Accident prevention is up to you! This graphic photo shows what can happen when placing wild animals in the transporter without proper restraint. In this case, leaping spontaneously out of the beam also affected the coordinates, resulting in the fatal rematerialization you see here. – Ship’s Safety Officer
What are you looking at? Aren’t you late for a tattoo or something??
[Guest birdwatching report by special correspondent Juan del Llano]
Okay, this guy (?) was in a ponderosa pine tree 10 feet from where they took the previous picture. I think it’s a yellow warbler, except it doesn’t have a streaked breast and I swear it’s bigger than a warbler. And have you ever noticed how bird books generally aren’t worth a damn? The photos never look like the bird you’re looking at—well, close, but who can remember if the silly thing had a yellow patch on its tail? Or if it went “ki-ka-CHEEP” instead of “oowah-oowah” or just sat there? And what good does calling it “four and a half inches” do me? Am I supposed to get it to land on a freaking ruler?!? What’s the matter with these people? I bought the Audubon “Birds” app for the iPad and it’s really cool but has the same damn problems. Enter “yellow” and scroll through 10 million birds and not a one of them looks like this. Not exactly, anyway. What, do birds go to salons to have their beaks colored? John James Audubon had the right idea: all his portraits were of dead birds he’d killed. That’s probably where it started, too. Paint a few streaks on the little bastard’s breast, who would be the wiser? The whole thing is a giant conspiracy to sell binoculars and telephoto lenses the size of elephant dongs. Life lists, you say? You saw a WHAT?! How do you even know??? Oh, you have a book? An app?? A bunch of dead birds in the freezer???
This one’s yellow, sort of. It flies.
Always so cool to see these guys
This is the best I could do with a 300mm telephoto lens, but there they are, having a fine time in the Valle Grande of the Valles Caldera. There’s a single immature male in this photo. (A larger one was lost in the cropping.)
You don’t have to drive to the Caldera to see elk in New Mexico, obviously. We’ve seen plenty of them near Taos. They’re all over the place in the mountains. Sometimes they stand in the roadway after dark enjoying the warm pavement. This makes driving at night or in the evening especially exciting. Those things are big, in case you hadn’t noticed—bulls stand five feet at the shoulder and weigh over 700 pounds! A few years ago we nearly collided with a small group of elk crossing the highway just over Flechado Pass. I barely got the car stopped in time but did have my DSLR ready and caught the last of them!
A couple dozen in all, crashing through the trees
To this day my wife shudders at the thought of taking that road after dark. We’re about to do it again though, with me driving of course, to hear Chick Corea play in Angel Fire. He’s even older than I am. I don’t know how much more excitement I can stand. Go, man! Hell, if that doesn’t work, we’ll take away his glasses and make him drive.
Medicine country
Another shot from the Valle Grande in the Valles Caldera between White Rock and Jemez Springs on New Mexico Route 4, a road I highly recommend if you don’t mind some truly scary switchbacks. (Don’t let Junior drive!) You have two assignments: 1) find the automobile, and 2) locate this forested lava dome in the previous image. (There’s a 90 degree shift in orientation, if that helps.) Nice, huh?
The volcanic explosion that took the top off what may have been a 25,000 ft high mountain roughly one million years ago, thus creating this space, is thought to have blasted 500 times the volume of material into the air that Mt. St. Helens did. That’s a lot of rock and ash, never mind the lava flows, which goes a long way toward explaining the topography of northern New Mexico. And this wasn’t the only volcano in the mix, by any means.
Ninety miles from touristy Taos
Welcome to the Valles Caldera, one of the most amazing places anywhere. Who knew an exploding volcano could leave such beauty behind after a million years? The sky and walking rain are most prominently featured in this shot. We’ll go in a little closer in the next one to give you a better sense of scale.
I’m still reeling from the impact of this place 24 hours later. The quality of the experience is similar to what I’ve felt in other mostly pristine numinous open spaces in New Mexico, the overwhelming characteristic being a sense of THIS, this, is how it should be, always and everywhere. Shedding tears is not uncommon. You’re in contact with the essence of what it means to be a conscious human being on the planet Earth. It’s like cool pure water for parched souls. A way to understand what “home” is all about, and I don’t mean geographical location.
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