked, well before we moved out of the forests into the savannas.

Divided into two species -- the lesser and the greater -- sandhills follow the seasons, the former summering as far away as Siberia and the latter in a refuge in southeastern Idaho. Standing 4 feet tall on long, thin legs with boat-shaped bodies, grayish plumage, featherless red caps and ever-wary amber eyes, they are transformed by flight, fast becoming long, sleek and sensual, powered by a broad 6-foot wingspan.

When conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote “A Sand County Almanac,” the mystery of cranes was not lost upon him. “When we hear his call we hear no mere bird,” he wrote. “We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.” Thirty years later, novelist Tom Robbins heard the call: “The whooper [a not-too-distant cousin to the sandhill] enters one’s spirit the instant it enters one’s senses.” Most recently, Peter Matthiessen added his voice, “If one has truly understood a crane -- or a leaf or a cloud or a frog -- one has understood everything.”

The power of cranes lies not only in their elegant, indifferent, sometimes elegiac aspect but also in the fragile beauty of the world that surrounds them. Crane habitats not only support hundreds of bird species, but also a mix of deer, bobcats, coyotes, trees, willows and grasses.

Located in the flood plain of the Rio Grande, a region not dissimilar to the Mojave Desert, the Bosque is a 57,000-acre man-made maze of canals, ditches, causeways and dikes that borders ponds and open fields of grass and corn. The federal government purchased the land in 1936, and the watercourses and drainage were laid out by the Civilian Conservation Corps before World War II to imitate the natural flooding of the Rio Grande, a circumstance restricted by almost 100 years of containment.

In 1941, 17 sandhill cranes wintered at the refuge. This year, at the season’s peak, 316 Canada geese, 21,700 snow geese, 46,935 ducks, 10,100 sandhill cranes and seven bald eagles are wintering at the Bosque.

“You know how you count birds?” It’s an oft-repeated “joke” among birders at the Bosque. “You add up all the legs and divide by two.”

Point and shoot

Roy Toft sits in a clearing of coyote willow near one of seven observation platforms just off the graded dirt road that winds 12 miles through the Bosque. He straddles a camouflaged 600-mm, F-4 lens perched atop a carbon-fiber tripod with a Wimberley head.

Toft knows how to shoot cranes, and right now he’s focused on two squawking cranes in a field of nearly 100. One’s head is tilted to the sky, the other’s at a lesser angle. The posture is known as a unison call, one of the many behaviors cranes adopt to communicate with others.

“I’ve photographed cranes from all over the world,” says Toft, “and rarely do you get to see these calling birds so close. There is so much to watch. To sit here for one hour and get into their rhythms and pace is quite unusual.”

Territorial, amorous, threatening, nurturing and vain, cranes are unlike any other bird species. Watching them is like taking a side seat at a cocktail party with children running around. In any grouping, juveniles and adults parlay with one another through vocalizations and actions.

Soon one of the squawking cranes jumps up to confront a third bird: wings back, legs shooting out in front. The unison call is often followed by such a dance and expresses a bond between a male and female -- at the expense of any interloper.

Wearing gloves with the fingertips cut off, Toft fires off a quick succession of shots. “It’s difficult in a bird photo to get personality,” he says. “Here you can portray them with some sense of life.... You get more dimensions here.”

The lives of cranes and humans have crossed throughout history. Their behavior has inspired aboriginal dances and storytelling around the world, and although it is often convenient to anthropomorphize their actions, some birders wonder if, given the fact that cranes are a much older species than humans, perhaps Homo sapiens learned their behavior from them.

‘Aching soul’ salve

“Why are we reflecting on avian spirituality?” LoraKim Joyner asks her audience at the New Mexico University of Mining and Technology in Socorro. She wears her long, blond hair in a braid and speaks without a trace of irony. “It is because birds can soothe our aching souls

Back at the Bosque, a cold wind tears through the visitors center. Strings of red chiles swing from the porches of the adobes. Dust devils scour the square, which looks like an old Hollywood set. Noontime -- when the birds are busy grazing in the fields and keeping an eye out for marauding coyotes -- is as good a time as any to get out of town. Up the road in San Antonio, green chile hamburgers are on the grill at Owl’s and, during the festival, there are seminars like this one in avian spirituality to attend.

“Birds show up so strongly in faith traditions,” Joyner tells the gathered, “that they serve as a deep archetype for understanding ourselves and the world. And seeing them and being open to what they have to say to us can lead us along the path of spiritual growth.”

Not everyone can talk eco-therapy with a straight face, and not everyone can listen without a smirk. But no one here is laughing.

“Even bird droppings are special,” she confides. “I was once talking to a person at a spiritual retreat about the components of bird droppings and you know, that person, seeing a pigeon dropping on the sidewalk, looked up at me in amazement and said, ‘How can anyone doubt there is a God?’ ”

At the festival’s Leica booth, men stand in a row with binoculars glued to their faces, staring at the leaves on the brush on the Chupadero Mountains, west of the Bosque. A woman wanders by holding up a Swainson’s hawk for a photographer. Boy Scouts, just off the bus, form a line at the Porta Pottis, and a giant raccoon and blue goose, looking suspiciously like Barney, are busy making friends.

Farther afield at the Farm Deck, winds are gusting over 40 mph. About 50 cars are parked off the road. The cold seeps through Gortex, wool, cotton and polyester settling into muscle and bone, but for some it might as well be a summer day.

A father pedals by, his bundled daughter behind him in the bike seat. A kid with a disposable camera squeezes between a row of tripods. Girls in T-shirts step out of their car, gasp and jump back in. A man holds his young son in his arms and points overhead, and a bus carrying 15 students from a local high school drives off the road. As the rear axle digs deeper into the sand, its passengers crowd the windows.

Some 100 yards away, thousands, if not tens of thousands, of snow geese and hundreds of sandhills poke among the dry stalks of a flattened cornfield. As the afternoon light burns and glows into dusk, the photographers grow more excited at the prospect of this huge flock of white birds taking off all at once with the tawny hills in the background and this brilliant clear light surrounding them.

But the birds foil them. The cranes slowly hop into flight one by one, group by group, soon leaving all the geese behind. The sun slips behind the mountains and the brilliant colors turn opaque.

“Kettling” is the word experts use to describe the circling flight pattern of the cranes when they get ready to migrate. As exciting as the arrival of the birds is in October, their departure in late February is equally so, prompting some at the Bosque to postpone their lives as the days grow longer and warm breezes begin flowing into the region. The cranes, kettling in the air, spend days searching for just the right thermal, most times returning to the fields but one day rising higher and higher into the sky until they finally disappear.

Right on schedule

Days at the Bosque end much as they begin.

At dawn, the rising moon, a silver-white crescent in the east, becomes ballast for the ever-changing light. It is a time of anticipation, of barking dogs, of trucks downshifting on the interstate and of waiting, and by the time the sun lifts above the Sierra Oscura -- a line of mountains on the horizon where, one July morning almost 60 years ago, the first atomic bomb was detonated -- the sky is filled with birds.

At dusk, the sky is sometimes mottled with clouds, gray and sliver in the light, like spaceships flown in from Roswell. This evening Kruidenier stands overlooking the pond near the Burlington Northern Santa Fe crossing. Photographers are setting up their cameras and the cranes have begun returning to their roosts, six or seven or eight of them gliding into the pond at a time, landing and brrring their contentment.

Wings stretched wide, feathers on their backs suddenly ruffling as they slow down, they glide on their approach, dropping their legs, adjusting their centers of gravity. Some circle in long, sweeping angles, others fall at 45 degrees or more.

Once landed, they lower their beaks and drink from the pond, forming perfect reflections in the water, and as the pond grows more crowded, the unison calls increase. Before long, the geese join them, as raucous as ever. We take pictures of these birds. We sketch and study and write. We try to bridge the distance between them and us, but in the end we come up short.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, “We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”

Says a man as he heads toward his car and out of the cold: “I wish I could speak duck.”