New Mexico's capital city, Santa Fe, is world famous for it's rich history, museum quality art, and signature "Santa Fe style". Visitors flock to the City Different to buy legit Native American jewelry, don their best "Southwest" outfit and pursue enlightenment while navigating impossibly narrow roads in the reluctant metropolis that relies on tourism but rejects the concept of city planning.
     Any visitor worth their salt will plan to see the Loretto Chapel, San Miguel Mission, The Palace Of The Governors, La Fonda Hotel, Georgia O'Keefe Museum, and all the art galleries on Canyon Road just to get warmed up.
     As for myself, I like to seek out the places where the tourists are not. Places that don't sell Kokopelli incense burners or Pendleton blankets and where nothing is adorned with a howling coyote. 

     Over the years I've been told all kinds of crazy things about hummingbirds. Since I began feeding and photographing them, I've fielded a number of interesting questions and encountered a wealth of misinformation.
     The need to ensure that I wasn't doing anything harmful led me down a path of extensive research and I can now say that I am fairly well educated on the topic. That being said, I would like to take this opportunity to address some common misconceptions about hummingbirds.

     In 1908 three men from Cedarvale, Kansas laid out a small farming community in New Mexico. Seeing no reason to come up with a new name, they stuck with what they knew and called the new settlement Cedarvale.

     With the incessant drone of bad news thumping like drunk ranchero music in the middle of the night, it is becoming increasingly necessary to turn down the volume on the world at large. 
     I spend a lot of time outside where the wild things are. There's a whole other world just beyond the door.

     The city of Belen, New Mexico is a curious place. I grew up alongside Belen in the neighboring town of Los Lunas. My family moved to Los Lunas in 1982 and at that time Belen was a significantly larger town. They had big paved roads with sidewalks and traffic lights and even some department stores. In those days, Los Lunas had a whole lot of not much.