Here’s another photo from yesterday’s wonderful trip along the Rio Grande near Pilar. We often find migrating Canada geese down in the canyon. Never very many at one time, though. I especially like these because of the clear water they’re resting in.
Farther north from here but still within the new Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, in a section with much higher canyon walls, a fly-fisherman and guide I know happened to be looking for a goose to shoot for dinner once. (It seems strange to me to think of someone doing that in the terrible high desert, when back in Maryland there would be huge flocks of hundreds or thousands of geese in the corn fields, but that’s what he was up to.) In fact, he’d spotted one flying downstream and decided to hike in that direction in hopes of encountering more. After a short distance, he looked up to see the same goose flying back up the river at a high rate of speed and couldn’t believe his luck. As he readied his shot, however, he spotted something else: right behind the goose came a bald eagle in fast pursuit!
Needless to say, he lowered his rifle and just took it all in, as the pair zoomed past and disappeared around a bend. When Nature gives you a show like that, you don’t go crazy in the theater.
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
Those two look happy, don’t they? Christmas does that to some of us.
Even Canada geese? 🙂 They were just about the calmest ones I’ve ever seen. And for the longest time, I thought the one on the right was standing on a rock!
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