Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge

Every autumn sandhill cranes come down out of the northern Rockies to the Rio Grande south of Socorro, and with them tens of thousands of snow and Ross's geese. At Bosque del Apache they spend the winter, flying out at sunrise to feed in the fields and coming back at dusk to roost in shallow water. The morning fly-out, a whole pond of birds lifting at once, is what people drive here in the dark to see.

The name means woods of the Apache, from the camps Apache people made in the cottonwood forest along the river. That forest and its marshes were made by flood. Dams and levees on the Rio Grande ended the floods in the twentieth century, and by the time the refuge was established in 1939 the natural wetlands had shrunk to almost nothing. The Civilian Conservation Corps built its first ponds in the 1930s.

What visitors see now is kept by hand. Water is moved through canals and gates into the ponds on a schedule that imitates the old seasons, fields are farmed and corn left standing for the birds, and invasive saltcedar is cut, sprayed and burned back to let the native plants return. A loop road of about twelve miles runs past the wetlands and fields, with viewing decks and short trails.

The cranes and geese arrive in late October and leave by about February, and the Festival of the Cranes, run from Socorro, comes in November. In summer the refuge is quiet and green, an oasis in dry country.