It is always a nervous time driving down the access road - what will you see? Often times arriving in the afternoon is a gamble as most of them fly out into local crop fields to feed during the day and only return around sunset. In my opinion, I love arriving mid-afternoon and waiting to watch (and hear) them upon their return! As I parked, an eerie sight was beheld - lots of cranes, but was strangely silent! They often cluck and talk to each other, but on Sunday it was almost reverently quiet... There were lots of people - I came a week after the "Wings over Willcox" celebration on purpose, when it was likely even more crowded. Taking the last parking lot close to the viewing areas, I mounted the 500mm on the tripod and took the couple hundred yard hike. As I walked up the trail, was able to squeeze off a few shots including a variety of birds shown at left above. Besides the grey and buff sandhill cranes, there were the almost pure white snow geese, and the Northern Pintails grazing in the shallow water. At right I caught a few of the snow geese taking off from that location - the last of the bunch we saw that afternoon!
While shooting the cranes standing on the ground is like "shooting fish in a barrel", they look a lot more graceful as they fly. They can also pass appreciable closer while flying by than standing at a safe distance. Of course, catching them flying introduces a whole new set of issues - focusing and tracking them as they move! Fortunately the big 500mm lens has pretty much instantaneous focus, and will even take out any unsteadiness as you pan to track them! As a result, I can usually get a couple frames like that at left. My criteria for sharpness is if you can resolve the pupil of their eye! Fortunately, I also like shooting the cranes passing by local landmarks like nearby mountains, in which case, no tracking needed. At right are a flock of them passing by a favorite landmark - Cochise's Head, located north of the Chiricahua mountains. Also visible are cars on the local access road and irrigation equipment in nearby fields...
Speaking of a sharp eye pupil as a standard of quality, I noticed something else this trip. In shooting some of the nearest cranes to our observation stand, one of the cranes looked bizarre - it appeared to have NO pupils at all! Now over ALL the sandhills I've shot over the years, they all appeared to have the yellow pupils that I thought were standard. Yet, as shown at left, the bird on the right appeared to have some eye disease or something! Strange, huh? A minute later I took another shot, and modified the image so both birds were magnified and moved next to each other. You might be able to detect in the image at right that, in fact, it does have pupils, but the eye color is dark brown - weird!
I must say, though, that while all sandhill cranes look regal in the above photos, that when they are looking straight at you with both eyes visible, they look a little what, dorky? I don't know what it is, but it makes them look a lot less intelligent, almost like an idiot caricature of themselves... Maybe its just me!There were other birds near us we got to see up close. In years past there were at least 2 large shallow ponds that attracted many water fowl that mostly have disappeared now with the low (or no water in the ponds!). Goodbye to Mergansers, pie-billed grebes and even the American Coots - none seen this year! One of the few additions to the monoculture of Sandhills were Northern Pintails, as shown at right. They were near us, mostly heads underwater grazing in the shallows. In this shot the male is below and the female above - an amazing difference in coloration and pattern!
I prefer a clear sky while visiting Whitewater - illumination and shadows seem sharper. But there were some high clouds that moved in on Sunday, thicker as sunset approached. But as it will sometimes do in AZ, it suddenly thinned as the sun sank behind the mountains to the west. Suddenly there was a spectacular coloration to the west, and a phalanx of photographers gathered at the west side of our platform! At first I took a shot of the sunset, at left. After that, it was fun to get profiles of the photographers at work shooting birds and sunset together, as shown at right.
I took a few more, but my favorite is the close-up shown at left, showing a photographer in close profile, with another telephoto intruding at right barely seen in the dark part of the sunset...Shortly after this suddenly a din erupted as cranes seemed to converge from all directions! It was just getting dark enough that imaging them was very difficult as the coloration and lighting was dim to get their silhouette, and it was mostly their noise that assaulted the senses! I did manage to get the shot at right, with a profile of hundreds of cranes in the last light of the twilight...
Finally darkness descended, but I had one more trick up my sleeve! Just having obtained a flash while in the Midwest (unfortunately, the full-format canon 6D has no built-in flash) I used it to reach out to a flock of cranes gathered perhaps 150 yards away. With a high ISO (3200) fast aperture (F/4) and full flash power, I got the shot at left. What is most amazing is the cats-eye effect (same as red-eye in human subjects in a darkened room). The light from the flash is focused in their eye, and reflects back out like the glass micro-spheres in reflective road signs. Every crane that had an eye pointed in my direction (at least one had both eyes visible, and another duck or waterfowl) showed the effect! Always fun stuff!I'm hoping to get back again before March arrives and cranes head north. Even though a mid-afternoon arrival requires sitting and waiting a few hours for sunset to arrive, I can think of fewer locations that are as nice to just "chillax" for a long period of time!
Lovely blog. Thanks for sharing with us.
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