One Year in a Million

It's hard to explain why I feel the need to drive 2 1/2 hours to stand in the cold March air on a bridge in the middle of rural Nebraska and watch the sun come up.  It's hard to explain why I feel the need to take hundreds of additional Sandhill Crane shots when all the cranes look alike and they are doing exactly the  same things that they were doing the last time I visited.  Still, here I am again watching a spectacle that has happened in each of the last million years - the Sandhill Crane migration.

The cranes spend the night in large groups on sandbars in the Platte River.  They come every year and spend a couple of week before the head up to their summer homes in the North.

Three early rising cranes fly near the moon.

In the golden hour light of the early morning,  three cranes fly above a field full of cranes eating their breakfast.   The out of focus feeding cranes demonstrate the challenge of crane photography.  There are large groups of cranes in distant and boring groups.  Instead of focusing on groups of thousands, I need to focus on specific individuals engaged in interesting behavior.  I need to find order in the chaos.

  These two cranes are having a discussion.  Backlight  helps to make this image "pop".

This is my favorite shot of the day.  Two cranes are engaged in a ritualistic dance and three other cranes are performing in the background.  The action in the image is in the pattern of an oval so your eye tends to go in a circle from one crane to another.