I made this set of photographs on an early December morning in California’s San Joaquin Valley. The photographs feature geese (mostly snow geese from what I could tell) and sandhill cranes, against the backdrop of late-Autumn morning light and light fog.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
A group of snow geese take to the air in early morning light above a San Joaquin Valley marsh
I never know exactly what I’ll find when I go out to shoot a subject like that which I focused on today, namely migratory birds out in the San Joaquin Valley of California. While there is a certain amount of knowledge and technique that goes into photographing this subject in this place, there is also a whole bunch of guesswork, luck, and happenstance. The part that I can chalk up to planning includes the choice to be in this place on a cold morning before dawn, enough familiarity with the place to know where to look for the birds and where the light might be good at certain times of day, and enough experience photographing these birds to have developed some knowledge and instincts that I can put to work.
However, so much is not in my control. On this morning I found a good size flock of (mostly) snow geese in a place where I don’t usually see so many of them, and they were closer to the place from which I can photograph than they usually are. So I stopped and photographed them and waited. Not much seemed to be happening at first – the birds mostly just sat in the shallow water – but the light was interesting, slanting in from the right where the sun had just cleared the horizon. When things seem static, there is no clear answer to the question of whether to wait for something to happen or to move on and look for something else. This time my hunch was that it might be worth waiting. And this time that hunch turned out to be the right one. (Just as often it isn’t!) As I waited I found some slightly better angles to shoot from, and eventually additional geese began to arrive and settle in with the group already there. Often some of the most interesting shots are during very brief instants of action, such as the sudden and unexpected lift-off of a flock of birds. So, after standing and watching and seeing little happen for some time, suddenly a lot may happen almost too quickly to photograph it. It pays to be ready to respond quickly. This group of snow geese was not too far in front of me, and when they suddenly took to the sky I was ready to track them as they lifted off. If you look closely you may be able to see water droplets falling from them as they leave the pond.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
During the past few years I have become a big fan of photographing migratory birds in California’s Central Valley, and now that summer is over I’m anxious to get back out there and get to work on this year’s bird photographs. Actually, we made our first bird photography trip out there about a week ago, on the first weekend in November. Our main goal was to find sandhill cranes, since we knew they were here already, but we were also interested in seeing what else might have showed up.
In keeping with my new policy of posting multiple photographs in a single message when I have too many photographs waiting in the queue, this post includes five bird photographs. Enjoy!
Late in the morning, long after the morning fly out, we were poking around on some rural backroads when we found a lot of sandhill cranes in dormant fields in thinning morning fog. This group thoughtfully posed for me with a distant pair of trees on the horizon.
Three sandhill cranes stand in a dormant Central Valley, California field
I photographed this group in much the same location as those in the previous photograph. While the cranes seem to collect in large groups near water in the evening and early morning, during the day they are often found more spread out in agricultural areas like this one.
Sandhill cranes land on a Central Valley pond during the evening fly-in
In the evening the cranes do a “fly-in” – where large numbers of them land together in areas around water. When we arrived at this small observation area an hour or so before sunset, there were many birds but no cranes. However, I’ve learned that the sandhill cranes often arrive late, frequently after sunset and sometime when it is becoming rather dark. (One of our most memorable migratory bird encounters occurred at another refuge further south in the valley. We had a great day of photographing birds, beginning very early in the morning and continuing through sunset. As the sun set the bird action began to diminish and it became quite dark. It had been a long, successful day, and we were happy to be finished with this shoot. We were just putting gear away when we began to hear a huge chorus of the easily recognized sound of sandhill cranes coming from out of sight to the southeast. A moment later the sky was filled with the birds – I’ve never seen so many cranes together since then.)
Here the birds began to arrive just a bit earlier. The first groups landed a good distance off, but soon a single large crane settled in on this dry area in front of us and began to produce very large calls, as if to say, “come on down and stop here!” Before long other birds did just that. Here the slow shutter speed allows the winds of the landing birds to blur a bit.
A small group of cackling geese in flight against blue sky over California Central Valley agricultural lands
I have a confession to make, and it is a little embarrassing for a person who is as enthusiastic about photographing birds as I am. Basically, I’m not very good at identifying birds, or at least not good at naming them! (This is an “issue” I’ve always had, and not just with birds. I’m so familiar with certain wild plants that I can tell you exactly what they look like in the wet and dry seasons, when the flowers will appear, and when to find them… but I often cannot name them.) I’m always happy when I can photograph with someone who is better than I at this.
I’m pretty certain these are geese! (Good so far?) I used to think that geese that looked like this were Canadian geese, but when I tried to find photos of these birds online to determine what they were, I kept coming up with “cackling geese.” To make things more confusing – at least for me – I understand that the differences between some Canadian geese and some cackling geese can confuse even the experts. Judging by the size and shape of the bill, the size of the birds, and the pattern and color of feathers, I’m going with this identification until someone shows me differently!
Sandhill cranes settle in to a Central Valley pond during the evening fly-in
This is the same group seen in a photograph earlier in this post, with this photograph being made a bit earlier – clearly the case as there are fewer birds on the ground in this shot, and the color of the sky is less intense. If you look closely about a third of the way in from the left edge of the frame, you may be able to see the larger bird that landed first and was then followed by other later arrivals.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
A white-faced ibis about to land in a San Joaquin Valley marsh.
A month or two earlier I had come across a large number of white-faced ibises in this precise spot along the perimeter road around this marshland where many, many migratory birds are found this time of year. The group of them was on the ground, apparently feeding in a wet grassy area, and they were quite shy about my presence, moving back from me as I came up alongside the on the road. On the day when I made this photograph, I had not noticed any of these birds at all. In fact, I had stopped here to photograph some ducks when I happened to look up and see this single bird angling in for a landing. I swung my camera around and tracked it to its landing.
I have a few random-sounding observations about the white-faced ibis. First, unless I’m missing something, they really don’t seem to have white faces! The beak is lighter than the bird, but that’s about as close to a white face as I can can find on these birds. Second, their coloration makes them difficult to photograph effectively. They are quite dark-colored birds, though their features can have a slightly colored iridescence that seems sort of reddish to me. Because of this, if I try to enhance the shadowed areas of the very dark birds in post, this coloration can quickly start to look fake. (In fact, I’ve seen a number of photographs of these birds that attempt to make them look lighter than they are, but which instead just end up looking odd.) They do make a fine photograph in silhouette, especially when a flock of them flies overhead early or late in the day.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
