San Andres Meditations

Scaled quail live a hardscrabble existence.

- Joseph Sands, Roy Heilman

The view from my window seat on Alaska 3430 from Portland, Oregon, revealed the New Mexico landscape as we descended into Albuquerque: Shiprock in the Four Corners region, the Jemez Mountains, Mt. Taylor and to the northeast on the downwind approach, Sandia Crest, its granite walls glowing pink in the afternoon sun. Below was the desert around Albuquerque and the long valley of the Rio Grande sweeping south between the mountains.

Everything in New Mexico seems old. The architecture, the remnant sections of Route 66 in Albuquerque, the cottonwoods in the bosques, growing tall and falling along the edge of the river. In reality, New Mexico is old. It is one of the first places in the United States explored by the Spanish. Before them, there were the Apache natives whose pottery can still be found in the Rio Grande floodplain. Even earlier were the Clovis people with a subtle eye for art in their spear points. And, of course, there are the rocks 1.4 billion-year-old Precambrian granite the rocks of forever.

My friend Scott lives near Tijeras in the Manzano Mountains. The southern portion of the Rockies, these mountains are part of the Rio Grande rift that divides the southwest portion of the North American continent into distinct landmasses. East of the Rio Grande rift, on sparse plains of San Andres limestone, nameless canyons have been cut into the earth by wind and water. This is where we are going.

The canyons, arroyos in New Mexico that have adequate grass, some plum and sumac and a bit of yucca, usually hold scaled quail. Blue quail. Birds of the dry country. Birds that run. Birds that get a bad reputation among some hunters because they defy what quail should” do. Birds that melt into the sparse cover under blue sky.