This trip wasn't in my radar due to COVID restrictions, a friend of mine visited couple weeks ago told me it's safe to go and most hotels at Socorro are near empty, so I did a quick planning and drove (8 hours for me). He was right. This area is going through a drought now. When you drive south on route 1 from San Antonio to Bosque, the famous roosting ponds on the right side before visiting center was COMPLETELY dry; when I saw this, it gave me a sudden shock through my whole body! I was thinking, why I drove this far? But the Bosque management did a great job there by filling water in the South loop roosting areas; however, north loop was almost dry. I also checked Bernado, and that area had decent amount of water, not sure that was filed by the management. I talked to few people who know the situations there, they were saying the work behind filling water is enormous, several pumps were operating continuously and also they were diverting the spend water from farmers irrigation system to fill this area. The birds were there in December, but lot of them left to south later dec/early Jan. But they were back when was there (last weekend)
Jan 30, 2021 at 12:21 AM
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