| A few weeks after
moving into a new apartment in Gurnee, Illinois, I was walking around the
wildlife preserve behind the apartment complex when I saw what I took to
be a family of Great Blue Herons. Unfortunately, there was
a lake between me and the birds, so I had to go along the far shore from
the birds and start taking photos. One of the five birds in
the group had separated itself from the others and I could see that it
was, indeed, a Great Blue Heron. I started taking photos of
the remaining group of four birds, first with my 500mm lens and then using
a tripod and teleconverter to turn it into the equivalent of a 1000mm lens.
That's when I saw the patch of red on their heads, and I realized that
I was looking at some sandhill cranes. Not only were these
the first sandhill cranes I'd ever seen, they were the first cranes, period!
I was pretty excited and figured that I had to find some way to get closer,
because they were still too far away, even with a long lens.
Luckily, the beavers had been pretty eager recently and there was a string
of four or five small dams stretching across one part of the lake for a
distance of maybe 50 or 60 feet. I started across, but carrying
a bag with thousands of dollars of camera gear across narrow and flimsy
dams bridging water of unknown depth didn't seem very smart, even to me.
Plan B: another slightly larger beaver dam across an eight foot wide constriction
in the lake. Again, the murky water was of unknown depth, but
it still seemed like I had a better chance of getting across this dam than
the other. One last problem: I was wearing jeans and
I was pretty sure that the water was more than knee deep. Solution:
take off my jeans and wade through murky waist deep water in my underpants
in an area where I'd already seen some large snapping turtles!
Well, I did say I was pretty excited by the birds, and I figured it was
pretty unlikely anyone would see me wandering around in a state of relative
undress - besides which, I was still wearing a long-tailed shirt!
Anyway, take a look
at the photos below and you can be the judge of whether it was worth it! |
