It's rare to get a chance to smile at animals, aside from our domestic pets. The best shots at this occur when a normally boring or stupid animal suddenly becomes clever. For instance, ungulates don't seem like the brightest bulbs on Mother Earth, but under the right circumstances...
Going down a road in the Socorro NM area I was surprised at the number of "hunters" parked along the road. Which season is it now? But then again, maybe they were joy-riding four-wheelers, rather than hunters.
The "lower" Rio Grande starts at Socorro by my estimate. It is reminiscent of the Mojave Desert, even though it is the Chihuahuan Desert, officially. Although I postpone "winter" locations in order to keep North America from shrinking too soon, it was fun to start walking arroyos again, which is something I only do in the winter.
What really makes walking these arroyos delicious is the cold, dry air.
On today's walk there were some cows. That's hardly a novelty on BLM land. But there was something halting and static about the cows' behavior.
A few minutes later I spotted another large animal, so out came the snooper scope. The creature was standing stationary on the arroyo-side of a small ridge. No leaping and bounding over barbed wire fences, no gamboling over steep hills like they were table flat, no nothin'; just standing there and weighing its options. Suddenly sentient. On the other side of that ridge was a large gang of hunters and their vehicles. The creature gave me a funny look as if to say, "Oh hell, not another one!", or maybe, "I thought those clowns were on the other side."
All of a sudden we had walked out of an arroyo near Socorro, NM, and into a Saturday morning Looney Tunes cartoon. It was all I could do to resist laughing out loud and shaking the camera as I took the sly cervine's photo:
Going down a road in the Socorro NM area I was surprised at the number of "hunters" parked along the road. Which season is it now? But then again, maybe they were joy-riding four-wheelers, rather than hunters.
The "lower" Rio Grande starts at Socorro by my estimate. It is reminiscent of the Mojave Desert, even though it is the Chihuahuan Desert, officially. Although I postpone "winter" locations in order to keep North America from shrinking too soon, it was fun to start walking arroyos again, which is something I only do in the winter.
What really makes walking these arroyos delicious is the cold, dry air.
On today's walk there were some cows. That's hardly a novelty on BLM land. But there was something halting and static about the cows' behavior.
A few minutes later I spotted another large animal, so out came the snooper scope. The creature was standing stationary on the arroyo-side of a small ridge. No leaping and bounding over barbed wire fences, no gamboling over steep hills like they were table flat, no nothin'; just standing there and weighing its options. Suddenly sentient. On the other side of that ridge was a large gang of hunters and their vehicles. The creature gave me a funny look as if to say, "Oh hell, not another one!", or maybe, "I thought those clowns were on the other side."
All of a sudden we had walked out of an arroyo near Socorro, NM, and into a Saturday morning Looney Tunes cartoon. It was all I could do to resist laughing out loud and shaking the camera as I took the sly cervine's photo:
Comments
I am not anti-hunting and did 'harvest' a doe one year when it was legal; deer season was a time for us to supplement our meat for the year. What I am against is turning hunting season into war games and shooting anything that moves, that includes windmills.