About a week ago I headed out to check a trail cam I have deployed in the vicinity of McCoy Flat Reservoir in western Lassen County. My hope is to deploy a newly built DSLR Camera Trap to photograph coyotes in the area (more on the camera trap soon). Ultimately, there were no new coyote captures on the trail camera. However, I was sure to take my wildlife gear with me as I had seen a trio of sandhill cranes (Antigone canadensis) hanging out on a couple of prior stops at McCoy. Neither the birds nor the conditions disappointed that morning! The birds were there and standing in a pretty setting with a bit of a rocky background behind where they were wading the shallows. The thermometer in my truck said 27 degrees Fahrenheit so the water was throwing off some very nice fog as the sun crested the eastern horizon and cast the scene in beautiful warm light – the nature photographer’s happy place!
If you’ve ever heard the sandhill crane’s call you can hear this photograph! They’re not exactly songbirds and their sound carries, quite literally for miles!
This frame was a few minutes after the last as a mallard drake and bufflehead hen swam by…
This was as the trio began to move out to go hunting toward the mouth of a small seasonal stream that flows in to the east…
As they began moving off, I shot a bit of video of the lead pair foraging…
All in all, not a bad way to spend a spring morning in the northern California high country.
Thanks for stopping by.