A Very Cold Winter for Sandhill Cranes
category: Birds • 1 min read
Sandhill Cranes on a Frozen Pond
This year has been a very cold winter. Everything froze! We are in Canada but this is the West Coast, aka the Wet Coast, aka the wimps…
Normally, it’s not that cold, so we have Sandhill Cranes the whole year round. They stay on the west coast because normally, it’s a cool winter, not a freezing winter like the rest of Canada. It’s actually nicer and warmer than most places in the US, so in the winter, many US Sandhill Cranes migrate to our region. How do we know that? Many of these Cranes have been banded.
This year was very rough for the Sandhill Cranes. Not only it was cold but also food was scarce because of the weather. Sandhill cranes are mostly herbivores, meaning that eat grass/herbs. But they’ll eat corn, wheat, berries, insects, snails… Since food was so scarce for them that many people, including me, would put out seeds by the ponds, thanks to Costco 20lbs bird seed bags.
Cranes are amazing birds, they often live to the ripe of age of 35.
Camera: Canon EOS 7D ISO 800 and 1/160
Lens: Canon EF70-200mm f/4L IS USM @200mm and f/7.1
Processed with Rawtherapee 5.5: https://www.rawtherapee.com/