prs@lanl.ARPA (10/21/85)
Just got back from a weekend at the Bosque del Apache Refuge near Socorro in central New Mexico. Cold fronts were marching through the state,but the birding was good. There were eared grebes, pied-billed grebes,about 50 white pelicans, both olivaceous (which have moved in in the last decade) and double-crested cor- morants, snow,canada, and 1 white-fronted geese, mallards, gadwall, pintails, am. wigeon, shovelers, l male redhead, ruddy ducks, lots of hawks, including sharp-shinned and cooper's, red-tailed, marsh (now harriers), a prairie falcon, and kestrels, white-winged pheasants, quite a few sandhill cranes in (but no whoopers yet), coots, killdeer, ring-billed gulls, red-shafted flickers, ladder-backed woodpeckers, mourning doves, say's phoebe, crows, white-necked ravens, marsh wrens, pipits, yellow-rumped (Audubon's) war- blers, yellow-headed, red-winged, and Brewer's blackbirds, w. meadowlarks, great-tailed grackles, brown-headed cowbirds, a pyrrhuloxia, rufous-sided towhees, house finches, lesser goldfinches, song and white-crowned sparrows. And 2 horned owls at dusk! They were nesting earlier near headquarters.