Hundreds of Sandhill Cranes join a small flock of White Pelicans and thousands of ducks to roost in the Click Ponds at Viera Wetlands. (click on the image to view larger)
Last week while I was shooting the Great Blue Heron Courtship film, I spent an evening at the Click Ponds, just adjacent to Viera Wetlands at sunset. Each evening, several hundred Sandhill Cranes (Grus canadensis) are coming in to roost in the ponds and it is a pretty spectacular show. A few days earlier, I had spent some time photographing and filming from the west side of the pond with the light at my back and gotten a few decent images but nothing spectacular. To try for something different, I decided to shoot on the east side of the pond, shooting back into the setting sun.
By the time I made it to the ponds, the sun had already set but the sky was ablaze. It was a chaotic scene with a large flock of White Pelicans, close to a thousand or more ducks, and a growing flock of cranes. To tell the story, I really wanted to isolate a few of the cranes in flight as they came into the pond at dusk. After taking a bunch of images, I finally found a group of birds that walked away from the dense flock just as a couple more cranes entered my frame. So far, this one of my favorite experiences and photographs from the project.
To learn more about the evolution of this image, watch this week’s episode of Behind the Lens, “The Evolution of a Photography.”
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