We see Sand Hill cranes often enough. Instead of seeing them in the neighborhood where you could stop to take a picture, they are along the sides of the much busier roads where we are zipping along at 50mph. And when I say they are along the sides of the roads I mean just feet from the road, but standing in the grass at the edge. And for some reason their mostly gray color doesn’t catch your eye until you find yourself noticing them when you are passing them by and only missing them by a few feet. But this encounter came about because we decided to drive past the Tampa rookery, just because it was on our way home. We saw no birds there, which we really weren’t expecting to see. But the lily pads that sometimes fill the little stream area where we stand to take pictures, were now filling all the water as far as the eye could see from that vantage point. I should have taken a couple of pictures.
So we left, driving the winding roads out of the neighborhood, and even though we weren’t going fast we still had to hit the brake hard as we came around a bend and found ourselves nearly on top of these two sand hill cranes. One side-stepped away from us and looked about as surprised as we felt. It was as close an encounter as I’d ever want to have. I wondered what they were saying to each other as they walked on.
A Snowbird's Life Through the Lens 