Moonlit Flight of the Sandhill Cranes

Moonlit Flight

3/13/2017

Sandhill Cranes fly across a moonlit sky traveling to their nightly roost on the Platte River in Central Nebraska.

Sometimes what's going on behind the scenes is just as good as the image created....

Saturday night, my husband and I were standing on the banks of the Platte River with a group of people watching the Sandhill Cranes come in to roost for the night. The moon was just a sliver from being full, but the cloud cover was so heavy that it was pitch black most of the night.

I heard splashes in the water not far from where we were standing, but I didn’t think much about it since I was focused on the sky as the Sandhill Cranes flew overhead. The cranes were making quite a racket!

Suddenly, out of the blue, my husband develops Tourette’s and yells, “HOLY SHIT!”

I cringed, not knowing anyone in our group; I sure hoped the cranes had drowned that out. We had been given a talk about no sudden movements and to stay low and quiet, so we didn’t startle the flock when we first arrived for the evening. And now my husband is yelling obscenities at the top of his lungs!

I looked over at Paul and could barely make out a large black blob about 3 feet from him, but it was too dark for me to identify it.

It was a beaver!

Paul told me later that when the curse words rolled, that beaver was sitting on his foot!

Beavers are notorious for having poor eyesight. I imagine we were all rather tree-like in our stillness, and I’m sure just as black to him in the darkness as he was to us. Paul said he stared at him for what seemed like forever before the beaver slipped back into the water and swam off.

Always the overactive imagination, I had visions of the beaver gnawing off his leg and swimming off with it to build a new dam. LOL

To find out more about Nebraska's Sandhill Cranes season check out my post about the Spring Migration of the Sandhill Cranes.

About the Photographer

Susan Rissi Tregoning is the 8th photographer in the past 4 generations of professional photographers in her family. After a long career as an art buyer and interior designer, she put her career on hold in 2006 to travel with her husband and his job. In the process she found her “roots” again, by developing a photography obsession far beyond casual snapshots that eventually evolved into a desire to capture each and every location and object as “art”. By meshing her two loves, photography and design, she has come full circle. Only now, she is creating art instead of just purchasing it.