cranes, the birds
The annual sandhill crane migration is underway, and this weekend, I drove out to Kearney, NE to go check it out.
It turns out I’m not really built to be a bird watcher, which is to say, I’m not good at waking up early. Daylight savings time didn’t really help matters.
It also turns out that cranes really don’t like people. So I couldn’t get anywhere nearly as close as I wanted. The ideal situation would have been to go on a Rowe Sanctuary tour down to specially placed blinds to get you closer to the birds, but see earlier note about not waking up on time.
While the long 70-200mm lens truly helped, I’m still a little disappointed by the photos. What you see here is the best I could do with a long lens and for my first time, really taking advantage of the high resolution of my camera by cropping quite a bit. I estimate that the best of these photos was taken from a distance of 60m, and in most cases, much further than that.
Better luck next year, I suppose.
- Posted by alex at 10:34 pm
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Looks like you had some pretty flat light too, which didn’t help. My sister rented a 100-400 for her trip to Alaska and had some amazing shots. I think that’s a lens of choice for bird watchers. Regardless, Cranes in that number are pretty amazing. I presume they were chortling a lot? Quite a unique call. Kind of like an elk crossed with a crow.
Wow Alex, I love how these look when I can see a full shot on the screen. I may have to make an Alex Chaing order #13 for the house walls.
Randy, yeah, we had a high overcast cloud ceiling the entire time. The midwest simply isn’t that much fun this time of year. ;-) And agreed, I learned that 400mm is the length you need for birds. I managed to capture some video with their crazy noises which I’ll post soonish.