Willcox Sandhill Crane Wintering Grounds

Author's Comments

You hear them before you see them. That is the part no one really prepares you for. Standing in the dark at Whitewater Draw thirty minutes before sunrise in January, the air cold enough that your fingers do not want to work the dials, and the sound builds out of the dark like weather coming in. Twenty thousand birds talking to each other in the half-light. The liftoff itself is not a single moment. It is waves. Small groups go first, then larger ones, and then at some signal you cannot see the whole roost rises at once and the sky becomes something I have not figured out how to photograph in a way that does the experience justice. A long lens flattens it. A wide lens loses the density. I have come to believe the honest frame is somewhere in between, and that you should make the picture you can make and then put the camera down for the last wave. Peak is December into January. The birds roost on the shallow water and lift toward the agricultural fields at first light, which means you want to be in position before the sky has any real color in it. The pre-dawn dark out here is genuine dark. Willcox sits far enough from any city that the stars are still doing their work when the cranes start to stir, and if you time it right you can catch silhouettes against a sky that is just beginning to turn from black to the deep blue that comes before pink. Bring more layers than you think. The desert at five in the morning in January is not the desert you drove through yesterday afternoon.

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