To be honest, I didn’t even know it was April Fools’. Camping out every day and not interacting much with civilization aside from maybe at lunchtime, really skews your sense of time. I understand now why prisoners kept for a long period of time just maintain a count of the days. That really was all I was doing – counting down how many days I had left to try and keep on schedule. It was time to leave Patagonia where I had had a wonderful time and photographed lots of birds. Yesterday I had been told by a person who was into bird photography that Swainson’s Hawks were feeding en masse on agricultural fields to the east of Patagonia. When a bird-watcher suggests birds to see, it may be worth trying to go after a photograph, but it may not. Not because the birds won’t be there, but because bird-watching goals and photography goals can be a bit different. A rare bird is a very hard one to photograph and usually will require a lot of time. Also, just because you can find a bird, it doesn’t mean there will be a situation where you can get quality photographs. But this was a photographer suggesting it and wide-open agricultural fields make for clean backgrounds. On top of that, hawks are birds I don’t often get a chance to photograph, except for the typical hawk on a perch shot. So today seemed like a good day to try it out – after all, if it didn’t work out, I’d lose less than a day and I was going to spend a good deal of the day travelling anyway. Well it didn’t work out – I did see a couple of Swainson’s Hawks circling high above the fields, but there were so few and with miles and miles of fields, my odds of getting a good photo of one feeding were slim to none. Timing is a funny thing with wildlife – a place that is just fantastic one day or even hours before can seem dead later. I cut my losses and headed back west towards the next destination – the famous birding hotspot – Madera Canyon. I spent a little bit of time walking the trails and hanging out at the famous bird feeders at a lodge within the canyon. Great for bird-watching, but unphotographable. The mountains that enclose Madera Canyon are quite pretty – if only I could have conjured up a cloud.
Outside Madera Canyon