Sandhill Cranes

On January 28th, 2012, Michele and I went with a couple of friends up north to Boundary Bay just outside of Vancouver, BC to look for Snowy Owls (pictures of those soon!). On the way back, we stopped at Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary and saw an amazing number of shore birds, raptors, ducks, and many other birds up close. Here are the Sandhill Cranes we saw there.


The first ones were right next to the entrance, eating from a bucket on the side of the gift shop. They were very close and didn't seem to pay us much attention.

Posing for pictures

Sandhill Crane

Walking around the path we met some more. Because feeding birds is allowed here (very unusual for a bird sanctuary), these guys actually approached us to see if we had anything for them.

We've been sighted!

Posse on it's way

Sizing us up

"We're here. What'ya got?"

They got very close! In fact, we had to pass them to continue on our way. We've heard that Sandhill Cranes can get aggressive in these situations, so we had to pass very carefully. You can see that there isn't a lot of room on the path to get by.

Sandhill Crane

Beautiful!

Up close.

Passing the Cranes, observed.

So, I thought I'd video the passing. In it you can hear Michele say, "I'm worried it will attack you", and I reply, "I don't think it will." Nothing happened, but I'm sure those are always the last words of every crocodile wrestler.

So you can see we made it- whew!

Safely passed.