The story
Bosque del Apache Festival of the Cranes in San Antonio
The Festival of the Cranes is an annual birding and photography event co-hosted at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge near San Antonio, New Mexico, and the Socorro Convention Center, celebrating the winter arrival of tens of thousands of migratory sandhill cranes, snow geese, and ducks. Held each December, it includes dozens of guided workshops, tours, and keynote presentations organized by Friends of Bosque del Apache.
Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge sits along a stretch of the Rio Grande south of Socorro, New Mexico, a section of river that, through decades of active water management, continues to function much as the historic floodplain once did before large-scale damming and diversion altered the rivers natural flow elsewhere.