Willcox Sandhill Crane Wintering Grounds

Author's Comments

You hear them before you see them. That is the part no one prepares you for. Standing on the platform at Whitewater Draw in the half-dark of a January morning, forty minutes before sunrise, the sound of twenty thousand cranes calling from the shallow water in front of you is something between a rumble and a chorus, and it carries across the flats in a way that makes the desert feel suddenly inhabited. The liftoff happens in waves. Not all at once, the way you might expect. A few hundred birds will rise, circle, and settle again, and then a larger group will go, and then the sky will fill. The exact moment depends on the light, and the light in the Sulphur Springs Valley in winter comes slowly. Pinks first, then a long blue, then the Dragoons start to catch warmth on their western faces while the playa is still in shadow. That gap, that twenty minutes when the birds are rising into a sky that is bright above and dark below, is the photograph. I bring two bodies. A long lens for the portraits, the individual birds banking against the mountains, and something wider for the chaos overhead when a thousand cranes pass directly above the platform. Long exposures work too, if you are willing to commit to abstraction. The blur of wings against a still horizon line is its own kind of honesty. Dress for cold you do not associate with Arizona. The playa holds the night air. Arrive in the dark, set up by feel, and let the morning bring the birds to you. They have been doing this longer than any of us have been making pictures.

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