Sandhill Cranes in Flight, Evening. Merced National Wildlife Area, California. February 21, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Five sandhill cranes take flight above the Merced National Wildlife Area in evening light.
Migratory birds have always been a subject that I’ve been aware of, but that I haven’t really paid enough attention to. Intellectually I know of their amazing travels between arctic and more temperate regions and I had heard about their appearance in California each winter season. I recall one magical evening a few years back when I began a long drive from the San Francisco Bay Area to Seattle late on a winter day, and as I travelled up the Sacramento Valley at twilight I saw huge flocks of birds and thought that I’d like to try to photograph this scene. I’ve seen and photographed a few interesting birds such as egrets and pelicans. But I somehow managed to mostly remain uninformed about their presence not far from where I live.
This season several things came together, seemingly by chance, to encourage me to actually make the effort to get out into California’s Great Central Valley to see (and hear!) the birds. The first was a chance meeting with one of my colleagues in front of the college espresso stand one morning. We were having a casual conversation and she mentioned that she had been out in the Cosumnes River area looking for birds recently. We talked a bit more and I asked her for more information. Being a librarian, she provided me with lots of information, including details of how to find some interesting places out there. A day or two later I found my way out to that part of the Valley and saw, for the first time close-up, the flocks of winter birds… and I was hooked. Within a few weeks I saw posts on the Chuq 3.0 blog where Chuq wrote about his photography of these birds. Then I saw a couple videos at Michael Frye’s blog that captured the “fly in” and “fly out” phases at the Merced National Wildlife Area. (This place is located out on a road that has to have my all-time favorite Central Valley road name: Sandy Mush Road ;-)
Fast forward a week or two and I was returning from shooting for four days in Death Valley, and driving into the Central Valley near Bakersfield. I looked at my watch and realized that I could probably make a small detour and be at the Merced National Wildlife Area before sunset. So I headed up highway 99 (rather than the more usual route up highway 5), found the turn off to Sandy Mush Road, and arrived at the area an hour or so before sunset on an evening when the clouds from a departing cold front lingered. I basically had no idea where I was going, since I had done literally no prior research other than finding the location via my iPhone. As I arrived in the general area I found a large field filled with what seemed like several hundred sandhill cranes. Slowly and quietly I stopped my car and got out on the side away from the birds and began to watch. I never did get to see the fly-in up close (though I could see a huge cloud of birds landing at a pond north of my position) but some of these cranes did depart from time to time, and I was able to photograph this group of the magnificent birds against the clouds in the western sky.
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Your photography is breathtaking! I live in central Michigan and have enjoyed Sandhills in almost all areas of this wonderful penninsula, upper and lower. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks, Cindy. I’ll bet you see more of these creatures than I do – I generally have to drive a few hours to find them.
Dan
Yep. And nice shots as well. I am still fighting to get good birds in flight shots. I have had some recent successes with shore birds, but falcons and hummingbirds remain a challenge.
Bigger hummingbirds would be helpful! :-)
But in all seriousness… this is a hard subject to shoot! I’m impressed by people who do this very well and make it their primary subject.
I probably don’t have long enough lenses to photograph hummingbirds, and I could probably use longer for some of the birds that I do chase. I have a thing about pelicans, and have photographed them quite a bit – and this could easily extend to other shorebirds once I get to know them better. As you know, photographing these birds in flight is tremendously challenging. You have to be there when they are, get close enough, figure out where they will fly past, track them with the camera, get the camera to AF, try to have some control over where the birds are in the frame and what is in the background. Whew!
The first thing that I paid attention to was the tracking, focusing, and framing. Surprisingly, my experience photographing bicycle racing helped! In both cases, the subject is moving, there can be distracting backgrounds that will pick up the AF system, and if you don’t think about where the subject is in the frame you can get some very odd shots. (With cycling I initially and instinctively put the rider’s head in the center of the frame… cutting of the body and the bike and leaving a bunch of empty space above.) With the birds, at first I decided to focus less on getting a shot and more on just practicing the tracking – trying to keep the bird a) in the frame, b) under an AF point, and c) against an interesting background. It actually gets better quickly with practice.
But with some birds that are very small, fly fast, or follow erratic paths, this can be really, really difficult.
Thanks, Tom. I knew you would come through. (Wish I could get myself to learn to identify these critters!) To clarify, the first bird (the one with the curved bill) is the white-faced ibis and the lower one (much shorter bead and head angled slightly down) is the snow goose, right?
Dan
Upon further review, those are snow geese. There is enough light to show that the birds are white.
The top one is the White-faced Ibis (http://www.flickr.com/photos/tclifton/4507918475/in/photostream/). The bottom one is probably Snow Geese. The other goose that I have seen out there is the Greater White-fronted Goose. Hammering on the pixels might bring out if they are dominantly white (Snow Goose) or brown (Greater White-fronted) (http://www.flickr.com/photos/tclifton/5209536411/in/photostream/)
OK, Tom, here is your challenge…
Judging from my past experience I’d guess you’ll be able to identify both of them. Sorry for the dark silhouettes, but that is the nature of the much larger shot from which these are taken.
Dan, If you send them my way, I will do my best. The White-faced Ibis one possibility. They are common out there and have a strong down curved beak. The are smaller than cranes and herons but fly like cranes with then neck extended (not folded). If it is smaller still, then it is probably a curlew.
Tom
Derrald, my first knowledge (limited as it has been) about the sandhill cranes came from reading Aldo Leopold back in college. Being who and what I was at the time, I couldn’t understand how someone could get so poetic and passionate about birds. Ah, youth! ;-)
In any case, if I recall correctly, his descriptions may have referred to the “sandhill” area of Nebraska you mention, which I’ve heard a bit more about recently. As I understand it, as impressive as our Central Valley sandhill cranes can be, this is nothing like what happens in Nebraska.
Tom, on one hand I’m sometimes embarrassed about certain things that I have overlooked or missed, sometimes because I didn’t believe they would be all that interesting. On the other hand, this means that there is still much remaining for me to discover! (On that topic, I have a photograph of some “other birds” above the MRWA that I shot against clouds that evening, but I can’t identify them. If I share a photo with you, would you like to try? One feature that catches my attention is bills/beaks that seem to sort of curve downwards.)
Dan
Yeah, it is kind of funny how long it takes us to get out and see something new. I have known about the cranes and other migratory birds for years. But it wasn’t until last April that I actually stopped to check them out. In addition to the Merced NWR, you should visit the San Luis NWR. I haven’t seen cranes there, but the ibisis are worth the trip.
Sandhill cranes are one of the most elegant creatures to grace the sky. As a resident of Nebraska, (which has the sandhills from which the cranes got their name), I have seen the migration of thousands of these. In your image, the cranes are suited well against the cloudy backdrop which allows you to see their details and their color. So often these creatures are portrayed as sillhouttes in a bright sky. While not every photographer is a “bird” photographer, I must admit, there is no experience like witnessing a mass migration of these creatures.