Not legal

Today was our last full day in New Mexico, so we decided to do some local birding in Albuquerque. We saw birds at the inn where we were staying, a place called Los Poblanos. It’s one of the nicest places we’ve been at, I think, and it comes with its own flock of noisy peacocks. There were two males and two females, and one of the males was all white. It was spooky to see his ghostlike form roosting in the trees at night. The other male was the noisy one, and he always squawked back at the beeping of the car’s lock. They were the most spectacular birds of the trip, but, unfortunately, not countable.

Our first birding stop was Embudito Canyon, which is at the edge of the city. It’s an arroyo that runs out of the Sandia Mountains. There weren’t many people using it, mostly dog walkers. It wasn’t long before we saw a CURVE-BILLED THRASHER, which was a lifer for me. Pole saw it in Texas last year, so I was glad to finally catch up. We walked the dry bed all the way up to where a stream fell from the mountainside. We saw two other lifers, a BLACK-THROATED SPARROW and a flock of SCALED QUAIL. The quail were running about in the brush and were hard to see, but once you get a glance at the “cotton top,” they’re unmistakable.

The other stop we made was to the Rio Grande State Park Nature Center. There wasn’t much to see there that you can’t see in Chicago (Downy Woodpecker, Wood Duck, Northern Shoveler, etc.), so it was a disappointment. The trip as a whole wasn’t, though, and the final count was 60 total species for Pole with 18 lifers, and 58 total for me, with 18 lifers. And, of course, I got to pass the 300 mark. A beautiful state, so different from the Midwest but not as insufferable as the Texas coast. We leave tomorrow, but we’ll have to come back.