Beauty of Bosque del Apache helps cut through dark times

The snow geese and sandhill cranes are nearly all gone by the middle to end of February. On the heels of the disappearing geese and cranes are the migrating shore and wading birds and the fly catchers (vermilion, ash-throated, southwestern willow) and warblers (common yellow-throat, yellow-rumped, lucy’s and yellow) to name a few. I love the avocets in their spring birding plumage, black-necked stilts, phalaropes, killdeer and dowitchers, who by early June will also have made their way north.

Complicating things for me and the birds late this year, too, was the smoke — first from the Bear Trap Fire and two weeks later the Black Fire, the second-largest wildfire in New Mexico history.

The mostly cloudless sky was a muddy, translucent brown since the smoke first appeared May 1. The complications for me were both visual — as muddied skies don’t make for good landscape photographs — and, perhaps even more importantly, they were emotional.

I watched the male and female vermilion flycatchers tend their nest with three offspring every day for a week. And I wondered how their chicks might be affected by smoke thick enough to be felt in my throat.

Vermilions sometimes raise two broods, where the female leaves the feeding of the well-established first brood to the male and starts a second brood elsewhere. Having seen both parents on the last day the nest was attended, I doubt that it happened with this pair. I wondered, too, if this was a result of the smoke. Though the fires were never a direct threat to the refuge, the smoke from fires close enough to color the sky was a threat to the sensitive respiratory systems of birds.

My growing fondness and intimacy with the birds has made more palpable one of the personal lessons from my Year of Refuge — the deeper we care and love, the more likely we are to also experience suffering, sadness, disappointment and grief.

I have learned in my relationship with my amazing wife, Deb, about the courage it takes to love deeply, fiercely and the costs in the coins of fear, suffering and sadness that can accompany it. Now I care, too, about the birds, plants and other animals of the refuge.

The fires and smoke, the prolonged drought and heat and the cost to keep the refuge alive in a time of challenging budget constraints all attack my still-forming questions about the future for these living things. Given the additional circumstances of the world that seem to force their attention on us — COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, global climate change, civil unrest — at times I wonder if I have the right to enjoy the beauty the refuge offers.

I said it this way in my March blog post: The terror and ugliness of the war in Ukraine “contrasted so sharply and so personally with what I had experienced on the refuge this day, that it made me wonder if I had a right to be happy seeing butterflies and vermilion feathered birds flitting about among cottonwoods with fresh, mint-colored leaves all smelling so much of spring. Is it only the schizophrenic who can juggle, unintegrated, beauty and ugliness? Or are we approaching a time when, from a growth of consciousness, the luminous in us will dissolve the darkness?”

I would add now: Is it the pain and suffering accompanying our love and caring that might also motivate us to act before it is too late? Caring, in the face of so many challenges, can be overwhelming at times. Still, I continue each day to look for the visual poetry of the refuge and feel, as Mary Oliver did, that the beauty of the world saves me.

Now halfway into the year, one of the new tools I have added to my photography tool bag is a smartphone app that tells me what birds I am hearing. I use Merlin at the refuge and on walks in my neighborhood, and I am loving learning the variety of birds that I never knew existed. Their voices expand my awareness of a larger bird world. The app is free and can be found at merlin.allaboutbirds.org.

I will update you on the Year of Refuge in The Santa Fe New Mexican in about three months. In the interim, I invite you to view more images from the year on my website, donboyd.com/collections/168474, and follow my postings on the website blog and at facebook.com/DonBoydPhotography.

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