Tag Archives: wildlife

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Sandhill Cranes in Flight, Evening

March 8, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 13 Comments

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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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Stack of Pelicans

February 9, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A vertical column of pelicans stacked one above the other along the Pacific Ocean coastline of California.

On a slow night this week – while waiting for a new hard drive to get backed up – I want back through some more raw files from the first half of 2010. Almost invariably, when I go back through older collections of images I find at least a few things that seem interesting to me know even though they didn’t really register at the time I shot them

I have previously shared some other photographs of these magnificent Pacific Coast birds that I made on this mid-May evening along the Pacific Coast Highway north of Santa Cruz, shooting from a bluff locations that I often return to. At this particular spot, when the conditions are just right, birds coming north up the coast and coasting on updrafts along the cliffs often climb toward the top of the bluff and frequently turn inland a bit right here as they come around an outcropping. That is what happened with these pelicans, who were coming almost towards me and were flying below my position on top of the bluff, creating what looks like a vertical stack of birds. How thoughtful of them to line up so that they fit perfectly within a 3:2 ratio portrait orientation frame! :-)

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Weeds, Slough

February 4, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Weeds growing in brackish water of a slough near the Cosumnes River.

It is a photograph of weeds! In a slough! ;-)

During my late January visit to the Cosumnes River Wildlife Preserve, the day began with extremely thick “pea soup” tule fog. As the morning wore on it stuck around, though gradually began to lighten a bit. As this process continued I wandered along the railroad tracks beyond the visitor center and at one point I passed by a quiet and slightly muddy slough… where I noticed these interesting (and so far anonymous) plants growing in the water.

I was intrigued by the pattern produced by their stems and the complementary reflections in the water. I also noticed that if I looked more closely I could see the outlines of some underwater specimens of the same plant and that a few odd oak tree leaves were floating here and there on the surface of the still water.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Trees and Brush, Levee

February 3, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Weak sunlight breaks through Central Valley tule fog to illuminate trees and brush growing on a levee near the Cosumnes River.

This morning started out with extremely dense Central Valley tule fog – at first so thick that I more or less gave up photographing. But eventually, as usually happens, the upper layers of the fog began to thin, and some light began to filter down through the fog. By late in the morning the fog was thinning enough that very pale sunlight began to show through and softly light the dense vegetation on this levee along the edges of the Cosumnes River. This is an incredibly rich environment in the winter, especially with all of the water from winter rains and the nearby river, and the vegetation grows very thick here.

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