Canada Geese take flight at the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Concord, Mass. (Glenn Rifkin) The sky above the open expanse at Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Concord, Mass. was ablaze with red clouds reflecting the sunrise. The colors, as dawn transformed into a cold, crisp morning, were dazzling, and the early hour meant we had this wondrous place nearly to ourselves. As a serious amateur bird photographer, I spend a fair amount of time during the year at Great Meadows. With its open water, extensive reed-covered marshes, and nearby woods and river, it is a bird lover’s paradise. As Emerson wrote in “Nature”: “To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.”