Spring Along the Rio Grande. The biggest migration of Western tanagers in memory is now moving upstream along the Rio Grande! The feeders at our riverside headquarters are mobbed, and these very colorful birds are being seen all along the river.
A very cold and rainy spell, with a good dump of snow in the mountains, has just ended, and it will, of course, add to the run-off. I drove up the through the gorge yesterday to see the storm lift.
Here’s a Rio Grande Gorge curiosity. In the photo below, the reddish-brown band that sits atop the cliff, and stains it, is a “channel fill”. It is sediment that filled-in a river channel that sat atop a lava flow, which got baked red by the next lava flow to arrive. That flow is the lava sitting on top of it. These channel fills are seen elsewhere in the walls of the gorge, where, at different levels, they always sit on top of one flow and beneath another.
Do you recognize this plant, in the photo below? It’s fairly wide-spread along the banks of the Rio Grande. Yep, it’s poison ivy
