Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge  (page 2)

Getting There and Equipment

When traveling to Bosque del Apache, it is best to use the town Socorro as your base. It is about 20 miles north of the preserve and has adequate facilities with respect to motels and restaurants. Socorro is about 75 miles south of Albuquerque airport along I-25.  The town of Socorro is medium in size with a reasonable amount of facilities. They have a good Mexican restaurant (Frank and Lupe's El Sombrero) for dinner that is located at the north east corner of town on the opposite side of the highway. There is also a pretty decent coffee house (Manzanares Street Coffee House) near the town circle that is a good place to hang out after your morning shooting to sip a latte, chimp your shots, and overhear the local university professors and other locals chatting about what-not.

To get to the refuge from Socorro, you get back on I-25 and head south another 10 miles to exit 139 for San Antonio.  From there head east about a mile and make a right at the intersection for NM-1.  Then head south on this road for another 8 miles.  You will see the visitor's center on the right and the entrance to the refuge another hundred yards down the road to the left.

As far as equipment is concerned: Bosque del Apache is big lens country. The most common setup and one that I have used is a 500mm f/4 auto-focus lens (Canon in my case) on either an APS-C or APS-H cropped sensor body with fast auto-focus capabilities. Additionally you should also have a 1.4x teleconverter handy to extend your reach further as lighting allows. Your setup should ideally be mounted on a sufficiently large tripod to hold the weight with a gimbaled head (such as a Wimberly) to allow for easier tracking of the birds in flight.

During the middle of the day when you have more light I find the use of the monopod to be more convenient and quicker to deploy for situations where a fleeting bird is spotted and you need to get out of the car and shoot more quickly. Having a bean bag or jacket thrown over the car window can be handy when photographing directly from the car or shooting from behind an open door (Note: When resting your lens on the door, don't have the engine running for the sharpest shots). For birds that are more skittish, shooting from inside the car, behind an open door, or from over the roof behind the car is sometimes the only way without scaring them off.

Under lower light conditions, it is sometimes helpful to have some type of fill flash. The challenge with a supertelephoto will be the reach of the flash may not be sufficient as-is.  To help with this, a flash extender like the "better beamer" can extend the reach of the flash for this purpose.  They typically utilize a relatively cheap plastic fresnel lens that is attached by an injected molded plastic frame and some velcro to your flashhead. This setup is shown on Tucker's camera setup in the lower left photo. I used the Better Beamer for fill lighting to photograph the bird under low light under overcast skys for the crane photo on the right. Note that there is some shadowing that can distract from the image if the flash power is too strong relative to the ambient light.