I’ve got the sad honor today of writing an obituary for Cliff Crawford, the retired University of New Mexico biologist for whom the word “beloved” carries only a fraction of the baggage that it should.

Courtesy Albuquerque Journal

Cliff’s the dean of the dean of the bosque biologists, a group who study and love the riparian strip along the Rio Grande through New Mexico’s midsection. His academic children – K-12, undergrads, graduate students – are thick in this town, reifying the cliche about one’s work living after.

More over at the work blog, and in tomorrow’s newspaper. Services tomorrow (Wed. 9/7), and I’m told Bosque School, which was integral in Cliff’s educational work, is pulling together an event in October to honor Cliff’s legacy.

Domingo Baca spring, Sandia Mountains, September 2010

In search of the juniper titmouse and random desert wrens, I headed up the Domingo Baca trail in the foothills above Albuquerque this morning. As is the case with most of the little canyons on the west face of the Sandias, there’s a spring near the bottom of Domingo Baca Canyon. The tilt of the rock causes the water to pool behind a layer of granite and rise to the surface at basically the same strata in each canyon, near the base of the mountains. At least that’s what I think explains it. The little green patches are lovely and always popular, with hikers and with birds. (Apologies for the picture, as I only had a cell phone with me.)

Baca was an old sheepherder, or so the story goes, and you can still see what they say is the remains of his rock hut on one side of the canyon just downstream from the spring. There is no perennial water flowing out of the Sandias into the desert below, but up in these canyons the springs, feed by snowmelt, run year ’round. It’s where I’d put my cabin too if I was herding sheep.

There were some broad-tailed hummingbirds, presumably on their annual commute, stopping for a drink. Well, not so much “stopping” as flying frantically and acting confused by the bright reddish pink shirt of a woman who arrived at the spring the same time I did.

I saw a flock of juniper titmouses (titmice?) and the wonderful fall nut-burying behavior of the scrub jays. You can here the “tap tap tap” as they poke it into the dirt. But no wrens today, at least that I could find.

Tingley ponds, Albuquerque, August 2010

Lissa and I were walking in the Rio Grande bosque, the riparian cottonwood forest, last night when the sun dropped below the clouds just before sunset and lit the trees across the pond with the most exquisite light. All we had was a cell phone camera, so I went back this evening at the same time hoping for the best. Nature did not disappoint.

Much like the Las Vegas Wash I wrote about in the spring, this is not “nature”. People built this pond as a habitat restoration project. It’s become a favorite birding and walking spot for us. This evening I saw a pair of summer tanagers dining on extremely large bugs in the cottonwoods. A ruddy duck and a coot were sitting on a jam of floating wood at one end of the pond. On the downstream end, the water spills out into a rich cattail marsh, all muddy and rich with bugs and birds. This year pampas grass has grown in towering clumps along the pond’s edge, and Lissa and were pondering whether someone had planted them, or whether they seeded themselves, escaped from gardens in the Country Club neighborhood just off the river to the east.

If this was nature, the Country Club neighborhood would be a swamp, and the riverside woods wood be clumps of cottonwoods here  and there, rather than a ribbon of trees locked into a narrow corridor by levees.

Nature or not? Important not to get too hung up on the question. I’d miss the lovely.