Sandhill Cranes

I tagged along with The Professor (site and blog) and a few others on a trip near Kearney, NE this weekend to try and capture the Sandhill Crane migration.  We took the day off of work and went on Friday to avoid the crowds, which for the most part paid off.  We left Papillion at about 3:30am, getting to our sunrise spot near Kearney at about 6am.  We got there in plenty of time to scope out the area and ensure there were actually cranes where we hoped there would be.

The first part of the day was the best, from sunrise to late morning when the birds were very active and performing their courting "dances."  The dances are pretty amusing where they jump up in the air and spread their wings.  Occasionally they also toss a corn stalk up in the air and dance with it; I managed to catch one doing that, albeit from quite a distance (see the last picture below.)

The cranes seemed easily spooked this year, which made it very hard to get near and grab some close-up shots.  This trip definitely taught me how important it is to just click the shutter as much as possible and expect that most of your shots won't be worth much.  For instance, I took 1,016 shots and liked about a dozen of them; I really liked only about 6.  For us nerds out there, that's about a 1% success rate.  Oddly enough that is all is takes to keep me interested.  I've heard the same thing about golf: you can hit bad balls all day long, but it's that one perfect shot that keeps you coming back time and again.  So far I'm hooked.

Here are my favorite shots of the day, all shot on my Canon 20D with 70-300mm IS USM lens:

ISO 400 | 1/500 | f/5.6 | 300mm

ISO 400 | 1/1000 | f/5.6 | 300mm

ISO 400 | 1/800 | f/5.6 | 300mm

ISO 100 | 1/400 | f/5.6 | 300mm

ISO 100 | 1/400 | f/5.6 | 300mm