Yet Another Form of Wildlife at the Farm
Well, I caught these creatures with my Sony -- sorry for the picture quality. I was shooting towards the morning sun and this great Sony has no viewfinder, if you can believe it! Between my super-duper tri-focal, anti-glare, transition lenses and the anti-glare viewing screen I had no idea whether I had these birds in view until the shoot was all over and I was inside! I love the camera, but failed to recognize how often I'd love to have that old-fashioned viewfinder in my life! So I cropped and enhanced, etc. etc...
Well, with that little snit over--- I believe these are sand hill cranes, and have never seem them until last summer. Then we saw three... This past weekend, I caught at least nine on camera in the morning, and surprised fourteen of them later in the day while walking Josephine in the field --- no camera with that time. The videos are a travesty as the picture, but thought you'd like to hear their calls.
Well, with that little snit over--- I believe these are sand hill cranes, and have never seem them until last summer. Then we saw three... This past weekend, I caught at least nine on camera in the morning, and surprised fourteen of them later in the day while walking Josephine in the field --- no camera with that time. The videos are a travesty as the picture, but thought you'd like to hear their calls.
Comments
I have never seen that many together.
Beautiful.
Some of these birds are 5-6 feet tall, and they are something to see fly because their wingspan about equals their height. Sorry I can't give you good perspective on size with these pics.
Anyway, last summer I looked at the internet info, and found that sand hill cranes love exactly the conditions we have to offer --- combination of deciduous and evergreen forests, swamp or marsh, some high land and field/pasture land, etc. They spend their summers in the northern climates like ours, and in Canada (and by the way there are such birds in Europe too, and the various countries of the former Soviet block (like Siberia, etc.)). They migrate to central/ South America and come back to northern United States each year. A friend of mine tells me that they gather by the thousands on their way north in North Platte, Nebraska, then sort of fan out as small groups from there. Not sure what they do in North Platte (except there is the big river, and maybe some frog hatch or something to sustain them on the rest of the journey). Anyway, he has a wildlife photographer friend who takes a trek each year to North Platte in the springtime to do a "meet-up" with the birds. Lucky us -- looks like maybe we now have one or more nesting families joining us for the summer months. All that tree planting is paying off, I guess.
It's a little crazy to see how they can adapt to such completely different environments.