The Cranes are Back!
I've got a lot under the cut, but I'll put this one up on the front - I'm rather proud of it, though you may need to enlarge it.
Sunset at the preserve, as the Sandhill Cranes arrive during autumn migration. This particular preserve is a staging ground for the cranes, where they store up reserves of fat before going further south, allowing the weather enough time to change so that they arrive when their foodstores are greatest. We'll get around 15-20,000 cranes in the autumn at one time. They spend their days in the harvested fields, gleaning corn and soybeans and whatever else, before flying back here at night.
More cranes flying in at sunset. I love the silhouette photos.
You definitely need to click on this one for a bigger image (I wish I knew how to make them bigger!) But a zoom shows the two in the middle on the verge of landing in the preserve field.
Traveling in the marsh where the cranes sometimes roost and forage, we scared up a wood duck. If you click on this photo and zoom in, the background may be blurry, but I caught the duck (with his beautifully painted head) almost perfectly.
No amount of clicking will zoom in on this, you'll just have to take my word for it. On one side of the pond, I saw a flash of blue moving around on the other side. If you see the tiny dot of blue perched on the upward-reaching tip of that dead tree? That's a belted kingfisher.
They've got demon eyes because of the flash I used, but there was a group of about five moving through the woods. However, this group was nothing on the 38 or so moving around on the preserve plain (because they knew they were safe from hunters there!)
And because I took a bunch of them, here are a few more sunset pics with cranes...
Sunset at the preserve, as the Sandhill Cranes arrive during autumn migration. This particular preserve is a staging ground for the cranes, where they store up reserves of fat before going further south, allowing the weather enough time to change so that they arrive when their foodstores are greatest. We'll get around 15-20,000 cranes in the autumn at one time. They spend their days in the harvested fields, gleaning corn and soybeans and whatever else, before flying back here at night.
More cranes flying in at sunset. I love the silhouette photos.
You definitely need to click on this one for a bigger image (I wish I knew how to make them bigger!) But a zoom shows the two in the middle on the verge of landing in the preserve field.
Traveling in the marsh where the cranes sometimes roost and forage, we scared up a wood duck. If you click on this photo and zoom in, the background may be blurry, but I caught the duck (with his beautifully painted head) almost perfectly.
No amount of clicking will zoom in on this, you'll just have to take my word for it. On one side of the pond, I saw a flash of blue moving around on the other side. If you see the tiny dot of blue perched on the upward-reaching tip of that dead tree? That's a belted kingfisher.
They've got demon eyes because of the flash I used, but there was a group of about five moving through the woods. However, this group was nothing on the 38 or so moving around on the preserve plain (because they knew they were safe from hunters there!)
And because I took a bunch of them, here are a few more sunset pics with cranes...