Saturday, November 5, 2011

Quivira National Wildlife Refuge

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Last weekend I went out to Quivira National Wildlife Refuge on Saturday for the paper. Quivira is normally home to two large salt marshes and a ton of migrating birds, however because of this year's prolonged drought, it's really dry out there and (though I haven't seen it in other years) I'm fairly sure there are a lot less birds than usual. We did however still manage to run into a few members of the Boulder Audobon Club, who had taken a field trip down to the Refuge because it is a migration stop point for the very very endangered Whooping Crane. Sadly we didn't see any Whooping Cranes but they did let us look through their scope to check out some Sandhill Cranes instead. Very cool.

The day started out as a bit of a feature hunt but instead the photos ended up running alongside a story on how the drought is effecting bird hunting season, as you can hunt some birds in certain areas of the refuge.