It pays to look around. I heard there were elk. Then I ran into a ranger and she told me where I might find them. Ran into her later and she actually pointed them out. But they were so far off they were hardly visible. So like a Pavlov dog every time I drove by that area I always stopped and scouted. Didn’t see a thing all week. On my last night I headed to my favourite hotspot for sunset-sandhill-crane-fly-ins. I had just set up when something told me to look behind. Just across the road at the edge of the clearing were my elk. Looked like they were enjoying the sunset as well.
Not having seen much wildlife all day, we were heading in for an early dinner when we spotted these three big horns on a cliff above the road. It didn’t look like much was happening but we thought we’d give it a chance. As we pulled over, we noticed a couple other photographers had spotted them as well and had set up across the road from us. For the next half hour we watched the sheep feeding. Then they began to tease and test each other. They’d mill around the edge picking at the tall grass until one would move up behind the other and then start kneeing him in the butt. Eventually the knee-ee would turn around, they’d face off, and do the classic ramming thing. They’d stand a few moments, stunned, then go about feeding again until one would start kneeing the other and it would begin all over. We shot until we lost the light. We were heading back to the car when we noticed what began as two had turned into fifteen photographers, all with big lenses. Must have been a slow day for everyone.
It began as a study of isolation.Amongst the tens of thousands of snow geese there stood, one, lone sandhill crane. There were hundreds of other cranes on the pond but most were grouped together along the edge of the sea of geese.Somehow this gal got stranded in the middle. The sandhills were already on the pond when the geese flew in. And when the geese come they arrive all at once and blanket the pond in a matter of seconds. So it’s likely that this crane was just caught off guard and when the feathers settled she found herself surrounded.It was an interesting juxtaposition. I shot a single frame with the crane centered and then recorded a few frames on either side imagining I would combine them into a panorama. Then she slowly began to move, picking her way through and high stepping over the congestion of geese. Gradually she broke into a trot, which became a run, and turned into a take-off as I merrily tracked along with her.It became a study in motion.
