Rio Grande Nature Center State Park

In the Visitor Center you will find exhibits describing the bosque and its plants, geology and animals. The Discovery Room offers hands-on exhibits for children, including footprints in a sandbox and a rubbing table. The Observation Room which overlooks the pond, contains a library with publications on birds, herbs, trees, and other aspects of natural history that can be used on the premises.

Outside, the Nature Center has interpretive nature trails and demonstration gardens to explore; Inside are exhibits on the area's riparian environment. The Riverwalk Trail is an easy one-mile loop through the bosque and along the river, passing through open meadows and heavily wooded areas. The Bosque Loop Trail, about 0.8 mile, is an easy walk through the bosque with a spur to the river.

Also at the Nature Center are park trail guides, binoculars and field guides that can be borrowed. Numerous birds make their homes in the park. Among birds likely to be observed in winter are waterfowl, such as ring-necked ducks and American wigeons, Northern harriers, ruby-crowned kinglets, hermit thrushes, chipping sparrows, dark-eyed juncos, western meadowlarks, sandhill cranes and balk eagles. Summer migrants include warblers, western meadowlarks, black-chinned hummingbirds, black phoebes and western kingbirds. A three acre pond surrounds the glass walls of the Visitor Center Observation Room, offering a virtual encounter with ducks, geese, turtles and dragonflies in sight and sound.

Reserved for education and research, the south side Discovery Pond invites visiting school children to sample aquatic life in hand and under the microscope.

A complex of specialized demonstration gardens offer a wide variety of native plants for display and for the education of local gardeners.

Seasonal and year-round residents of the Nature Center include Cooper's hawks, great-horned owls, American coots, Canada geese, ring-necked pheasants, mallards, wood ducks, black-capped chickadees, great blue herons, northern flickers and both downy and hairy woodpeckers.

Other inhabitants of the park include turtles, toads, lizards, bull snakes, dragonflies, beavers, muskrats, cottontail rabbits, pocket gophers, rock squirrels
and coyotes.

Opened in 2001, the Candelaria Wetland is an important new outdoor arena for Albuquerque, the Nature Center, and the Rio Grande valley. This nine-acre amphitheater of land and water is attracting performers from near and far. Located east of the Nature Center and north of the parking lot, this stretch of valley land used to be an uncultivated section of Candelaria Farms, a dry, overgrown, scraggly meadow of tough grasses rooted in thick, fine sand below a thin surface of clay. Reborn as Candelaria Wetland, the area now includes two ponds offering five surface acres of water and four more acres of meadow for visiting waterfowl and shorebirds; some, like snow geese and ibis, would be first-time visitors to the Nature Center. Immigrant mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and arthropods, all current residents of the Middle Rio Grande Valley, are moving in, too. Planted with 98 species of native aquatic and riparian vegetation, Candelaria Wetland restores habitat once common in the Albuquerque reach of the Rio Grande, wetland rich in plants and animals that has been reduced since l935 by development and agriculture to less than 20% of its former self. This $155,000 project is a cooperative, continuing effort by the city's Open Space Division, Hydra Aquatics, Inc., New Mexico State Parks, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Reclamation, General Electric Co., and the Friends of the Rio Grande Nature Center.

One important dimension of the project is data collection about the plants and animals that are moving, and will move, into and through the area. Getting underway, this research will continue through all seasons for many years to come. What plants and animals have colonized the wetland? How do they interact? How will their status and interactions change over time?