In the broadest sense nature is our home. It includes the oceans and forests which provide us food, climate control, and oxygen etc, and other ancient ecosystems that we are just as utterly dependent upon. And we have shared this home with countless species that have fulfilled as many needs, yet now exist only because of our tolerance and only under our heel.

Until a few hundred years ago much of the world was a wilderness in which man had to be as cunning as his predator and his prey. Eventually he would master them both, and indeed every other species, using his remarkable hands, superior ingenuity, and his tools (weapons and snares). Man not only followed game trails, he could blaze one when he had to.

Nature was the central theater of life for our ancestors, not a playground in which to recreate after a hard week at the office. But for most of us today, nature is indeed that playground, a getaway where we can hunt, fish, hike, swim, pick berries, sleep under the stars, or paddle a canoe, just for fun. We will bake like a reptile in the sun any chance we get. And we shriek with delight in the ocean surf or gaze with wonder on a mountain peak, as if remembering in our mind's eye some prehistoric pleasure. We then return to the office "re-created," or remade, as the word implies.

Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge is one of the premier wildlife photography sites in the world. Sandhill cranes and various waterfowl by the thousands winter in this 59,000 acre refuge along the Rio Grande River in central New Mexico. A mecca for big lens photographers, the refuge, nevertheless, does not feel crowded except perhaps at dawn and dusk when skies are fiery red and flocks take wing.