Sunset Fly-In. San Joaquin Valley, California. January 2, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Ross’s Geese and Snow Geese settle in for the evening at California Central Valley wetlands

This is a sort of New Years post – the first 2014 photograph to share – but my “2013 Favorite Photographs” post is yet to come. Watch for it later today.

Last year a group of friends decided that we couldn’t imagine a better way to welcome the new year than to assemble along the edge of a San Joaquin Valley marsh before first light, listening to the raucous sound of thousands of geese and cranes, to watch the first dawn of the year through the inevitable Central Valley tule fog, and then to spend the day making photographs. This year several of us resolved to make this an annual tradition and, although not all who came last year could make it, we again assembled at the familiar spot early on New Years Day. (It was a double challenge for me, as I arrived in back California from New York City barely more than 5 hours before my alarm would go off for the drive to the valley. At least the time zone change was on my side, or so I tried to convince myself at 4:00 AM by repeating, “It is already 7:00 in New York!”)

I drove in to the refuge in earliest pre-dawn light and met my friends David and Charlotte, who had arrived a few minutes earlier and were photographing the fog drifting along the edge of the wetlands. We exchanged New Years greetings and listened to the wild sounds of geese and cranes coming from all directions, and then began the (pleasant) work of finding dawn photography locations. We photographed through the morning and then, perhaps because this was a New Years Day “photographers’ holiday” ended up spending an inordinate but very pleasant amount of time standing around talking as the midday light became less conducive to photography. I had decided that I would probably leave for home after the morning shoot, but I succumbed to the invitation to join Dave and Char for a quick lunch in a nearby town, and when we finished eating (and, yes, again, talking a lot ;-) it was late enough that I figured I would make one more pass through the wetlands. I wasn’t certain how the evening would play out photographically, since friends visiting the area the previous day had reported finding few geese and because high clouds seemed to be turning the sky a bit gray and murky. The first good omen was finding a very large group of geese in a pond close to an access road. I stopped here a bit more than a half hour before sunset to photograph the evening fly-in, selecting a location that would place any evening color opposite the geese. Before long the gray sky began to pick up some color and as the process continued more geese arrived. Then, a bit earlier than usual, one of the most impressive events of any evening in this valley occurred – the arrival of thousands of high-flying sandhill cranes, passing overhead and circling in the fading light. A few of them appear against the sky in this post-sunset photograph of the colorful sky, a flock of geese below a lone tree, and the reflecting surface of a flooded field. Soon there was no longer enough light to photograph, and I simply stood by the car and listened to the sound of the cranes and geese until it was time to go.

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.
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