Chasing the Great Migration: Three Days in the Marsh

There is no adequate way to prepare someone for the sensory experience of a major waterfowl staging ground in full migration. The sound reaches you first — a wall of honking and wingbeats that registers more as weather than wildlife. Then the movement: layer upon layer of Canada geese and sandhill cranes and lesser species I couldn't identify without a field guide, all banking and circling and landing in great broken waves across the open water. I stood at the marsh edge for twenty minutes before I thought to raise a camera.

The challenge of migration photography is the opposite of what you might expect. It is not scarcity but abundance that undoes you. When there are ten thousand birds in the frame, nothing is the subject. I spent most of the first day making technically fine images that communicated absolutely nothing about what it felt like to stand there. On the second morning I made a deliberate decision: I would find one bird. One individual among the multitudes, and I would follow it. I chose a young sandhill crane, still showing patches of rust-brown juvenile plumage, working the shallow edge of the marsh alone while families and flocks moved around it.

That single bird became the whole story. By the third day I had learned its habits, its preferred feeding grounds, the particular patch of cattails where it roosted at midday. The migration photographs I'm most proud of from that trip show a single crane against the vast backdrop of thousands — solitary, unhurried, entirely itself within the noise of the world. That felt true. The great migrations are not abstract forces of nature. They are made of individual lives, each one entire.