Re-Creating the Flood

Re-Creating the Flood

Every year the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge is home to the Festival of the Cranes. This week-long celebration honors the thousands of sandhill cranes that migrate there winter after winter, using it as their fairweather resting grounds.

A crucial spot along a major migratory flyway, the area has provided refuge to tens of thousands of birds—including sandhill cranes, Canada geese, snowgeese, and ducks—for millennia. The mighty Rio Grande flooded the arid plains year after year, creating the perfect marshy haven for these migratory birds.

And then, the river was dammed. The damming of the Rio Grande stopped the natural flooding of the river, altering forever, it seemed, the land these birds depended on for their livelihood. Until, in 1939, as part of President Roosevelt’s efforts to create a national wildlife refuge system, Bosque del Apache was founded. Its purpose: to provide habitat for wildlife.

Many first-time visitors assume that the Bosque del Apache refuge is a completely natural system; in fact, it is a completely man-made construct. Every aspect of the refuge is engineered and managed. Men, not God, control where and when the water flows, when the fields are flooded and drained, even where the birds fly, by controlling the amount and location of crops planted on the refuge.

In a sense, man is playing God: God creates the flood; man destroys the flood; man re-creates the flood. A risky game? Certainly an expensive one: each year millions are spent on re-creating what once was: a fertile floodplain, a warm winter home, a watery heaven/haven on this dry earth.

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To find out more about the history of the Refuge, watch this short video produced by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBVVllM2ofA