My family (Jeane, both sisters and one brother-in-law) took a day trip to a small town about an hour south of Louisville to find some Sandhill Cranes to gawk at, and we were thrilled to find a couple of Whooping Cranes hanging out with them. It still astounds me that with only a few hundred Whooping Cranes left in the world, we managed to see some on their migration!
This habitat is agricultural fields (mown cornfields, primarily) that hold a lot of water, providing good feeding grounds and the shallow water in which cranes prefer to roost at night. The area is well known among Kentucky birders for hosting thousands of Sandhill Cranes for a few weeks in February as they fuel up here on their journey North. We'd begun hearing reports that they were gathering in large numbers, but I think ours was the first sighting of Whooping Cranes reported on the KY bird list. I hope they make their journey unscathed; too many cranes being shot lately
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It was a most cool experience!!
It was a HORRIBLE day for photography; it started out dreary and gray and ended with pouring rain, but I did my best given the available light...
Here are my photos:
http://photos.bellhanley.com/Birds-Bats-Butterflies/Around-Kentucky/Cranes-Cecilia-2012/My sisters also took photos, and all of us captured a few different scenes, so I'll share those albums as well. Linda got some nice photos of the Whooping Cranes in flight, as well as one doing a nice display...and she also shot a video for those folks that enjoy the cacophony of crane calls.
http://joyfuldog.smugmug.com/Animals/Cranes-in-Cecilia-KYSister Laura got a nice series of series of flight shots as well:
http://tinyurl.com/6phcuzw
