Sandhill Cranes 2011

It’s that time of year again. The time where I pack 100lbs of equipment into an off-roading vehicle, drive down to the Platte River at Kearney, NE at 4:00 am and shoot images of the Sand Hill Cranes. When we arrived in Kearny, at about 6:00 am, everything was still dark. We went to our usual hot spots to scope out if the birds were there. We ended up finding a good number at our usual location, War Axe. When the sun came up it was hidden behind a sky full of clouds. Finding ourselves a little bummed, we jumped into the car to scout out some other locations as we waited for the clouds to clear. The clouds did clear about a 1/2 hour later and we had perfect lighting for the rest of the day.

The best time for taking images of these birds is when they have left the riverbed after sunrise. It is this time that they go to the fields to eat spent corn from the earlier harvest. What is really nice about this time is that it is the time they play and dance. They communicate by dancing and throwing corn stalks into the air. This is what I love to photograph. The birds are so eloquent and graceful in their dancing. This is also the most difficult time to photograph them because they are really edgy and fly away for the smallest disturbance. I was rewarded this year because I spotted a Leucistic Crane dancing. These are cranes that are often mistaken for albinos because they are all white. Instead of missing the pigment of color, which would make it albino, they have the gene to make their feathers all white. Being very rare I was pleased to get an image of one spot on.

At the end of the day we gathered on the bridge close to the Minden Exit to watch the cranes return to the river for the night. Regretfully the birds were flying in east of our location so we were unable to get decent pictures. This was until the moon came above the horizon. When planning the trip I decided to go on a weekend with a full moon. This provided a great backdrop for some night photography. All I needed was for the cranes to cooperate and fly in front of the moon for a nice silhouette. Well the cranes had other plans. It seemed as though they were trying their best to fly over or under the moon leaving me empty handed. I had just about given up when one solitary bird flew right where I needed him to go. I pushed the shutter release and nailed the shot I have been waiting for, for several years. With that the day was over and it was time for the long trip back to Omaha.

We will end with the technical stuff. This year I rented a 300mm 2.8 IS Prime Canon L Series lens. Attached to this was a 2.0 Canon extender. This extender dropped my 2.8 to a 4.5. All this fun stuff was mounted to a Canon 20D. With the lens, extender and the cropped sensor on the 20D I had about a 960mm zoom. Last year I used the same body and extender with the 400mm 2.8 Prime. That lens was awesome but really cumbersome, needing a tripod for almost every shot. I am the kind of photographer who likes to run and gun, the 400mm was so big that this was not possible. The 300mm provided great optics with less weight and smaller lens size. This gave me great versatility, which allowed me to capture some really great shots that I would have missed with the 400mm lens.